Entered, but not completely in.

Written by: Azuma (@azuma_eth), Planet Daily

On the evening of September 16, Beijing time, Kraken's parent company Payward officially announced its cooperation with Hyperliquid and outlined the details of bringing the latter's product services into the U.S. market.

According to the announcement, Payward plans to build a customized perpetual contract trading market based on HIP-3 on the Hyperliquid mainnet through its trading and clearing institution Bitnomial and futures broker NinjaTrader Clearing, and open trading services for qualified U.S. users.

Trump's prediction is finally coming to fruition

Regarding Hyperliquid's entry into the U.S., the earliest clues trace back to Trump's speech at the White House last month (see "What Did Trump Say on the Night of Cryptocurrency Surge?").

Before this, Hyperliquid's offshore attributes had always been viewed as its regulatory weak link, but when Trump himself stated that "Michael (CFTC Chairman Michael Selig) is also working hard to promote Hyperliquid to enter the U.S. in a fully compliant and legal manner," the market began to speculate about how Hyperliquid would specifically enter the world's largest financial market.

The day after Trump's speech, Blockworks analyst Shaunda Devens discovered that a deployer called "Kraken HIP-3 test DEX" had enabled permission management features (Star gating) on the Hyperliquid testnet, and had gone live for testing on August 19. Devens speculated that Kraken might be one of the first U.S. centralized exchanges to collaborate with Hyperliquid.

Subsequently, on September 1, Bloomberg confirmed the above speculation - Hyperliquid was in deep negotiations with Kraken's parent company Payward, and if the relevant cooperation received regulatory approval, U.S. users would be able to trade perpetual contracts linked to token prices on the Hyperliquid blockchain through Bitnomial.

Until yesterday, Payward officially confirmed the details of its cooperation with Hyperliquid. According to the announcement, Payward is not directly bringing Hyperliquid as a whole into the U.S. but is choosing to start with HIP-3, deploying a permissioned perpetual contract market for U.S. users on the Hyperliquid public chain.

Specifically, Payward's Bitnomial, which is regulated by the CFTC, will be responsible for deploying the HIP-3 market on Hyperliquid and managing the creation, ownership, management, and clearing and settlement of contracts; NinjaTrader Clearing, a futures broker also under Payward and registered with the CFTC, will manage U.S. customer accounts. The relevant entities will also assume corresponding regulatory and compliance obligations.

This means that trading itself will still occur on Hyperliquid's public chain, with orders continuing to be matched and recorded by Hyperliquid's on-chain order book, but the accounts, clearing, and compliance systems for U.S. users accessing this market will be managed by Payward's regulated entities. According to Payward, U.S. customers can open futures accounts through their registered brokers and then trade these new perpetual futures contracts on Hyperliquid; the related products will be launched based on Bitnomial's rules once they receive regulatory approval.

From this perspective, Hyperliquid's entry into the U.S. has actually found a path to integrate its on-chain infrastructure into the U.S. compliance derivatives framework - Hyperliquid provides the underlying public chain, order book, and trading infrastructure, while U.S. compliant entities like Payward are responsible for bringing in U.S. users, brokers, clearing, and regulatory requirements.

Restrictions still exist

Another detail not to be overlooked in the announcement is that Hyperliquid's entry into the U.S. still has obvious limitations regarding the product services that can be offered.

First, the originally open trading experience of Hyperliquid will still need to be wrapped in a stringent access mechanism in the U.S. market. Payward explicitly states in the announcement that only accounts that have passed NinjaTrader's review and are on both NinjaTrader's and Bitnomial's whitelist can participate in trading in these markets. In other words, U.S. users cannot directly enter Hyperliquid and trade freely as users in other regions do; they must first go through a regulated account system.

Second, the currently disclosed scope is only the HIP-3 market deployed by Bitnomial and does not include all existing perpetual contracts on the Hyperliquid mainnet. This means that even if the products are officially approved in the future, what assets U.S. users can trade, how much leverage they can use, and whether they can further access other markets on Hyperliquid will still depend on Payward, Bitnomial, and the U.S. regulatory framework, rather than being determined solely by the Hyperliquid protocol itself. Therefore, a more accurate description of this cooperation is that Payward has established a "compliance zone" for U.S. users on Hyperliquid.

Thus, what this cooperation truly opens up is a connection between the U.S. regulatory system and Hyperliquid's on-chain trading infrastructure, rather than a full opening of the U.S. market to Hyperliquid.

Legislative obstacles, regulatory first

Interestingly, on the same day Payward revealed the pathway for Hyperliquid's entry into the U.S., the U.S. crypto regulatory environment also received another piece of less optimistic news - on September 16 at dawn Beijing time, the U.S. Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act with a procedural vote result of 49 to 50. This bill originally attempted to clarify the regulatory boundaries of digital assets through congressional legislation and delineate the regulatory responsibilities of the SEC and CFTC in different digital asset markets.

However, if we shift our focus away from Congress, the actual advancement of U.S. crypto regulation has not completely stagnated. This year, the SEC and CFTC have continuously clarified the regulatory boundaries for some digital assets and derivatives through existing regulatory tools such as interpretations, guidance, and No-Action Letters.

Putting these two events together from yesterday neatly reveals the real state of current U.S. crypto regulation - while complete rules at the congressional level have not yet materialized, regulatory agencies have begun to use existing authority to gradually find executable compliance paths for on-chain trading, perpetual contracts, and other products.

For Hyperliquid, this cooperation with Payward might just be a reflection of this regulatory environment. It did not wait for a complete new law to open the U.S. market but instead took advantage of existing regulatory licenses and infrastructure like Bitnomial and NinjaTrader to fit on-chain trading into the framework that current rules can accommodate. Therefore, rather than saying that Hyperliquid has "entered the U.S.", it is more accurate to say that it has finally found a path to attempt to enter the U.S. How far this path can go still depends on regulatory approvals, the range of tradable assets, and what kind of crypto market structure will ultimately form in the U.S.