Today, we're announcing Hypercall Mobile Testnet is live. This marks an important milestone for Hypercall. For the first time, users will be able to trade on-chain options on US500 and USOIL on testnet.
This has been a long time coming. RWAs in DeFi were first discussed in 2017, but they lacked the right infrastructure until the launch of HIP-3. In under a year, HIP-3 Perps have gone from an idea to the dominant way to express a thesis on geopolitics, and are now being discussed in the WSJ and Financial Times.
At the same time, options volume has continued to grow exponentially in TradFi.
Hypercall sits in the center of these two trends and is poised to become the first on-chain options platform to allow trading across asset classes.
What's in Mobile Testnet
The first release of testnet will be mobile only. There are a few reasons for this:
- The Robinhood Thesis: Options volume was historically flat until Robinhood came on the scene. We believe the reason for this is UX: prior iterations of options chains, by focusing on the Greeks + data density, were simply too overwhelming for retail traders.
By focusing on mobile traders in this release, we believe we can validate DeFi demand for options and show our builder code partners a path forward for options integration into their apps.
- Toxic Flow: This has led to surprising market dynamics, with Deribit dominating options open interest despite competing with larger players like Binance and OKX.
By focusing on building a world-class mobile experience, we can completely avoid the toxic flow problem that has plagued so many other exchanges.
- Pro Feedback: The universe of traders who use pro options interfaces is much smaller than that of retail traders. This has allowed us to consistently receive 1:1 feedback from pro traders in a way that hasn't been possible on our mobile interface.
Who Mobile Testnet is For:
If you're an experienced options trader who's used to trading on Deribit or Interactive Brokers, Mobile Testnet is probably not for you. It does, however, mark an important step in building a product for everyone.
The mobile testnet is built for mobile-only traders who use products like Robinhood to express views on the market. We believe that path-independent, liquidation-free options have a place both in DeFi and on the blockchain to house all of finance.
Other Limitations:
To limit the scope of Mobile Testnet, we've decided to ship a few features over time rather than in the initial version. That means:
- Standard Margining Only: Portfolio Margin will ship in our Pro Testnet, concurrently with our Pro interface.
- Long Only - While users can buy Puts or Calls to express an opinion in either direction, users are not yet able to go short on options. This is because Liquidations require features that have not yet been enabled in testnet.
- API Stability: Mobile Testnet is explicitly not built for API traders. This means the API is subject to change as we incorporate feedback from Liquidity Providers and Partners.
Why Mobile Testnet Matters:
Mobile Testnet is a critical step forward for us. It represents the first time we have part of our application out in the wild and getting user feedback.
Make no mistakes, we expect Mobile Testnet to have some hiccups. As Reid Hoffman said, “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” While we're incredibly proud of what we've accomplished to date, we expect issues and lots of feedback.
Without brutally honest feedback from you, we will fail. If you have any thoughts at all, submit them through the app, DM me on Telegram, or reach out on Twitter.
If you encounter bugs, we'd prefer you report them through the app, as this makes them easier to reproduce.
What We've Been Up To
We announced Mobile Testnet would be going live soon, nearly a month ago, and we missed our target. Internally, we try to follow the Elon rule on timelines, and we definitely missed the mark this time:
This time was not wasted.
Thanks to the feedback from our UX interviews, we streamlined the user experience. Most importantly, latency across our app and backend is now competitive with the likes of Deribit.
We also had many opportunities to deepen our relationships with Liquidity Providers, refine our Volatility Surface Oracles and have been in the process of retooling our Scenario Grid.
What to Expect Going Forward
Trading Competition
Later this week, we'll be announcing a trading competition. The competition will be incentivized and aimed at gathering insights from market makers and users on what works and what doesn't. Trading with paper money is fun, but without a goal, it can quickly start to feel frivolous. We believe having something on the line will help accelerate our feedback loops and lead to a better product overall.
We'll also be announcing an agent trading competition with the release of our Pro Testnet. This is not our first foray into agentic DeFi. Last year, we built Cortex, the first on-chain agent, but we were definitely too early.
That's no longer the case: today, the top-20 Polymarket Crypto Traders are all bots. Options liquidity has historically been a hard problem, but the AI renaissance will solve it by allowing anyone to market-make on Hypercall.
Better Comms
We're now publishing Hypercall changelogs that highlight new features and what we’re exploring internally. We’re excited to share them with everyone.
Governance Updates
We'll be putting out several governance proposals to Synapse holders as part of our migration from Hypercall, including turning off liquidity incentives on Synapse Pools and other governance cleanup measures.
We'll also be rebranding Twitter and Discord to reflect the Synapse Ecosystem's focus on Hypercall. We believe Hypercall represents one of the biggest opportunities in crypto today, and we want our brand identity to reflect that.
The Opportunity
While I recommend you reread our announcement post here, I want to give everyone a quick reminder of just how big the opportunity is here.
Deribit has over $40 billion of open interest at this very moment. IBIT has another $30 billion in open interest. That's just crypto: total notional options open interest is in the trillions.
Furthermore, by building on Hyperliquid, we gain access to structurally deeper liquidity across more assets than any other venue in crypto today. Any options exchange that doesn't do this is fundamentally competitive with Hyperliquid by virtue of having its own perp product. For us, it's not possible to conceive of these other products ever coming close to Hyperliquid in terms of liquidity depth, and for that reason, Hyperliquid (and, specifically, CoreWriter) represents, for us, the biggest innovation in liquidity since the invention of the Perpetual Swap.
We're proud to be part of the Hyperliquid ecosystem and excited to build the future with all the other great teams building on Hyperliquid.