Pump.fun Routes Memecoin Traders Onto Hyperliquid 40x Perps

Pump.fun switched on bitcoin and ether perpetual futures in its app on 16 October, routing those trades through Hyperliquid. Eligible users can take up to 40x leverage on bitcoin and 25x on ether without holding the coins, while Hyperliquid matches the orders, holds the margin, pays funding, and runs the liquidations.

Pump.fun now takes a builder fee on Hyperliquid fills instead of running its own order book, even as both names still appear next to each other on protocol revenue tables.

Perps Land in the Pump.fun App

The new tab sits inside the same Solana memecoin app that made Pump.fun a fee machine. Traders open leveraged bitcoin and ether contracts from that screen, and the fills print on Hyperliquid’s books. They do not need to hold BTC or ETH, and they do not get a separate Pump.fun derivatives exchange.

Perps data first showed up in Pump.fun’s API on 9 October, with funding rates, open interest, and volumes pulled from Hyperliquid’s HyperCore mainnet. By 16 October the product was live in the app. Pump.fun’s own account did not post a launch thread that day, but the legal text caught up the next morning.

Access is blocked in the United States and Ontario, and in every other place Pump.fun already treats as off limits. Anyone who can open a position still posts collateral that Hyperliquid can wipe in a fast move. The app is the door. The engine is not Pump.fun’s.

What Hyperliquid Keeps After the Plug-In

HyperCore still does the work that makes a perp a perp: order matching, margin balances, hourly funding, and liquidations. Pump.fun’s terms say no Pump entity operates or controls Hyperliquid, and that prices and liquidation levels on the Pump screen are indicative only. A fill can print at Hyperliquid’s oracle and mark, not at the number the app just showed.

This is the second time Pump.fun has wired itself into that chain. On 26 August it added HyperEVM token trading against USDC and called itself the first app to bring HyperEVM to the trenches. That was spot tokens. Perps are Hyperliquid’s actual business, and Pump.fun is now a frontend on that business rather than a new venue beside it.

Hyperliquid’s perpetual market printed about $12.43 billion of daily volume in late August, which is the pool Pump.fun traders now tap. Building a second book would have meant bootstrapping that depth from zero. Renting it means Pump.fun’s memecoin crowd hits the same bids and offers as every other Hyperliquid frontend.

THE PATH FROM SPOT TOKENS TO PERPS

1. 26 August 2026: Pump.fun adds HyperEVM token trading against USDC in its app.
2. 9 October 2026: Pump.fun’s API returns Hyperliquid perps data from HyperCore, including funding, open interest, and volume.
3. 16 October 2026: Bitcoin and ether perps go live inside the Pump.fun app.
4. 17 October 2026: Pump.fun updates its Terms of Use with a Perpetuals Feature section that names Hyperliquid as the third-party venue.

The sequence is a distribution deal, not a new matching engine. Pump.fun keeps the users. Hyperliquid keeps the book.

The Extra Fee on Every Routed Fill

Pump.fun reaches those books through Hyperliquid’s on-chain builder codes for frontends. A builder is an app that sends orders for a user. Each fill can carry the app’s address and a fee, set per order, and the protocol pays that fee as part of its normal fee logic. The user has to approve a maximum builder fee from a main wallet, not an agent or API wallet, and can revoke it later.

The cap is 0.1% of notional on perps and 1% on spot. On perps the fee hits both sides of a trade. On a $10,000 fill at the cap, the builder takes $10. Hyperliquid still collects its own trading fee on the same fill; the builder slice sits on top, and DefiLlama’s Hyperliquid line already excludes builder fees from the 99% of perps fees that go to the Assistance Fund for HYPE purchases.

HOW A BUILDER CODE GETS PAID

• User approval: The trader signs ApproveBuilderFee from a main wallet and sets a max rate the app may charge.
• Per-order tag: The app attaches its address and a fee in tenths of a basis point, so a value of 10 equals 1 basis point.
• Hard cap: Builder fees cannot exceed 0.1% on perps or 1% on spot, and they apply to both sides of a perp fill.
• Builder stake: The builder needs at least 100 USDC of perps account value and can collect through the usual referral claim path.
• Limit per wallet: A user may keep at most 10 active builder approvals at a time and can drop any of them.

Pump.fun has not published the rate it will charge. Ten basis points is the ceiling, not a confirmed sticker. Other apps already compete on that number, and a trader who sees the extra line can leave the Pump screen and send the same order on Hyperliquid directly.

Pump.fun and Hyperliquid Still Trade Places on Fees

The two platforms have spent 2026 near each other on protocol revenue even though they sell different products. Pump.fun takes a slice of bonding-curve trades, graduation fees, Mayhem-mode fees, a 0.05% PumpSwap protocol fee, and terminal fees after cashback. Hyperliquid’s counted revenue is almost entirely perps fees routed to the Assistance Fund, after builder fees come out.

DefiLlama protocol revenue rankings on 17 October still have Hyperliquid just ahead on every window that table shows.

PROTOCOL REVENUE ON 17 OCTOBER

The gaps are $0.30 million on the day, $1.22 million on the week, and $3.02 million on the month. A late-September snapshot that had Pump.fun a hair in front on a seven-day reading does not match this table, so it is not the working picture here. What the 17 October ranking does show is a photo finish that Pump.fun is now feeding. Every routed perp fill can pay Pump.fun a builder fee and still send Hyperliquid’s remaining perps take to the fund that buys HYPE.

That is a strange kind of competition. Pump.fun can add a derivatives line without hiring a matching engine. Hyperliquid can take memecoin-app order flow without winning those users away from Pump.fun’s home screen. The people in the middle pay two fees on the same trade if they stay in the app.

Who Already Collects the Builder Cut

Pump.fun is late to a crowded pipe. Wallets and trading apps have been attaching builder codes to Hyperliquid perps for months, and the public fill files make the take easy to rank. OpenChainBench’s Hyperliquid frontend fee leaderboard on 16 October tracked 85 builders. Together they took $7.76 million of builder fees on $18.09 billion of volume from 155,800 users over 30 days. Pump.fun is not on that list yet.

HYPERLIQUID FRONTEND FEES OVER 30 DAYS

Those four names took $4.91 million of the $7.76 million. Phantom brought the most users. FOMO brought the most volume. Trust Wallet brought the most fees. The pattern is the same in each row: the app that already sits in a trader’s pocket routes Hyperliquid perps and keeps a cut. Pump.fun’s bet is that a memecoin home screen can do what a wallet home screen already does.

FOMO is the closest comparison, because it already mixes Solana memecoins with Hyperliquid perps. Pump.fun is trying to pull that mix back onto its own turf. If the routed volume shows up in the next fill files, it will land as one more row on a leaderboard Hyperliquid already owns. If it does not, the perps tab is just another button in an app that still makes its money on coin launches.

The Terms Shut Out the United States and Ontario

Pump.fun wrote the product into its Pump.fun terms of use on 17 October and labelled it a Restricted Feature. The Perpetuals Feature is not available to a Perps-Restricted Person, and the list is wider than a US geoblock.

WHO CANNOT OPEN PUMP.FUN PERPS

• United States: Anyone located, incorporated, organised, or resident in the United States, including territories and possessions, or with a registered office there.
• Ontario: The same tests applied to the Province of Ontario, Canada.
• Prohibited jurisdictions: The United Kingdom, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Russia, Belarus, and the Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, plus other comprehensive-sanctions territories.
• Hyperliquid’s own list: Anyone Hyperliquid treats as a restricted person under its terms at app.hyperliquid.xyz/terms.
• Sanctions and proxies: Anyone on a US, UK, EU, or UN sanctions list, and anyone acting for a person in the groups above.

Pump.fun says it may use geolocation, IP address, device, wallet, and transaction signals to decide who sees the feature, and that its call is final. Eligibility for the rest of the Pump platform does not carry over. A user who can still launch memecoins can still be locked out of perps.

Perpetual Contracts accessed through the Perpetuals Feature are leveraged derivative instruments. Trading them can result in the rapid loss of all of the collateral you post, and your positions may be liquidated automatically, without notice to you, at prices determined by Hyperliquid’s oracle, mark price and liquidation mechanics rather than by you.

Pump.fun Terms of Use, 17 October 2026

Funding can keep accruing against an open position. The terms also warn that the prices, margin needs, and liquidation levels on the Pump screen may not match the levels Hyperliquid actually uses. Pump.fun is the interface. Hyperliquid is the venue that can close the trade.

40x Bitcoin Leaves a 2.5 Percent Cushion

The leverage numbers in the app are Hyperliquid’s numbers. Official Hyperliquid BTC and ETH margin tiers allow 40x on bitcoin for notionals up to $150 million and 20x above that, and 25x on ether up to $100 million and 15x above that. Across the rest of the perp list, max leverage runs from 3x to 40x. A user picks any integer from 1 up to that cap. Initial margin is position size times mark price divided by leverage, so a 40x bitcoin position posts 2.5% of notional and a 25x ether position posts 4%.

Maintenance margin is half of the initial margin at max leverage, which is 1.25% on a 40x bitcoin book and 2% on a 25x ether book. Isolated and cross margin both exist. Leverage is checked when the position opens; after that the trader has to watch it. Hyperliquid can liquidate without a Pump.fun warning, at its own mark.

That is a thin band for an audience trained on bonding-curve coins that can move more than 2.5% in a minute. A reply to the launch put the product as leverage on a rug. Another called it a second floor on the same casino. Both point at the same mechanic: the people most likely to tap 40x from a memecoin app are the people least likely to treat 1.25% of notional as a line they must defend.

Pump.fun gets a new fee stream if they stay. Hyperliquid gets the volume, the remaining perps take, and another frontend that never has to out-earn it on a weekly table to keep sending flow. The order book does not care which app the click came from. The margin account does.

The perps tab is live, the terms are dated 17 October, and the builder rate is still unpublished. Until the public fill files show a Pump.fun row, the product is a pipe into an engine that already pays Trust Wallet, FOMO, MetaMask, and Phantom for the same job.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on a leveraged trading product and is for information only. It is not investment, trading, tax, or legal advice, and it does not recommend opening perpetual futures, posting margin, or using Pump.fun or Hyperliquid. Readers should consult a licensed financial adviser, and where needed a lawyer who knows the derivatives and securities rules in their country, before placing any leveraged trade or moving collateral. Leverage caps, fees, geo blocks, and revenue figures reflect the cited pages on the dates given in the piece and can change without notice; a trader can lose the entire amount posted as margin.