Coinbase has announced a partnership with Hyperliquid to bring perpetual futures trading directly into its Base App, giving eligible users access to leverage of up to 50x across more than 290 markets.
What the Integration Offers
The new feature covers perpetual futures pairs spanning Bitcoin, Ethereum, tokenized stocks, and commodities, available around the clock. Leverage levels vary by asset, and positions face liquidation if losses exceed defined thresholds.
Coinbase Head of Engineering Chintan Turakhia described the demand clearly: ‘Perps are where the volume is, roughly 75% of all crypto trading today is perps, not spot.’ Turakhia called perpetuals ‘the single most requested feature from our power users.’
Hyperliquid handles the actual trade execution. ‘Hyperliquid is one of the highest-performance onchain perps protocols, and because we support multiple chains and ecosystems, this integration lets our users tap into its deep liquidity and speed without ever leaving their existing wallet,’ Turakhia said.
Perpetual Futures Explained
Perpetual futures, known as perps, are derivative contracts that allow traders to speculate on whether an asset’s price will rise or fall without taking ownership of it. Unlike conventional futures contracts, perps carry no expiry date. Traders apply leverage to control positions larger than their capital outlay, amplifying both potential gains and potential losses.
The arithmetic of 50x is worth spelling out. At that level a position is controlled with 2% of its value, so a 2% move in the wrong direction is enough to erase the capital behind it and trigger liquidation. Crypto assets routinely move that far within a single session.
Geographic Restrictions
Coinbase confirmed the perpetual futures product is not available to users in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, or other jurisdictions where leveraged crypto derivatives face regulatory restrictions.
Base App’s Shifting Strategy
The perps launch marks the latest expansion of Base App’s trading capabilities and arrives roughly a year after Coinbase rebranded its wallet as Base App, initially positioning it as an ‘everything app’ combining crypto trading with social features, messaging, AI tools, and creator monetization tools.
That social-first direction did not deliver the adoption Coinbase anticipated. In July, Base creator Jesse Pollak stepped back from leading the app after acknowledging the push into social features and creator coins had missed expectations. Pollak identified prediction markets, perpetuals, and stablecoins as stronger adoption drivers, pointing the platform back toward trading, payments, and AI agents.
‘We made the right bet on builders, but obviously the wrong bet on social,’ Pollak wrote on X.
Why Hyperliquid
Turakhia’s framing of the Hyperliquid choice centres on performance and cross-chain reach. The integration keeps trades inside the Base App interface while Hyperliquid’s infrastructure provides the liquidity and speed. Users retain self-custody throughout, which Turakhia said was central to the design.
