Hyperliquid's resting liquidity matched the median of Binance, Bybit and OKX on four of five crypto assets in a live order book study by Castle Labs, and the decentralized perpetuals venue undercut the three centralized exchanges on trading costs across the same sample.

The study pulled live order book data rather than relying on self-reported volume figures, a methodological choice that targets the most contested variable in the onchain-versus-CEX comparison.

Researchers compared depth at the inside spread and at successive price levels against the cross-venue median, a yardstick that penalizes one-sided books and rewards venues with consistent two-way quoting.

Resting liquidity — the quantity of unfilled limit orders a venue can absorb without moving price — is the variable that drives market impact. On the four matched assets, Hyperliquid cleared the bar.

What the numbers say

The fifth asset showed a narrower gap. Castle Labs framed the remaining delta as a matter of depth at deeper price levels rather than missing top-of-book liquidity, a distinction that matters for takers who care about executable size near the mid.

The report did not name the five assets, a limitation that constrains independent verification by market participants and likely will draw follow-up scrutiny from data vendors.

The cost comparison produced a cleaner result. Slippage and fee-adjusted execution on Hyperliquid came in below the three centralized exchanges across all five assets, not just the four where resting depth was matched.

For basis traders, latency-sensitive market makers and any strategy that routes primarily on realized fill price, the onchain venue now functions as a neutral or positive leg in the venue mix.

Where the gap actually remains

The headline finding covers crypto-native pairs. Where onchain perps still trail centralized rivals is in the pricing of non-crypto underlyings, specifically equity and commodity perpetuals that require a reference price during the hours when the underlying cash market is closed.

That distinction matters because stock and commodity perps depend on an index or synthetic reference to compute funding. The quality of that reference drives funding-rate stability, basis behavior and, ultimately, the willingness of professional market makers to commit capital.

Centralized exchanges typically inherit the cash-session close and reopen. Onchain venues must either source an off-hours oracle, route through a prediction market or accept wider spreads until the next session prints.

Castle Labs framed that mechanism as the principal open problem for decentralized perps aspiring to operate as full-spectrum derivatives venues.

What changes for market structure

For crypto-only takers, the study pushes execution venue choice toward treating Hyperliquid and the three largest centralized competitors as roughly fungible, with the cost side tilting toward the onchain venue.

The competitive read-through for Binance, Bybit and OKX is that their professional order flow now faces a venue that can match CEX depth at lower cost, which compresses the moat that the incumbents historically drew from preferred routing arrangements and tiered fee schedules.

For the equity and commodity perps business, the report points to investment in off-hours pricing infrastructure as the binding constraint, rather than additional liquidity provisioning.

Until the reference-price problem is solved, onchain venues will continue to cede that product category to platforms that can either maintain extended-hours cash linkages or warehouse the basis risk themselves. That is the market-structure question that will shape which venues capture the next expansion of decentralized perps.