On the evening of September 16 Beijing time, Kraken's parent company Payward officially released an announcement disclosing the company's cooperation approach with Hyperliquid, as well as details of the path to bring the latter's products and services into the US market.
According to the announcement, Payward plans to build a custom perpetual contract trading market based on HIP-3 on the Hyperliquid mainnet through its trading and clearing institution Bitnomial and futures broker NinjaTrader Clearing, and open trading services in this market to eligible US users.
Trump's Preview Is Finally Coming to Fruition
Regarding Hyperliquid's entry into the US, the earliest clue can be traced back to Trump's speech at the White House last month.
Prior to that, Hyperliquid's offshore nature had been regarded as its compliance weakness, but when Trump himself personally stated that "Michael (CFTC Chairman Michael Selig) is also working to push Hyperliquid to enter the United States in a fully compliant and legal manner," the market began to continuously speculate on exactly how Hyperliquid would enter the world's largest financial market.
The day after Trump's speech, Blockworks analyst Shaunda Devens discovered through investigation that a deployer named "Kraken HIP-3 test DEX" had already enabled permission management functionality (Star gating) on the Hyperliquid testnet, and had launched testing on August 19. Devens speculated that Kraken might be one of the first US centralized trading platforms to cooperate with Hyperliquid.
Subsequently, on September 1, Bloomberg reported and confirmed the above speculation — Hyperliquid was in in-depth negotiations with Kraken's parent company Payward, and if the relevant cooperation ultimately receives regulatory approval, US users would be able to trade certain perpetual contracts linked to token prices on the Hyperliquid blockchain through Bitnomial.
Until yesterday, Payward officially confirmed the details of its partnership with Hyperliquid. According to the announcement, Payward is not directly bringing Hyperliquid as a whole into the United States this time, but instead has chosen to start with HIP-3, deploying a permissioned perpetual contract market for U.S. users on the Hyperliquid public chain.
Specifically, Payward's CFTC-regulated Bitnomial will be responsible for deploying the HIP-3 market on Hyperliquid, and will handle market creation, ownership, management, as well as contract clearing and settlement; NinjaTrader Clearing, a futures commission merchant also under Payward and already registered with the CFTC, will be responsible for managing U.S. client accounts. The relevant entities will also separately assume their corresponding regulatory and compliance obligations.
In other words, the trading itself still takes place on the Hyperliquid public chain, and orders continue to be matched and recorded by Hyperliquid's on-chain order book, but the accounts, clearing, and compliance systems through which U.S. users access this market will be handled by Payward's regulated entities. According to Payward, U.S. clients can open futures accounts through its registered broker and then trade these new perpetual futures contracts on Hyperliquid; the relevant products will be launched under Bitnomial's rules after obtaining regulatory approval.
From this perspective, Hyperliquid's entry into the United States this time is in fact finding a path to embed its on-chain infrastructure into the U.S. regulated derivatives framework — Hyperliquid provides the underlying public chain, order book, and trading infrastructure, while U.S. regulated entities such as Payward are responsible for bringing in U.S. users, brokers, clearing, and regulatory requirements.
Restrictions Still Exist
Another detail in the announcement that cannot be overlooked is that Hyperliquid's entry into the United States this time still has clear limitations in terms of the products and services it can offer.
First, the originally open trading experience of Hyperliquid still needs to be wrapped in a strict access mechanism in the U.S. market. Payward explicitly stated in the announcement that only accounts that have passed NinjaTrader review and have also entered both the NinjaTrader and Bitnomial whitelists can participate in trading in these markets. In other words, U.S. users cannot directly enter Hyperliquid and trade freely like users in other regions, but must first go through a regulated account system.
Second, the scope currently disclosed is only the HIP-3 market deployed by Bitnomial, not all existing perpetual contracts on the Hyperliquid mainnet.This means that even if the product is officially approved in the future, which assets U.S. users can trade, how much leverage they can use, and whether they can subsequently gain further access to other markets on Hyperliquid will still depend on Payward, Bitnomial, and the U.S. regulatory framework, rather than being determined solely by the Hyperliquid protocol itself.Therefore, a more accurate description of this collaboration is that Payward has established a "compliant zone" on Hyperliquid for U.S. users.
So what this collaboration truly opens up is a connection between the U.S. regulatory system and Hyperliquid's on-chain trading infrastructure, rather than a full opening of the U.S. market to Hyperliquid.
Legislation Stalled, Regulation Moves First
Interestingly, on the same day Payward disclosed Hyperliquid's path into the U.S., the U.S. crypto regulatory environment received another less optimistic piece of news—at around 3:00 AM Beijing time on September 16, the U.S. Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act in a 49-50 procedural vote. The bill had originally sought to further clarify the regulatory boundaries of digital assets through congressional legislation and to delineate the regulatory responsibilities of the SEC and CFTC across different digital asset markets.
But if one looks away from Congress, the actual advancement of U.S. crypto regulation has not completely stalled as a result. Since the beginning of this year, the SEC and CFTC have continued to clarify the regulatory boundaries of certain digital assets and derivatives through interpretations, guidance, No-Action Letters, and other existing regulatory tools.
Putting these two events from yesterday together precisely reveals the true state of current U.S. crypto regulation—complete rules at the congressional level still have not landed, but regulators have already begun using existing authorities to find executable compliance paths for products such as on-chain trading and perpetual contracts, step by step.
For Hyperliquid, this collaboration with Payward may be a microcosm of this regulatory environment. It did not wait for a complete new law to open the U.S. market for itself, but instead first leveraged existing regulatory licenses and infrastructure such as Bitnomial and NinjaTrader to fit on-chain trading into a framework that existing rules can accommodate. So rather than saying Hyperliquid has already "entered the U.S.," it is more accurate to say it has finally found a path it can try to enter the U.S. How far this path can go will ultimately depend on regulatory approval, the scope of tradable assets, and what kind of crypto market structure the U.S. will eventually form in the future.
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