VALR x Hydromancer: The Infrastructure Behind 200+ Onchain Perps Markets
In July, we launched more than 200 Perps markets powered by Hyperliquid. For the first time, VALR customers can take a leveraged view on Nvidia, Tesla, the S&P 500, gold, crude oil, major FX pairs, and a wide range of crypto assets, all from their VALR account.
We're the first major regulated exchange to natively integrate an onchain protocol as the liquidity source for cross-asset perpetuals. Here's a look at the infrastructure that makes it work, and at Hydromancer, the data partner that helped us build it.
The best of CeFi and DeFi, in one account
VALR Perps is designed so both sides do what they do best:
VALR provides regulated onboarding, local fiat rails, customer support, and the app our customers already know.
Hyperliquid provides deep, transparent liquidity, onchain margining, and a fast-growing range of markets, including equities and commodities through HIP-3.
For our customers, the result is simple: global markets, one account, and no wallets, bridges or private keys to manage. And because every position lives on Hyperliquid, it is verifiable onchain.
Why data matters as much as liquidity
Placing an order on Hyperliquid is only part of the job. To give customers an experience they can trust, VALR has to know the exact state of every account at every moment:
open positions and margin
every fill, including liquidations
funding payments
deposits and transfers
Hyperliquid markets trade 24/7, so this can never pause. When a trade is filled, a funding payment lands or a stop-loss triggers, customers expect to see it in their VALR app right away, and to see it correctly.
Hyperliquid's public API is open to everyone, which is exactly what it's for. But a public API isn't designed to track the accounts of an exchange serving close to two million users, and it doesn't come with the service levels, dedicated support and room for feature requests that a regulated business needs. So we partnered with Hydromancer, which provides Hyperliquid data infrastructure to more than 80 teams.
Building it together
Our engineering team moved VALR Perps' Hyperliquid data onto Hydromancer. We first built a production-like setup on testnet, working closely with the Hydromancer team, and then went live on mainnet.
Market prices, funding rates and open interest for every Hyperliquid market reach us through Hydromancer streams. Account activity, including fills, leverage changes and order updates, comes through dedicated endpoints built for exchange-scale workloads.
Custom infrastructure for how an exchange works
Most Hyperliquid data tools assume a self-custodial world. A wallet belongs to an individual, who might use it through several apps. A platform like ours could therefore only see activity that was explicitly tagged as coming through VALR. Many events never carry that tag, including liquidations, funding payments, deposits and transfers. Without a different approach, we would have had to check every customer's account one by one, around the clock.
VALR works differently. The Hyperliquid accounts behind VALR Perps are used only through VALR, so everything that happens on them belongs to a VALR customer's activity. Hydromancer built a new set of data feeds around that fact. They cover all activity on accounts that trade through VALR, including liquidations, funding and transfers, in a handful of streams instead of millions of individual requests.
For our customers, that means positions, P&L, funding and liquidations are reflected accurately and quickly. It also means our infrastructure scales with every new trader who joins VALR Perps.
"VALR is showing what an exchange looks like when it's built on open, onchain markets. Our job was to make the data layer underneath invisible, meaning fast, complete and always on, so VALR's customers see their Hyperliquid trades on time." —, Hydromancer team
What's ahead
We believe the future of trading combines trusted, regulated platforms with open, onchain liquidity. As more equities, commodities and new asset classes come to Hyperliquid, VALR customers will be among the first to access them. Recently, we’ve also published API documentation for VALR users who want to trade Perps via API.
Risk Disclosure
Trading or investing in crypto assets is risky and may result in the loss of capital as the value may fluctuate. VALR (Pty) Ltd is a licensed financial services provider (FSP #53308).
