Hyperliquid adds 10 HYPE rule as price falls to $78.98

Hyperliquid has introduced revised order priority rules on its testnet, including a reported 10 HYPE delegation requirement for traders seeking faster order handling through its priority fee system.

In an October 18 announcement circulated through its community channels, the decentralized derivatives platform outlined changes to write priority fees following feedback from users. The proposed rules concern traders who depend on low delays when placing, modifying or canceling orders.

The announcement identifies four changes involving account settings, transaction processing and eligibility for priority fees. Hyperliquid’s existing technical documentation confirms how its priority fee system operates, although the newly reported delegation threshold has not yet appeared in the publicly accessible documentation reviewed for this report.

The changes are described as live on testnet. No confirmed date has been announced for applying the revised requirements to mainnet trading.

Hyperliquid introduces a 10 HYPE priority fee rule

The October 18 update introduces a minimum delegated balance of 10 HYPE for accounts seeking to use IOC and ALO priority fees, according to the announcement.

IOC, short for immediate-or-cancel, refers to an order that attempts immediate execution and cancels any portion that cannot be filled. ALO, or add-liquidity-only, is used to place orders that join the order book without immediately taking available liquidity.

Both types can use priority fees under Hyperliquid’s existing system, although the benefits work differently. The latest announcement introduces a staking-related eligibility requirement for the priority features. It does not establish that all traders must delegate 10 HYPE to place ordinary orders.

At the supplied HYPE price of $78.98, 10 tokens had a market value of $789.80. The value is a market-price comparison, not a newly announced fixed dollar fee.

Hyperliquid’s existing priority fee documentation states that eligible fees are charged from the user’s undelegated staking balance. The October announcement refers separately to a minimum delegated balance.

The distinction is important to the technical description of the proposal: the delegated balance would determine eligibility under the reported new rule, while the documentation describes an undelegated staking balance as the source used to pay priority fees. The publicly accessible documentation does not yet confirm whether the platform intends to change either balance requirement before a mainnet release.

New rules change how Hyperliquid handles orders

Hyperliquid’s announcement restricts mempool priority to accounts using Standard abstraction. The platform’s account abstraction documentation describes Standard mode as the recommended option for market makers, high-volume automated users and developers.

Standard accounts maintain separate balances for spot markets and perpetual futures, including individual balances across independently deployed markets. By comparison, Unified accounts combine eligible balances to support cross-margin trading. Under the proposed rule, transaction priority within the mempool would apply only to Standard abstraction accounts.

The announcement identifies a second restriction concerning HyperCore operations. Account activity outside cancellations, order placements and order modifications would reduce the relevant account’s transaction priority until confirmation.

The reported behavior concerns the ordering of account operations before confirmation. The announcement does not provide a numerical estimate of the additional delay affected accounts might experience.

A separate provision lowers mempool priority for accounts that have directly submitted CoreWriter operations. CoreWriter connects smart contracts running on HyperEVM with actions on HyperCore, where Hyperliquid maintains its native trading functionality.

The rule would therefore affect certain accounts using transactions that pass through HyperEVM to interact with the exchange’s core trading system.

Hyperliquid has not provided a complete list of CoreWriter activities that would trigger the reported priority treatment.

IOC and ALO priority fees work differently

Hyperliquid introduced write priority fees to give advanced trading users a way to pay for improved order handling without relying entirely on faster connections to exchange infrastructure.

Its official documentation separates read priority from write priority. Read priority concerns how quickly users receive market information from participating nodes. The system uses two independent Dutch auctions running on a three-minute schedule.

Write priority concerns the submission and processing of orders. Hyperliquid supports priority fee settings for eligible IOC and ALO order groups, with the fee rate included in the order submission.

For IOC orders, priority fees can reduce the time between order submission and processing. The documentation reports an empirical improvement of approximately 45 milliseconds for each basis point of priority fee, up to an eight-basis-point range.

It describes additional priority rates above eight basis points as a method for ordering certain transactions received within closely spaced periods. Cancellation requests retain priority over immediately executable orders, even when those orders carry priority fees.

ALO orders use a different arrangement. Priority fees affect the order’s position within a price-level queue during a continuous 400-millisecond eligibility period. An ALO priority fee is charged when an eligible order is placed, whether or not the order eventually fills.

Unlike IOC fees, ALO priority payments do not provide faster mempool processing. Their documented purpose is to improve queue position among qualifying orders. The platform burns priority fees collected through the mechanism, according to its technical documentation.

Hyperliquid trading activity remains closely watched

The proposed testnet changes follow several months of growing activity across Hyperliquid’s perpetual futures markets.

In September, the platform’s open interest reached $18 billion, setting a record for outstanding derivatives positions across its trading markets. The reported figure included activity from the platform’s original perpetual futures exchange and HIP-3 markets created by independent deployers.

Hyperliquid subsequently introduced a HIP-3 permissioned market upgrade on testnet, allowing deployment teams to restrict access to selected trading venues through on-chain permission lists. That update gave market operators more control over which wallets could participate in their contracts. Existing HIP-3 markets were not automatically required to adopt the permissioning feature.

In October, select Hyperliquid perpetual prices became available through Bloomberg Terminal, allowing professional users to monitor around-the-clock markets covering cryptocurrencies and other assets. The Bloomberg Terminal data integration provided market information without adding direct trading execution through the terminal.

Meanwhile, HYPE traded at $78.98 in the October 18 market snapshot supplied with the announcement, down 1.12% over 24 hours and 6.97% during the preceding week.

The snapshot placed HYPE’s 24-hour trading volume at approximately $425.84 million and market capitalization at $17.56 billion. The data did not establish that the priority fee announcement caused the token’s price movement.

Earlier in October, Hyperliquid’s HYPE buyback activity had attracted attention after the Assistance Fund’s cumulative purchases reportedly surpassed 48 million tokens, worth approximately $1.36 billion.

That October 13 report recorded HYPE near $81.20 following a daily decline of almost 5%. For the priority fee proposal, the next operational step is a decision on whether and when to apply the testnet rules to mainnet. Hyperliquid has not supplied a confirmed activation date or a published test result measuring their effect on live order processing.