Payward Will Deploy a Hyperliquid HIP-3 Market for US Traders: The Structure, Explained

On September 16 Payward, the parent company of Kraken, said it intends to deploy onchain perpetual futures markets for US clients, starting with Hyperliquid HIP-3 markets. The announcement came out of Cheyenne, Wyoming, and it is the first time a registered US exchange and clearinghouse has said it will own and administer a market on a public onchain order book. The contracts would be listed under the rules of Bitnomial Exchange, subject to regulatory approval.

That last clause matters. Nothing is live yet. But the structure Payward described is specific enough to reason about, and it answers the question perp traders have been asking since the CFTC started clearing a path for onshore crypto perpetuals earlier this year: what does regulated US flow on a public order book actually look like.

The three entities that carry the regulatory obligations

Payward named all three in its press release. Bitnomial Exchange, LLC, a CFTC regulated designated contract market, would be the HIP-3 deployer. It would create, own and administer the market, and Bitnomial Clearinghouse, LLC, a CFTC registered derivatives clearing organization, would clear and settle the contracts. NinjaTrader Clearing, LLC, a CFTC registered futures commission merchant and NFA member, would carry the client accounts.

The access rule is the part most readers skim past. Per the release, only accounts onboarded by NinjaTrader and present on both the NinjaTrader and Bitnomial allowlists could trade. This is a permissioned market in the literal sense: the order book is public, the matching happens onchain, and the participant set is gated at the broker and exchange level.

Payward's head of US derivatives framed it plainly in the same release. A US client would open a futures account with Payward's registered broker and trade new perpetual futures contracts on Hyperliquid, cleared through the same clearinghouse that already supports the crypto perpetual contracts Payward offers US clients today.

Why HIP-3 is the piece that makes this possible

HIP-3 is Hyperliquid's builder deployed permissioned perpetual market standard. A third party stakes to deploy a market, sets its parameters and administers it, while trades still match and settle on Hyperliquid's onchain order book. Builder deployed markets are not covered by HLP, the protocol's shared liquidity vault, which means the deployer carries the market making and risk problem itself.

That design is exactly why a CFTC regulated entity can plausibly sit in the deployer seat. Bitnomial would not be asking Hyperliquid to run a compliant market on its behalf. It would be running its own market and using Hyperliquid as the matching and settlement venue, holding the keys and carrying the obligations itself. Payward's co-CEO described it in those terms in the release.

For the protocol, this is the first real test of whether HIP-3 works as infrastructure rather than as a product surface for crypto native builders. Every HIP-3 market so far has been deployed by an entity that answers to no US regulator.

The 98 percent open interest concentration nobody talks about

Payward's co-CEO dropped one statistic in the release that deserves isolating: multiple venues run builder deployed perpetuals on Hyperliquid, and one of them holds 98 percent of their open interest.

For anyone reading HIP-3 tape, that is the whole story of the segment right now. Aggregate HIP-3 open interest figures are describing one venue with a long tail behind it. Treating that aggregate as a diversified number will produce bad inferences about depth, about slippage, and about who is on the other side of your fill.

A second deployer with a US client base and its own clearing stack would not fix the concentration overnight. It would give the segment a second distribution channel whose flow has a different origin: futures accounts that passed KYC and margin onboarding at an FCM, rather than self custodied wallets that showed up because the funding rate looked good.

What allowlisted flow changes about reading Hyperliquid orderflow

Permissioned does not mean opaque. The markets would run on Hyperliquid's public blockchain, whose onchain order book matches and records trades. Every fill in a Bitnomial deployed market would be visible in the same place as everything else on Hyperliquid, at the same granularity.

What changes is the behavioral profile of the participants. Accounts carried by an FCM face margin calls from a clearinghouse on a defined schedule, not an automatic onchain liquidation at a published price. They sit under position limits set by exchange rules. Flow that behaves on futures market timing, inside a book that is fully visible, is a genuinely new object for anyone doing orderflow work on Hyperliquid.

The scale context is not small. Payward cited CoinGecko's 2026 State of Crypto Perpetuals Report for more than $85 trillion in perpetual futures traded worldwide during 2025, and DefiLlama for more than $200 billion of Hyperliquid volume in the trailing 30 days. Payward said it held 6.6 million funded accounts as of June 30, 2026, with Proof of Reserves reviewed by an independent third party accountant showing client assets backed above 100 percent.

The approval gate that has not been cleared

The release says it twice: subject to regulatory approval. There is no fee schedule, no launch date, no expected volume figure and no disclosed economic arrangement with Hyperliquid.

It also lands in an awkward week for US crypto policy. The Senate blocked the CLARITY Act on September 15 in a failed cloture vote, 49 for and 50 against, short of the 60 votes needed, which effectively ends market structure legislation in the Senate for 2026. The Payward plan does not depend on that bill. It runs through the CFTC's existing designated contract market and clearing framework, which is precisely why it is worth watching. It is the route that does not need Congress.

If a Bitnomial deployed market goes live, the first thing worth measuring is whether its open interest and depth grow independently of the incumbent that currently holds 98 percent of HIP-3 open interest, or whether it simply mirrors the same flow with a different wrapper. Buildix covers Hyperliquid HIP-3 markets alongside native perps in the screener at buildix.trade/screener, with CVD, order book imbalance and whale attribution on the same pairs, so that comparison is available from day one rather than reconstructed months later.

Perpetual futures have traded outside the United States since 2016. The interesting part of this announcement is not that US traders might finally get them onshore. It is that the first regulated version is being built on a book that everyone can already read, tick by tick, without asking anyone for permission.