Who is responsible for what
The scheme is divided into three parts. Each participant covers its own part of the transaction.
- Bitnomial. Creates and administers the markets. It is a CFTC-supervised venue with its own clearing, that is, the right to settle trades.
- NinjaTrader Clearing. A registered futures broker. It maintains client accounts and performs their verification.
- Hyperliquid. Provides the infrastructure: an order book directly on the blockchain and trade execution.
Why access will be closed
Not everyone will be let in. The HIP-3* add-on adds an optional admission mechanism to the regular HIP-3.
- Whitelist - the market operator admits only addresses it has approved to trading.
- 500,000 HYPE tokens - the minimum that must be locked to deploy a market on HIP-3.
- October 2025 - from this time, HIP-3 itself runs on the Hyperliquid mainnet.
What this means for the trader
This is about perpetual futures. These are leveraged contracts with no expiration date. Outside the US, this is the main instrument of the crypto market, while inside the country it was subject to strict restrictions for years.
- 190 countries - in more than these, Payward served clients as of June 30, 2026.
- 6.6 million - funded accounts on the same date.
- May 2026 - that is when Payward bought Bitnomial, and on September 16 it submitted the first proposal for regulated perpetual futures.
- 98% of open interest - that is how much falls to a single operator in the existing markets deployed by third-party developers on Hyperliquid. Payward pointed to this concentration separately.
Open interest is the sum of all open positions. How the challenge and payouts work is covered in the academy.
Key point: the first CFTC-supervised perpetual futures market on Hyperliquid will be closed - trading only for whitelisted addresses.
What's next
- CFTC approval. Registration of the venue does not mean automatic admission of every contract.
- Network update. Currently the admission mechanism exists only in the test version.
- Disclosure of the contract list. What exactly will go to trading has not yet been announced.
- Leverage limits. They have not been announced either, so you can pick a challenge to suit your style in advance.
The infrastructure is new, but the deposit is old
You have probably been trading perpetual futures for a long time - just on an offshore exchange and with a volume that decides nothing. The market around you matures every month: clearing, licenses, whitelists. And your trading size has not changed in that time. Prop trading closes exactly this gap: you pass a challenge, take the company's account to work with and share the earnings with it. The mechanics are better understood in advance, not on launch day.