Kraken’s parent company Payward plans to lead the HIP-3* initiative, bringing Hyperliquid’s U.S. compliance roadmap to light.

Written by Nicky, Foresight News

As early as August 19, during a White House meeting with executives from the cryptocurrency and prediction market sectors, Trump publicly noted that Michael Selig, Chair of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), is working to "bring Hyperliquid to the United States in a fully compliant, legally sound manner."

This announcement at the time pushed HYPE’s price higher, and marked the first time the market clearly realized that Hyperliquid’s entry into the U.S. market would likely not be achieved through its own direct registration, but via partnerships with regulated entities.

On October 27, Hyperliquid announced in an official post that Kraken parent company Payward plans to become the first CFTC-regulated HIP-3* market deployer, leveraging Hyperliquid’s infrastructure to offer perpetual contract trading services to U.S. customers.

Once regulatory approval is secured, Bitnomial — the CFTC-regulated entity under Payward — will be responsible for market creation and management, as well as contract clearing and settlement. Registered Futures Commission Merchant (FCM) NinjaTrader Clearing will manage client accounts. HIP-3* is currently live on the testnet, and its specific specifications remain subject to adjustment.

To understand the significance of this partnership, it is first necessary to draw a clear distinction between HIP-3 and HIP-3*.

According to Hyperliquid’s official documentation, HIP-3 allows eligible third-party deployers to build and operate their own perpetual contract markets on HyperCore. Deployers are required to stake approximately 500,000 HYPE (valued at roughly $38.855 million), and are responsible for market parameter definition, leverage settings, and oracle configuration, while HyperCore uniformly manages order books, trade matching, margin processing, and clearing operations. The framework is open by default, meaning any rule-compliant wallet can access trading.

The HIP-3 mainnet launched in October 2025. According to Hyperliquid Analytics data, HIP-3 currently records a daily trading volume of $2.83 billion, primarily driven by trading of real-world asset (RWA) perpetual contracts covering stocks, commodities, and indices.

HIP-3* is an optional incremental feature built on top of HIP-3, with on-chain whitelisting as its core mechanism. Deployers can restrict access to specific markets so that only whitelisted wallets are permitted to trade, and grant limited permissions such as order cancellation and reduce-only proxy order placement, with access strictly confined to the specific markets deployed by the entity.

This feature is strictly optional and will not impact existing HIP-3 markets. It is designed to allow regulated entities to leverage Hyperliquid’s public order book while meeting requirements for compliance, Know Your Customer (KYC) verification, and geographic access restrictions.

The core essential difference between the two is as follows: HIP-3 allows any user to deploy open, permissionless markets, while HIP-3* adds optional access controls on the same underlying infrastructure, enabling regulated deployers to retain ownership of client relationships, clearing obligations, and compliance responsibilities on their end, with Hyperliquid serving solely as a neutral trade matching and settlement record layer. Put simply, HIP-3* builds on HIP-3 by adding compliance restriction features to align with CFTC regulatory requirements.

So why is Kraken, rather than Coinbase, the first entity to take this step?

The root cause behind this dynamic is the differing positions of the two firms in the derivatives space. According to public information, Coinbase completed its acquisition of Deribit in August 2025 for a total consideration of approximately $2.9 billion, taking ownership of the world’s largest crypto options trading platform. Its proprietary ecosystem already includes a CFTC-registered Designated Contract Market (DCM) — Coinbase Derivatives — and Futures Commission Merchant (FCM) — Coinbase Financial Markets. It also received approval as a Derivatives Clearing Organization (DCO) in 2026, forming a fully in-house closed loop covering trading, brokerage, and clearing services. Building on this foundation, Coinbase has already launched U.S.-regulated perpetual-style futures, and is advancing products such as single-stock perpetuals.

In other words, Coinbase is already a direct competitor to Hyperliquid in the U.S. derivatives market. Helping Hyperliquid enter the U.S. in a compliant way would mean introducing a high-performance external matching layer to Coinbase’s most core product lines, which is not aligned with the commercial interests of its proprietary perpetual products and the Deribit ecosystem. Notably, the Hyperliquid perpetual contract integration embedded in Coinbase’s Base App is explicitly blocked for users in the U.S., U.K., and Canada.

The situation is different for Kraken. Payward completed its acquisition of Bitnomial in May 2026, obtaining both DCM and DCO licenses through the transaction. Prior to that, it acquired NinjaTrader in 2025, which holds an FCM license.

When combined, these three licenses allow Payward to act directly as a HIP-3* deployer to build and manage markets, complete clearing and settlement, while leveraging the FCM to host client accounts. However, this license stack previously lacked a sufficiently competitive underlying perpetual product. Compared to the combined scale of Coinbase and Deribit, Kraken has much thinner product depth and liquidity in the U.S. derivatives space.

Using Hyperliquid as the underlying trade matching and record layer, with its own licensed entities serving as the compliance wrapper, perfectly fills this gap. For Kraken, this partnership presents an opportunity to enable its acquired derivatives platforms to launch compliant business lines and expand its product offerings.

For Hyperliquid, the biggest significance of this partnership is that it connects the U.S. compliance framework and public order book for the first time. Prior to this, no registered U.S. exchange or clearing institution had ever deployed a market on Hyperliquid. This resolves Hyperliquid’s long-standing core barrier of being unable to directly serve U.S. users: Hyperliquid itself does not need to register as a U.S. exchange, and can achieve compliant market access via regulated deployers. For the HYPE token and the broader HIP-3 ecosystem, this integration will bring potential U.S. liquidity and legitimacy endorsement.

The plan has not yet received final regulatory approval, and still faces multiple layers of uncertainty. CFTC review timelines tend to be lengthy, with market participants noting that similar structured arrangements typically require at least 10 to 12 months to complete the approval process.