The Interview: @hyperddot Ddot is a Mercantile exchange building on Hyperliquid and today we get to hear from the Founder on topics ranging across the meaning of Mercantile Exchanges and the ecosystem they’re looking to cultivate so keep reading to find out more! What prompted the idea of Ddot? Ddot was born from two core assumptions. First, perpetuals are one of the most important recent financial innovations — simple, leveraged instruments that remove the complexity of futures expiries while offering the appeal of options without exposure to Vega. Second, we know that traditional finance is moving towards 24/7 markets, and that this will become the global norm. We want to combine these to be the leading solution for the trading of RWAs. What was the main attraction to building on Hyperliquid? The best markets in the long run are the fairest and tightest. On-chain trading is uniquely suited to 24/7 markets thanks to instant settlement, reliability, and order book-based systems provide unmatched transparency. We’ve been following Hyperliquid since Jeff’s 2023 @choffstein Flirting with Models episode, and with the rapid growth of their exchange, it felt like the perfect place to build. The announcement of HIP-3, enabling permission-less perp deployment, decided the future for ddot. For people that don’t understand Mercantile Exchanges, can you give an overview and how it relates with Ddot? A mercantile exchange is a marketplace for buyers and sellers to trade commodities and financial derivatives. We’re aiming to move market share from off-chain (e.g. the Chicago Mercantile Exchange - CME) to on-chain. Who would you describe as your ideal user? Our early adopters are traders who want access to high-performance, transparent derivatives 24/7 — e.g., someone looking to trade U.S. equities on the weekend with up to 50x leverage. Longer term, our vision is for institutional investors, such as pension funds, to use ddot for their broad index exposure, which would signal that we have achieved important regulatory breakthroughs. Do you expect more competition in this specific niche or do you believe you have a free go at it in the long run? We expect multiple deployers of HIP-3 markets to tackle these problems, however there are a lot of TradFi markets that should be moved on-chain, so the space is quite broad. One problem deployers will face is initial liquidity provision, which we can provide in-house via our own market making systems. What is key for these markets is the integration with front ends such as @phantom and @Rabby_io to drive volume, which is one of our focuses. How many team members do you currently have and is there any plans or talks around funding rounds? We are currently 3 but are looking to expand asap. At the moment we are bootstrapped, with income from our current multi exchange crypto market making operation. What do you think of Digital Asset Treasuries based on $HYPE? MSTR has made this trendy, honestly view it as abit of a fad but does solve accessibility issues for certain individuals. Do you think Hype becomes the focal point token for tradfi, superseding btc considering Hype is based on a running business? Really BTC is viewed alike an index for crypto by the average earth enjoyer, and thus it’s not really something HYPE will replace. However, I think there is massive upside in $HYPE and thus I am extremely long. What other niches do you think are under-explored within the HL ecosystem? Hyperliquid is becoming the leading trading venue, I’d like to see more development in RFQ solutions for the seamless execution of large trades via HyperCore. Any final words you’d like to give us? If you cannot simply explain your edge, then you are just gambling.

As TradFi gets more integrated with Crypto, a term I believe we’d start to see more often is CME. CME is short for Chicago Mercentile Exchange and it was formed by the merger of the CME and the Chicago Board of Trade that led to the creation of one of the largest financial exchanges in the world. What is the purpose of CME? Well, companies and traders use CME contracts to hedge against potential price fluctuations. CME contracts are futures and options based contracts that lets you trade a wide array of products such as commodities, interest rates, currencies, energy, metals + more. How do they use it tho? Using a real life example ⇨ Suppose an Airline Company intends to purchase 23k barrels of jet fuel in December but worry that oil prices would have increased by then from $70/ barrel in August to $90 in December. They can hedge against that price increase by using a CME West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil futures. Each CME WTI futures contract covers 1,000 barrels of oil and considering they need 23k barrels, the airline calculates it needs about 23 WTI contracts. The airline then buys 23 of these contracts which helps lock in August prices. For clarification, these contracts are not crude oil directly but are assets pegged directly to the price of crude oil just like stable coins pegged to USD. If by December, the price of each barrel of Oil really jumps to $90/ barrel, the airline will be buying the jet fuel at a more expensive price but because they held their CME WTI contracts from $70 to $90 as well, they can sell these contracts and the profit will cover for the higher expenses of the “physical” fuel they had to buy. Suppose the price/barrel goes from $70 to $50 by December, i.e a price fall, this means the company will be selling their WTI contracts for a loss but now they’d be able to buy the physical oil for cheaper, which would offset the losses for the contract sale. Btw, if you’re wondering what the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) means in this context, it is a key benchmark for crude oil pricing in the United States and globally due to Texas being a high oil-producing state. Hence why it is a liquid asset for hedging fuel costs on the CME. How does this niche integrate with Crypto? We’re already starting to see Mercantile exchanges build up within different ecosystems such as Hyperliquid and an example is @hyperddot with their HML exchange which stands for Hyper Mercantile Link, similar to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. These are the types of products that would help onboard tradfi because it’s similar to what they already used to and with tradfi comes retail. Thank you if you made it this far 🤍