A centralized exchange just plugged itself directly into a decentralized protocol’s infrastructure. VALR, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Africa by trading volume, has integrated Hyperliquid to power a new cross-asset perpetuals product offering over 200 markets. It’s the first time a major regulated centralized exchange has natively built on top of Hyperliquid’s Layer-1 blockchain.
The product, announced on July 2, went beyond the typical crypto perpetuals menu. Users will be able to take leveraged long and short positions on global equities like NVIDIA and Tesla, commodities including oil and natural gas, forex pairs, and of course, crypto. Web access is scheduled to go live on July 6, with mobile support following shortly after.
The CeDeFi play nobody expected
The exchange, which serves more than 1.9 million users and over 1,900 institutional clients, is using Hyperliquid’s permissionless infrastructure for trade execution and liquidity sourcing. Hyperliquid is widely recognized as the largest on-chain perpetual futures DEX, optimized specifically for high-speed trading and deep liquidity across multiple asset classes.
VALR’s COO Gianluca Sacco framed the integration as an effort to deliver “the deepest on-chain liquidity available anywhere.” Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 protocol allows efficient third-party market deployment on its permissionless infrastructure, which is essentially what VALR is leveraging here.
