How Hyperliquid agrees on a block

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Just committed

pending order or cancel proposed block, and the leader's ring votes and the quorum certificate committed the block's real proposer votes, replayed (not observed) committed transactions bids asks on the order book HyperEVM block

Traders sign actions, mostly orders and cancels, and send them to a node, which passes them to the validators. There is no gas: an order costs nothing to place, and fees are charged only on fills.
Each round has one leader, picked in proportion to stake, so a validator with a tenth of the stake leads about a tenth of the blocks. The leader (ringed) fixes the order of the round's actions and sends the block to the others.
Each validator checks the block and signs a vote, which it sends back to the leader rather than to everyone. Votes count by stake, and the block needs more than two thirds. Votes: 0 % of stake.
The leader bundles the quorum's signatures into a quorum certificate and passes it on with the next round's proposal, to the next leader (ringed faintly). With a certificate the block is committed: final in one block, with no waiting for confirmations.
Every validator now runs the block in the same order: other actions first, then cancels, then orders that can trade. Orders rest on the book or match in price-time priority, so every validator ends with the same book.
The same blocks also drive HyperEVM, the chain's EVM. The first block of each second produces a small EVM block, 3 M gas; the first of each minute also produces a large one, 30 M gas. This one adds a small block.

Proposers are real: each block names the validator that proposed it, ringed as it arrives, about 15 times a second. The order book is the real BTC perpetual book, top ten levels each side. Votes happen between validators, so the blue beams are a replay. Pick any step to study it in step-by-step mode.

Action types, in sampled blocks Waiting for the first sampled block

How this is counted

Blocks come 15 a second, too many to fetch, so every two seconds the page loads one recent block in full and counts its transactions by action. One transaction can carry many orders or cancels; it counts once. An EVM transaction is a HyperEVM transaction sent through HyperCore; other covers transfers, leverage changes, no-ops and the rest. Rejected actions, such as an order that would cross the book with post-only set, are included.

Transactions per block Waiting for the first block

HyperCore blocks 0 tx in this block 70 ms per block on mainnet 0 active of 0 · 0 HYPE staked HyperEVM –

The parts that make this work

An exchange that is a blockchain

Most chains run a general-purpose virtual machine and leave trading to smart contracts. Hyperliquid's main state machine, HyperCore, is the exchange itself: perpetual futures, spot markets and their order books, margin and liquidations are built into the protocol. Placing an order, cancelling one or moving funds is a signed action that goes into a block like any transaction, and the matching engine runs as part of executing the block. A typical block holds several hundred to a couple of thousand transactions, most of them orders and cancels from market makers. Hyperliquid says mainnet handles about 200,000 orders a second, limited by execution rather than consensus.

HyperBFT

Consensus is HyperBFT, Hyperliquid's variant of HotStuff, the leader-based Byzantine fault tolerant protocol published in 2018. In each round one leader proposes a block. Validators send their signed votes to the leader instead of to each other, which keeps the message count growing linearly with the number of validators. Votes are weighted by stake, and a quorum is any set holding more than two thirds of it. The leader aggregates a quorum's votes into a quorum certificate and carries it forward with the next proposal. A certified block is committed and can't be reverted unless validators with more than a third of the stake break the rules, so there is no waiting for confirmations. Blocks arrive about every 70 milliseconds; Hyperliquid quotes a median end-to-end latency of 0.2 seconds for a client sitting next to a node.

Validators and stake

On October 1, 2026, the API listed 35 registered validators, 27 of them active, with about 437 million HYPE staked. The active set is the top 27 by stake, and each needs at least 10,000 HYPE of its own staked to join. Blocks are produced in proportion to stake. The stake is concentrated: the Hyper Foundation runs four validators holding about 47 % of it, and the eight largest validators together pass the two-thirds quorum. The set changes in epochs of 100,000 rounds, about 90 minutes. Validators that respond too slowly can be jailed by a vote of their peers, which stops their rewards; slashing is reserved for provably malicious behaviour. Unstaking takes seven days. Staking rewards come from an emissions reserve, at a rate that falls with the square root of the total staked: about 2.4 % a year at 400 million HYPE.

Ordering inside a block

The leader decides the order of the actions it proposes, but HyperCore doesn't run them in exactly that order. It sorts each block into three groups: first actions that send no orders able to trade straight away (including post-only orders), then cancels, then actions that send good-til-cancelled or immediate-or-cancel orders. Within a group the leader's order holds. Putting cancels and post-only quotes ahead of orders that take liquidity protects market makers from being picked off by a taker in the same block. Orders then match in price-time priority, with prices on a tick grid and sizes in whole lots.

HyperEVM

HyperEVM is an Ethereum-compatible chain secured by the same HyperBFT consensus, not a separate network. Its blocks are cut from the HyperCore block stream on two clocks: the first HyperCore block of each second produces a small EVM block with a 3 million gas limit, and the first of each minute also produces a large block with a 30 million gas limit, for contract deployments and other heavy transactions. Both kinds share one sequence of EVM block numbers. EVM contracts can read HyperCore state, such as prices and balances, through precompiles.

What live mode shows

Live mode opens a WebSocket to rpc.hyperliquid.xyz and subscribes to the explorer's block and transaction streams. Block heights, hashes, times, transaction counts and proposers are real, about 15 blocks a second; the scene rings each block's proposer as it arrives, and the strip shows the newest block twice a second. The ring is the active validator set from the info API, sized by stake. Every two seconds the page loads one recent block in full to count its actions by type. The order book under the block is the live BTC perpetual book from api.hyperliquid.xyz, and the HyperEVM block number comes from its JSON-RPC endpoint, with large blocks marked. Votes and certificates stay between validators, so the blue beams are a replay. If the explorer stream doesn't answer, the feed falls back to BTC trades.

What the animation simplifies

A real block takes about 70 milliseconds from proposal to commit, so step-by-step mode stretches one over about a dozen seconds. Real HyperBFT is pipelined: each round's proposal carries the certificate for the previous block, so voting on one block overlaps with proposing the next. The node software is closed source, so details such as how exactly leaders are scheduled are taken from Hyperliquid's documentation rather than the code. Order sizes and the simulated book are illustrative. Sources: the HyperCore overview, staking, order book and dual-block architecture pages, and the HotStuff paper.