01
The trading view
A familiar three-pane layout: chart on the left, orderbook in the centre, order entry on the right. Top-bar carries the asset selector, leverage, and asset details at a glance — zero new muscle memory required.
kinetiq
Equilibre × Markets.xyz · Kinetiq · 2025
Designed in 2 weeks,
traded $3B in Q1.
(Case 01)Series B · web3 · 11 weeksscroll ↓
The brief
Design a brand-new perpetuals exchange from scratch, on a brand-new framework, with no precedent in the category — in two weeks. Then keep iterating as real volume started flowing through.
- Project
- Markets.xyz (by Kinetiq)
- Surface
- Web app · Trading platform
- Domain
- Perpetuals · Hyperliquid HIP-3 · RWA + crypto
- Type
- Zero-to-one
- Timeline
- 2 weeks to initial design
Outcome
$3+ billion tradedin the first three months.
Markets.xyz shipped on schedule from a two-week MVP research and design sprint, then kept compounding. It became one of the most active HIP-3 venues on Hyperliquid and a meaningful contributor to Kinetiq's protocol revenue — with a healthy split between perps and spot from launch onward.
$3B+
Notional traded
first 4 months
2 wks
MVP research & design
kickoff to ship
Top
HIP-3 venue
on Hyperliquid
Healthy
Perps + spot mix
from launch
01 · Context
A new venue on a brand-new framework.
Kinetiq was already the dominant liquid-staking protocol on Hyperliquid — 80%+ market share and over a billion in TVL. The next move was bigger: build the first major venue on Hyperliquid's brand-new HIP-3 framework, the builder-deployed perpetuals layer.
Markets.xyz had to be a fully on-chain, permissionless perpetuals exchange where any asset class could trade 24/7, from BTC to the S&P 500 to FX to single-name equities like BABA — on the same screen, without compromising any of them.
02 · The split audience
Two trader profiles.One screen.
No mode toggles. No two-app split. The same surface had to feel native to perp veterans and legible to traders meeting on-chain RWA perps for the first time.
Profile A
The crypto-native perp trader
Muscle memory from Hyperliquid, dYdX, Drift, Aevo. Cares about depth, latency, leverage UI, settlement clarity. Will judge in the first ten seconds based on whether it "feels right".
Profile B
The RWA-curious trader
Reference points are TradingView, Robinhood, IBKR. Wants to trade an S&P 500 perp at 3am Sunday but has no idea what kmHYPE means or why behaviour shifts when the underlying market is closed.
03 · Research
Convention as the floor.
Two weeks ruled out the usual research toolkit. Validation compressed into three parallel sources: a competitive teardown of Hyperliquid, Trade.xyz, and dYdX across a dozen surfaces; trading-platform benchmarks from Kraken Pro, Robinhood, Revolut Pro, Bitget; and direct conversations with active perp traders.
The finding mirrored what professional perp traders will tell you: those products share roughly 90% UI overlap because conventions converged years ago. Diverging from convention inside the trading flow itself would cost trust on day one — trust we hadn't earned because nobody had used the platform yet.
04 · Design priorities
Three surfaces, ordered by the volume each would carry.
02
The asset selector
The selective novelty. Two completely different asset categories without making either feel second-class: category tabs (market perps / crypto perps / spot), asset descriptions on hover, and per-column sort to discover anything.
03
The user's activity
A clear separation between trading assets and the user's activity overview — balances, positions, open orders, P&L, and trading history living in one section. Less mental overhead, fewer mis-clicks.
05 · Pacing
Must-have at launch. Nice-to-have, weekly.
Every screen got a "must-have" and a "nice-to-have" stack. Must-haves shipped at launch. Nice-to-haves rolled in over the following weeks: refinements to order entry, improved orderbook views, clearer TP/SL flows, sharper charts.
Work continues today on advanced order types, cross-margin tooling, mobile-first layouts, and deeper integration with the Kinetiq ecosystem.
The outcome
Traders didn't have to learn a new way to trade.They only had to learn what was newly tradeable.
What the volume number doesn't capture is the composition: a healthy split between perps and spot trading from launch onward, which suggests both sides of the intended audience showed up — and stayed.
That distinction was the design's biggest bet, and the volume profile suggests it landed — over $3B in notional in the first four months, one of the most active HIP-3 venues on Hyperliquid, and a meaningful contributor to Kinetiq's protocol revenue.
01 · Research & designDuration
2 weeks
From kickoff to design handoff to engineering we took two weeks, which included research, design, testing and handoff for the MVP.
02 · Notional tradedOutcome
$3B+
In the first four months over $3 billion was traded on the platform, making it one of the most active HIP-3 venues on Hyperliquid.
Now it's your turn
You came here with anactivation problem.Let's fix it.
Not in progress, not on the roadmap. Handled.