Hyperliquid Referral Code: The 4% Discount in Plain Numbers

Sign-up bonus

None. Hyperliquid has no deposit or sign-up bonus.

Fee discount (kickback)A kickback is the share of your own trading fees the platform hands back to you, usually for as long as the account exists.

4% off your trading fees for your first $25M of volume

Referrer reward

Referrer gets 10% of your fees, less your discount, for your first $1B of volume. Creating a code requires $10,000 of own volume.

KYCKnow Your Customer: identity verification with an ID document and often a selfie, required by regulated platforms before bonuses or withdrawals.

Not required. You connect an EVM wallet or log in with email.

Withdrawable?

The discount lowers fees as you pay them; there is nothing to withdraw. Referrer rewards are claimable once above $1.

Availability

The official app's terms block US persons and Ontario; sanctioned countries are excluded.

How the bonus unlocksWhat you must do (deposit, trade a volume, hold funds) before the bonus becomes usable or withdrawable.

Instant once the code is linked to your wallet. Does not apply to vaults or sub-accounts.

Search for a Hyperliquid referral code and you will find promises of “20% off” and “exclusive rebates”. The official docs tell a simpler story. A Hyperliquid referral code gives you a 4% discount on trading fees for your first $25 million of volume, and the person who referred you earns a share of what you pay. Hyperliquid has no deposit bonus, no welcome voucher and no KYC.

This page explains what that 4% is worth in dollars, how to get set up with only a wallet, what bridging and withdrawals cost, and the risks of trading perps on a chain where nobody can reverse a mistake.

• 4%discount on your trading fees with a referral code
• $25Mvolume cap after which the discount stops
• 5 USDCminimum deposit; smaller amounts are lost
• 0.045%base perps taker fee before any discount

What a Hyperliquid referral code actually does

Hyperliquid is a perpetual futures exchange running on its own blockchain. You trade from a wallet you control, and fees go to the protocol rather than to a company. The referral system is short enough to quote almost in full. Using a code gives you 4% off your fees for your first $25M of volume. The referrer receives 10% of your fees, less your discount, for your first $1B of volume. And you need $10,000 of your own trading volume before you can create a code to share.

The phrase “less any fee discount they receive” matters. Read literally, your 4% comes out of the referrer’s 10%. Nobody is quietly giving up a big slice for you. The program is built so a referrer earns something without the protocol paying out more than 10% of your fees in total.

The 4% discount in real money

Hyperliquid charges fees by a 14-day volume tier. At the base tier a perps takerA taker order fills immediately against orders already in the book, such as a market order. A maker order rests in the book and waits to be filled. Makers pay less. pays 0.045% and a maker pays 0.015%. Spot is 0.070% taker and 0.040% maker. The discount takes 4% off whichever rate applies, so a 0.045% taker fee becomes 0.0432%.

There is a ceiling too. The discount covers only your first $25M of volume. At the base taker rate, 4% of the fees on $25M comes to $450, and that is the most the code can ever save you. Someone trading $5M a month hits the cap in five months. Someone trading $100,000 a month would need more than twenty years.

So the code is worth having, because it costs nothing. It is not a reason to choose Hyperliquid over another venue. If fees really matter to you, your fee tier, the maker share of your orders and HYPE staking all count for more. Our guide to maker vs taker fees explains why a trader who mostly places limit orders can save far more than 4%.

No-KYC onboarding: wallet, email and the 5 USDC rule

Hyperliquid has no account sign-up in the exchange sense. You connect an EVM wallet such as Rabby, MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet or anything that supports WalletConnect, and sign a message. If you have never used a wallet, email login sends you a 6-digit code and creates a wallet tied to your address, which you can export later. Neither path asks for ID documents, so KYCKnow Your Customer: identity checks with an ID document and often a selfie, which centralized exchanges require before you can trade or withdraw. is not part of the process.

Funding works like this. You need USDC, and the standard route is USDC on Arbitrum, which means you also need a little ETH on Arbitrum for the deposit transaction’s gas. The email login flow also accepts USDC from Ethereum, Base and Polygon, and other assets such as BTC, ETH and SOL can be deposited and then sold for USDC. After that, trading on Hyperliquid itself is gas-free.

Deposits are credited in under a minute, and withdrawals arrive in your wallet in 3 to 4 minutes, according to the USDC docs. Withdrawals need only a signature on Hyperliquid, with no Arbitrum transaction. The USDC docs do not list a withdrawal fee, so check the amount the withdrawal dialog shows before you confirm. New accounts on HyperCore also pay a one-time activation fee of 1 USDC on their first incoming transfer. These costs are tiny next to fees, but they matter for anyone testing with $10.

How to use the code and keep the discount

You can attach a code in two ways: open a friend’s link (it looks like app.hyperliquid.xyz/join/CODE) or type the code on the Referrals page. Do it before your first trade. The docs do not set a deadline, but they also describe no way to swap codes later, and every dollar you trade before linking a code is volume the discount never touches.

Three details catch people out:

• Vaults and sub-accounts do not get the discount. The clearinghouse treats them as separate accounts, so if you trade mostly through a sub-account, the 4% will not apply there.
• Third-party frontends can override it. Apps built on Hyperliquid charge a builder fee per order. The docs note that a builder code overrides the referral code for that order, and builder fees can reach 0.1% on perps. That can cost far more than the 4% you save.
• The discount ends at $25M; the referral link ends at $1B. After your first $25M you pay full fees, while your referrer keeps earning a share until $1B.

If you want the general mechanics of codes, links and discounts across platforms, our guide on how to use a referral code covers the usual traps.

What referrers earn on Hyperliquid

To share your own code you need $10,000 of trading volume first. After that, you earn 10% of each referred user’s fees, minus the discount they get, for their first $1B of volume. Rewards accrue in every quote asset, can be claimed once they exceed $1, and land in your spot balance.

Compared with centralized exchanges, which often pay referrers 20% to 50%, this is modest. Hyperliquid once published a proposal for a staking-based referral program in which referrers who stake HYPE could keep up to 40% of fees and pass part of it to users. The docs now say there is no definitive version of that program ready for mainnet and that it is being re-evaluated. Until it goes live, 10% minus the discount is the real rate. For how kickback splits work in general, read how referral kickbacks work.

Points and airdrops: what is official

Hyperliquid ran a points program in two phases. The first gave out 1,000,000 points a week for six months. The L1 phase that followed gave out 700,000 a week. During the program, referrers earned 1 point for every 4 points their referred users earned. That program has ended. No points scheme is tied to referral codes now, and any page promising “airdrop points” for using a code is describing something Hyperliquid does not document.

Risks a referral code does nothing about

A fee discount lowers your costs a little. It does nothing for the risks of on-chain leverage, and these deserve more of your attention.

Liquidation. Maximum leverage ranges from 3x to 40x depending on the asset, and the maintenance margin runs from 1.25% (40x assets) to 16.7% (3x assets). If your equity drops below it, the protocol sends market orders to close your position. If equity falls below two-thirds of the maintenance margin before that works, a backstop liquidationLiquidation is the forced closing of a leveraged position when your collateral no longer covers the required margin. You lose the margin tied to that position. hands the position to the liquidator vault and you lose the maintenance margin. With cross margin and no isolated positions, that can leave your account at zero.

Smart contract and bridge risk. Your funds sit in on-chain contracts and a bridge rather than with a regulated custodian. No support desk can reverse a transfer sent to the wrong address or chain.

No recourse on mistakes. A deposit under 5 USDC is lost, and a signature you did not mean to give is final. Self-custody means you carry the whole responsibility.

Who can use Hyperliquid

Anyone with a wallet can technically reach the protocol, but the official interface follows its terms of use, which bar US persons, residents of Ontario and sanctioned jurisdictions. Using a VPN to get around this breaks those terms. If you are in the US, compare regulated alternatives instead. Our perp DEX hub lists other on-chain venues, including Aster, which pays a referral discount of up to 10% for 365 days, and edgeX, which pays only the referrer.