A breakdown of trader migration patterns from Binance to Hyperliquid, including fees, UX, on-chain architecture, and execution insights.
0
You are living under a rock if you haven’t seen the Binance vs Hyperliquid beef doing rounds on crypto Twitter.
While both platforms’ CEOs have been quiet, it is the community and loyal users pumping their favoured platform and sledging the competitor. Binance users have been accusing Hyperliquid of stealing users and spreading false information.
Hyperliquid’s community has accused Binance of corruption in listings and perpetrating the October market crash, caused by massive liquidations after a localised Ethena USDe depeg on its platform.
Nonetheless, Binance remains the largest exchange, and Hyperliquid has been able to capture just 10-15% of its mindshare. However, Hyperliquid’s rise has been nothing short of a spectacle.
It processed over $1.57 trillion in total perpetual trading volume during the past year. Hyperliquid’s monthly perpetual volume has grown by 600% year-on-year, with volumes reaching $100 billion at peak times. July alone saw $330 billion traded on the layer 1 exchange.
Hyperliquid is a decentralised perpetual futures exchange built on its native Layer 1 blockchain. It was established in 2022 and rapidly gained traction in 2025. Binance has been crypto’s favourite CEX since 2017, albeit with its own set of controversies.
This article discusses whether Hyperliquid’s speed and transparency can match the depth and scale of Binance, and why users are moving towards the DEX.
Binance has been a leading player in crypto derivatives for years. Its low fees, deep liquidity, and institutional-grade market depth attract millions of investors each year. It ranks on leaderboards with daily volumes as high as $217 billion. After recovering from regulatory setbacks and the Binance vs SEC trial, the exchange is going strong.
However, with scale, centralised venues invite centralised failure modes. Binance is no anomaly:
Binance suffered several outages during high volatility periods. This prevented traders from updating positions or closing risk. Professional traders, who rely on split-second execution, were forced to liquidate.
The USDe depeg was an example of how Binance’s own design flaw, timed with Trump’s tariff announcement, caused forced liquidations and huge losses to traders across tokens. Binance has seen many such controversial liquidation cascades.
Dragonfly managing partner @hosseeb, wrote on X how the USDe depeg was a localised event, and hardly any other platform saw any major fluctuation in the stablecoin prices.
Oftentimes, Binance has been accused of charging excessively high listing fees in cash and token allocations from projects seeking to get listed on the exchange. The CEO of Limitless Labs claimed that Binance demanded 9% of his project’s tokens and $2.45 million in cash.
Binance dismissed the claims later. In 2024, Moonrock Capital's CEO made similar allegations against Binance. People have started calling Binance a ‘centralised casino imposing unfair listing taxes.’
Such kind of listings invite speculative or low-quality assets, which was seen when some newly listed assets dumped sharply after listing. Binance addressed the listing fees issue as an ‘optional donation’ that the exchange calls from not-so-good projects. According to them, a good project would be listed for free.
Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan accused Binance of underreporting liquidations. In an X post, Jeff said, “Even if there are thousands of liquidation orders in the same second, only one is reported.”
According to him, liquidations happen in bursts, and the chances of underreporting could be as high as 100x under some conditions. Not only Binance, but also other CEXs like OKX are downsizing their liquidations.
Also Read: Why Gen Z Traders Never Touch Binance?
Athena faced $20 billion in liquidations across markets. As compensation, Binance paid $283 million to the affected users.
Also Read: Binance Unveils Relief Plan For Crypto Industry After Market Crash
Binance’s documentation states that, “only the latest one liquidation order within 1000ms will be pushed as the snapshot.” CEXs are way more opaque than on-chain platforms like Hyperliquid, and have been facing user trust issues.
Though Binance claims an uptime of 99.98%, there have been several instances when Binance failed in such crypto market stress tests:
CEXs are vulnerable to infrastructure failures, node/provider outages, and flash-crash stress events, which is a huge downside for high-frequency traders.
Hyperliquid is known for its on-chain transparency, self-custody, and CEX-like speed. It has been aggressively positioning itself differently from CEXs like Binance over the last two years.
Here’s a quick look at the features:
Binance, on the other hand, has been juggling with regulatory obligations, regional restrictions, listings, fiat bank partnerships, etc.
The subsequent sections deal with features that give Hyperliquid an edge over Binance and other CEXs, and why the trader migration is happening.
Web3 has suffered most on the UX front, but Hyperliquid feels faster, lighter, and more aligned with the needs of modern traders. We did a structural breakdown of its app/website’s UX audit:
The interface loads in a single, smooth pass, with orderbook, chart, depth, and positions rendering almost instantly. Pro traders find this ultra advantageous. There’s limited cognitive friction due to fewer moving parts. Perceived trading latency has little effect on traders’ intent-first behaviour.
Binance is a multi-service platform, and loads in layers, which impacts the loading speed and how traders navigate.
It uses a lightweight, custom chart renderer optimised for rapid updates and low system load. The charts feel the same as the desktop trading tools used by quant desks.
Binance charts are richer with TradingView integration, which can lead to micro stutters during zoom, slower scroll load, and delayed candle refresh. The delay to load can impact the traders’ ability to fulfil split-second trades and increase their chances of getting liquidated.
Hyperliquid has a single-column order panel with options to set quantity, leverage, limit/market selector, immediate visual cost estimate, and one-click place. Traders describe the panel as more muscle-memory-friendly.
Binance offers a more configurable order panel. However, that means more dropdowns, more toggles, and more pop-ops. Non-essential settings demand time, attention, and clicks–where every click means greater time spent to move from intent to execution.
Since Hyperliquid skips KYC, users can onboard in less than 10 seconds by connecting their wallet or email. There are no email loops, identity checks, or verification steps involved. Binance onboarding requires account creation, identity verification, deposit, and internal wallet transfers or futures before you can begin trading.
Hyperliquid charges no fees on trades. Despite being a decentralised perps platform, it allows instant order acknowledgement, real-time mark price and funding updates, and sub-second on-chain settlement finality.
There is no custodial banker, withdrawal limits, or internal ledger exposure. The non-custodial trading change feels like an upgrade rather than a change on Hyperliquid.
Any trader who has lived through the FTX scandal era remembers frozen funds, paused withdrawals, maintenance delays, and both paused and forced liquidations. Hyperliquid’s decentralised trading infrastructure guarantees funds remain on-chain and in your custody. Never will the funds remain in external custody under any maintenance mode or other unforeseen circumstances on Hyperliquid.
Gen Z traders care less about brand and more about execution economics.
The Hyperliquid vs Binance comparison becomes decisive when we compare each funding rate, maker/taker fees, vault incentives, bridging cost, etc.
Hyperliquid uses a transparent on-chain funding model that updates in real-time. There’s no ‘internal engine opacity’ that traders often complain about on CEXs. Traders using high-frequency strategies in leverage trading prefer the predictability of Hyperliquid.
Hyperliquid has lower taker fees, stronger maker rebates, and zero gas fees on execution. In comparison, Binance offers competitive pricing but still has higher fees, charges extra costs from funding spikes, and occasionally, the spread widens during volatility.
Hyper Unit Bridge allows nearly frictionless cross-chain deposits on Hyperliquid. These transactions are fast, low, and gas-abstracted. On Binance, traders need to deposit funds into the main account, transfer them to the futures wallet, and then sometimes pay network fees even on internal transfers.
Traders can earn passive yields from providing derivatives liquidity to HLP vaults and market-making vaults (MMVs). No such income-earning opportunity is available to retail traders on Binance.
Traders get facilities such as vault staking, lower spreads, predictable fees, and other staking incentives on Hyperliquid.
Hyperliquid returns 97% of exchange fees to HYPE tokenholders through token buybacks and liquidity incentives. Binance never shares its revenue outside the company. Only a small portion is distributed through BNB utilities.
Hyperliquid has a permissionless listings model where the community votes on project listings. There are no backroom deals or token-for-listening swaps involved. Binance, on the other hand, charges high listing fees, has preferential listing routes for VC-based assets, and puts up token allocation demands.
DEXs often face liquidity issues as their AMMs are unable to replicate the speed, precision, and depth of an order book. Hyperliquid replicates the CEX model in its decentralised architecture.
Hyperliquid offers deep on-chain derivatives liquidity, transparent liquidation logic, no custodial freeze risk, no KYC barriers or regional constraints, and on-chain verifiability when trading billions.
Binance has deeper liquidity. But whale trading behaviour shows they prefer liquidity combined with a non-custodial guarantee, both of which Hyperliquid offers.
Also Read: Binance Wallet Introduced New TGE Model
Rather, the question should be which platform removes more friction for real traders?
Hyperliquid is engineered around four levers, which give it an advantage over Binance.
Hyperliquid’s architecture respects trader autonomy and matches crypto-native behaviour. However, Hyperliquid isn’t without its demerits. Since it is a DEX, smart contract vulnerabilities remain. Beginners might find Hyperliquid overwhelming, as most traders enter crypto through fiat on-ramps and CEXs. Hyperliquid doesn’t allow fiat deposits, and there’s no multi-chain support available, except for the Arbitrum chain.
Hyperliquid’s growth isn’t an exception. It points to the structural inefficiencies rampant in the crypto trading infrastructure. Traders are migrating from Binance because the platform offered them the transparency, speed, and autonomy they have been asking for since 2020.
Also Read: MGX introduced $2B into Binance: What Does This Mean For The Industry
Binance can learn many lessons from Hyperliquid. Smaller modular updates work best rather than monolithic feature drops that only add to the UX burden. Composable incentive structures are the best to engage the new-age traders instead of continuous value extraction from users.
Opaque liquidation engines and maintenance-led outages are no longer acceptable. Rather, platforms with audit depth, risk assessments, and real-time execution are the way to go. Self-custody is the future. No one wants a TradFi 2.0 wrapped in crypto colours. On-chain market infrastructure isn’t just transparent, but also verifiable and a trust builder.
CEXs who learn their lessons fast will survive the next cycle and reduce user attrition and migration to better platforms.
0
