The decentralized perpetual futures exchange Hyperliquid has introduced revised order priority rules on its testnet, including, reportedly, a requirement to delegate 10 HYPE for traders wishing to speed up order processing through the priority fee system.
In a message dated 18 October, distributed through community channels, the decentralized derivatives trading platform outlined changes to the rules on priority fees for order placement, adopted based on user feedback. The proposed rules concern traders who count on minimal latency when placing, modifying, or canceling orders.
The announcement lists four changes concerning account settings, transaction processing, and eligibility for priority fees. Hyperliquid's existing technical documentation confirms the operating principle of the priority fee system, although the new delegation threshold does not yet appear in the publicly available documentation reviewed for this report.
The changes have already been implemented on the testnet. A confirmed date for rolling out the revised requirements to the mainnet has not yet been announced.
Hyperliquid introduces a 10 HYPE priority fee rule
According to the announcement, the update of 18 October introduces a minimum delegated balance of 10 HYPE for accounts wishing to use the priority fees IOC and ALO.
IOC, short for immediate-or-cancel, denotes an order that attempts to be executed immediately and cancels any portion that cannot be filled. ALO, or add-liquidity-only, is used to place orders that are added to the order book without immediately tapping available liquidity.
Both types can use priority fees within Hyperliquid's existing system, although the benefits work differently. The latest announcement introduces an eligibility requirement for access to priority features, tied to staking. It does not establish that all traders must delegate 10 HYPE in order to place regular orders.
Hyperliquid's existing documentation on priority fees states that the applicable fees are charged from the user's undelegated balance within staking. The October announcement separately mentions a minimum delegated balance.
This distinction matters for the technical description of the proposal: under the stated new rule, eligibility will be determined by the delegated balance, while the documentation describes the undelegated staking balance as the source used to pay priority fees. The publicly available documentation does not yet confirm whether the platform intends to change any of the balance requirements before the mainnet launch.
The new rules change how Hyperliquid processes orders
In the announcement, Hyperliquid limits priority in the transaction pool to accounts using standard mode. The platform's account configuration documentation describes standard mode as the recommended option for market makers, users with a high volume of automated operations, and developers.
Standard accounts maintain separate balances for spot markets and perpetual futures, including individual balances on independently deployed markets. By contrast, unified accounts combine eligible balances to support cross-margin trading. Under the proposed rule, transaction priority within the pool will apply only to standard accounts for abstraction purposes.
The announcement specifies a second restriction concerning the operation of HyperCore. Account activity, other than cancellations, placements, and modifications of orders, will lower the transaction priority for the corresponding account until confirmation.
The reported behavior concerns the order in which operations on an account are executed before confirmation. The announcement does not provide a numerical estimate of the additional latency that affected accounts may experience.
A separate provision lowers the memory pool priority for accounts that have directly submitted CoreWriter operations. CoreWriter links smart contracts running on HyperEVM to actions on HyperCore, where Hyperliquid maintains its own trading functionality.
Thus, this rule will affect certain accounts using transactions that pass through HyperEVM to interact with the exchange's core trading system.
Hyperliquid has not provided a complete list of CoreWriter actions that could trigger the specified priority treatment.
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