Hyperliquid (HYPE) Confirms Singapore HQ as MAS Claims No Jurisdiction

Hyperliquid Labs Confirms Singapore HQ

Hyperliquid Labs has confirmed that the corporate entity behind Hyperliquid (HYPE), the decentralized trading platform, is registered in Singapore, even as the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) says it is not aware of the protocol being regulated in any major jurisdiction. The Hyperliquid price slipped roughly 3.7% across the last 24 hours in our live monitoring, a modest reaction to the jurisdictional dispute. Co-founder Jeff Yan and a team of about 11 people relocated to Singapore in 2024, according to company documents that identify the city-state as the registered headquarters. Recruitment material from recent weeks also referenced a Singapore office, and job advertisements posted as recently as last week asked candidates whether they could work from the location. Hyperliquid Labs confirmed the registered address when approached for comment.

MAS stated directly that it is “not aware that Hyperliquid is regulated in any major jurisdiction.” People familiar with the regulator's thinking said MAS does not consider the platform to be based in Singapore because of its decentralized nature, which places the protocol outside the authority's jurisdiction despite the registered corporate entity. Hyperliquid acknowledged that it operates without regulation, said it has never claimed to be licensed or authorized by MAS, and offered to work constructively with regulators. MAS previously added Hyperliquid to its Investor Alert List on June 26, an entry that names both the Hyper Foundation website and the trading application and warns that the platform's perpetual futures, a leveraged form of contract trading, fall outside the authority's supervision. The regulator describes the list as a notice about entities investors may wrongly believe are licensed or regulated by MAS, and says it is not exhaustive. Hyperliquid responded at the time that an IAL listing “does not constitute a ban, an enforcement action, or a finding of wrongdoing,” adding that its permissionless infrastructure remained unchanged. We follow the full Hyperliquid regulatory coverage as the story develops.

Licensing Rules and $716 Billion in Volume

The jurisdictional dispute lands against a licensing regime MAS finalized last year. Under the regulator's May 30 notice and its June 6 clarification, covered digital token service providers had to obtain a license or stop covered activities by June 30, 2025, with no additional transition period. The framework applies to providers serving only customers outside Singapore, whether in digital payment tokens or tokens representing capital market products, and the regulator's own clarification states it set a high licensing bar and would generally not grant licenses for that model. The authority cited elevated money-laundering risks and the difficulty of supervising providers whose substantive regulated activity takes place overseas. Meanwhile, the protocol's operating scale keeps compounding. Data covering the 12 months through October 6 shows $730.5 million in protocol revenue and $723.7 million in operating net income. Perpetual derivatives trading volume reached $716.4 billion in the third quarter, and open interest stood at $16.4 billion at quarter-end. Traders post collateral on-chain in a structure similar to margin trading, one reason the venue has been hard for regulators to classify.

A separate access route is forming in the United States. On September 16, Kraken parent Payward announced plans for regulated Hyperliquid perpetual markets built on the platform's HIP-3 infrastructure, subject to regulatory approval before eligible U.S. customers can trade. Under the proposal, Bitnomial Exchange would create and administer the contracts, with Bitnomial Clearinghouse handling clearing and settlement, while trades match and record on Hyperliquid's on-chain order book. Payward plans to carry customer accounts through NinjaTrader Clearing, and traders would need to appear on both NinjaTrader and Bitnomial allowlists. The arrangement limits customers to the regulated products Bitnomial deploys under its own exchange rules rather than the platform's full market range, which spans spot trading alongside perpetuals. No launch date has been given; readers new to the venue can follow our guide on how to trade on Hyperliquid.

Two Divergent Regulatory Paths

The setup is unusual: a venue large enough to book $723.7 million in operating net income over a year operates with no regulator claiming oversight, while its registered home jurisdiction lists it on a consumer warning board rather than licensing it. In our reading, MAS's decentralization reasoning sets a question other regulators will have to answer: if a protocol is genuinely decentralized, where does supervision attach? The Payward structure suggests one answer, since it pushes the regulated perimeter onto intermediaries such as Bitnomial and NinjaTrader rather than onto the protocol itself. Sentiment studies, including one where ten AI models named HYPE a top year-end pick, and our Hyperliquid technical analysis give traders ways to judge whether the regulatory limbo weighs on price.