# Building on Hyperliquid | Toast Hypurr - Hyperliquid

- Channel: [Ethereum Denver](https://streameth.org/ethereum-denver)
- Date: 2026-03-09
- Duration: 18:32
- Topics: ETHDenver, Crypto, Web3, Blockchain, Event, Conference, ETHDenver 2025, ETHDenver 2024, Bitcoin, Ethereum
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-X_XMF7oOTBw
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_XMF7oOTBw

## Description

"toast" is a long-time Ethereum NFT enthusiast who was early to Hyperliquid. He recieved a generous airdrop which allowed him leave the fiat mines and transition full-time into web3 in 2025. He organized the $250,000 Hyperliquid Community Hackathon, and runs a show called DeFi for Dummies.

## Transcript

All right, after that amazing session, now we've got Toast from the Hyperlquid global community who'll be talking more about how you can build apps on Hyperl, how you can build on the Hyper EVM, and a lot lot more cool instructions right there. So, if you've ever done per trading, you've ever heard of this amazing thing called Hyperlquid, today's your day to learn how you can build on it as a developer and go where users and liquidity both live together. Toast, are you ready? Over to you. Thank you, man. All right. Well, thanks for coming to my thing. Um, just like with the introduction, I'm just a member of the community. I'm a builder on Hyperlquid and um you know building on Hyperlid is a little tricky. There are some gaps in the tooling and and that sort of thing. And so I wanted to put this talk together specifically geared towards uh EVM builders because Hyperlid runs an EVM chain and uh on the surface it looks like it would be very easy uh to just use. Um, in my time, you know, working in the Hyperlquid community, I've worked with the, uh, Hyperlquid community hackathon and, uh, that was a very successful effort. We raised, uh, quarter million dollars and just from the community and and our corporate sponsors and, uh, we actually got some really good tooling, uh, built out of that hackathon effort. Um, I also help out with HL Global and, um, I do some, uh, some other apps and stuff like that. So, uh, one thing to understand about Hyperlid is that it's not really a, um, single chain. It's sort of got two chains running, um, in parallel. So, there's sort of two different state machines running. And what you see in this diagram here is um on the left hand side is you've got the hyper core which is the pers and uh spot markets the order books um that are sort of the uh core product of hyperlquid and then on the right hand side of that diagram you have the the hypervm and uh they they share a unified consensus that is called hyperbft and that's where the states of both state machines um are validated and sort of rolled up. I'm not an expert on um cryptography and that sort of thing. Uh so I couldn't tell you in details about uh about how that works. But this is a good mental model of understanding how to build especially if you want to interact uh with hyper core. So you can deploy solidity smart contracts on hypervm uh just like another EVM chain. But there are a lot of quirks um and in particular the consensus is different. So there's some things that don't work but uh for most purposes it works pretty well out of the box. Um recently I uh finally succeeded in standing up a ref node on um the hypervm test net and um I actually wrote a guide with all my learnings and experiences. That guide is right here in this QR code if anyone wants to take a look at it. Um nanorath is a fork of uh ref that is built for hyperlquid. It's uh has a lot of changes to make it kind of work but we got it working. So, so that's great. Give you a second to scan if you want to see it. Uh, my background, I'm sort of a quant data scientist, machine learning engineer. And so, um, what I like to do is to index blockchain data. So, uh, if you like data like I do, um, you might want to run, you know, a non-validator node, uh, this this guide here is a is a good place to start. So, I think the most important thing to understand about the Hyper EVM for EVM builders is the uh quote unquote dual block architecture. Um, this diagram here is I've seen it a lot on the internet. It's actually a little bit misleading in terms of how it works. Um, because it kind of makes it look like the blocks are running in parallel and that's not really the way that it works. But the basic idea is that there are two types of blocks on the HyperVM. uh there's small blocks which are fast and they've got a small uh maximum gas I think it's 3 million and then there's big blocks with 30 million and those execute uh less frequently. So essentially what happens is you just have a sequential EVM uh block execution and every second a small block is executed and um every 60th block is a big block. So you've got two mem pools and um depending on the way that your user wallet is set, you'll be either sending your transaction to one mem pool or the other. So essentially for most everyday transactions, if you're interacting with a smart contract, you'll probably want to use small blocks because you'll get faster execution. But if you're deploying a smart contract, uh you want to use a big block, which will be a little slower, but you should have enough gas um to to cover your smart contract execution. And so there's another tricky point about this is that the uh block size and the memp pool that you submit to is not set um on the transaction request. It's actually set um via hyper core. So you actually need to initialize your hyper core account um and then set your user your EVM user type to big block or small block. And I have a just a Python uh script here if you want to see, you know, how you can do that uh for your user. But one gotcha is that you need to actually uh fund your hypercore account uh to activate it before you can do this. Otherwise, you're stuck just with the default uh small blocks, which is just fine. But it's a it's a tricky part that you need to um yeah, you need to be aware of when you're building here. So, um, I'm going to talk about a lot of the new features that Hyperlid sort of brings to the EVM. I sort of see Hyperlid as like a, uh, applied EVM chain. So, you have all these cool features on Hyper Core and you can interact uh, with the Hyper Core in your Solidity smart contracts. So I think one of the clearest and most straightforward um tools is to actually just read the state of uh Hyper Core into your smart contract. And for you know a DeFi chain like Hyperlid um very often you want to look at things like uh asset prices, maybe you want to look at uh balances, something like that um on the order book side of the exchange. And that's where uh read pre-ompiles come in. um you get the state from the um the start the time of the start of the block. Whatever the state of the hyper core is um that's the data that you're going to have in these read pre-ompiles that you can read into your uh to your smart contract. There is a very helpful uh demo smart contract that is actually using one of our um hackathon projects libraries. This is a very very cool library. It's called hyper minus EVM minus lib. It's uh very useful and it really filled a lot of gaps um in tooling for hypervm. And so this smart contract will show you how to just read into your um into your smart contract uh things like spot positions uh spot prices etc from from the order book. Um there's also a lot of uh extra tools around reading the state of per markets um as well as other information that you might want to get uh from hyper core and uh yeah read pre-ompiles are very useful. Um, another really cool feature of Hyperlquid that unlocks a lot of different interesting products and uh, permissionless capabilities is um, is coin or coin or token linking between the hyper core and hypervm. So um, what this looks like is you know whatever your same private key is for your EVM account you can use um, for hyper core. So you have one unified account across both state machines and you effectively are able to bridge quote unquote between uh between the two um state machines. So you've got essentially two balances. You've got a balance on your ERC20 contract on the EVM side and you've got a balance on uh Hyper Core. Um when you link the account uh you link a ERC20 contract that you've deployed uh to Hyper Core there's a system address on the EVM um that you simply send your funds to and those funds will uh will appear in Hyper Core and then bridging back is similar. Um so as an example of the kind of thing that you can build let's see if I can get this uh might actually show you I don't know is anyone here familiar with the um NFT fungeability protocol called NFTx? Yeah. So this is essentially just a vault. You can put your NFT into it in exchange for one ERC20 uh token. So what I did on the test net EVM is I deployed a fork of the NFTxv2 contract and uh then I was able to deploy vaults and link the ERC20s to to hyper core. So it's risky. I don't know if I want to risk showing you this with our technical things. Okay. Yeah. Uhhuh. Um, so basically, yeah, just like with NFTX, you can vault your NFT. So, I'm going to do that. It's really risky. I don't know if you classic. Take a moment to ponder the hyperbm. Uh so I've deployed a test net NFT contract for the hyper NFTs. If anyone's familiar with hyper NFTs uh they're very awesome. So, this will fund me with one ERC20 token. And then I'm able to bridge right to Hyper Core just by sending to the system address that was generated when I link this to the Hyper Core ticker. Keep in mind that Hyperlid test net is uh perfectly fine. It's not geoblocked in the United States. So once you're on this side, you're in the spot order book of Hyperlid and you can go ahead and dump your NFT uh in USDC. So, I was able to just sell $100 worth of my fractionalized NFT there and then you can do whatever else you want. You can bridge it back. Um, but this is just a simple demonstration of how you can take protocols that were developed on the Ethereum mainet um and sort of leverage some of the features um on Hyperlid to do things like list your own coin on an exchange. Um, now if we look at this, this is just a demo front end for that um, read pre-ompile smart contract that I showed you guys. Um, you can just call the EVM RPC and uh, and pull this balance out. I mean, this is trivial, but you can also get this balance um, into your smart contract for whatever uh, logic you want to implement. So in this case the token that I deployed on testn net hyper core is um token 1460 and then you're able to query the EVM RPC to call that function. >> This is what that looks like. So this pre-ompile lib here again is a awesome hackathon project um that won uh some of our our prize money for our hackathon and abstracted this um to make it very simple. It was a big pain to actually get this but definitely want to use this tool. Um, so this is what that looks like. And if you're curious about their implementation, it's um it's all open source. Does anybody um have any questions about any of this? I have a lot of content that I really can't get to in my time. Um, I also just wanted to point out that we have some cool merch from HL Global. So, if anybody wants a duffel bag, uh, my friends over there have some um for you that were left over uh from our Hyperlid event. All right, I'm just going to um talk briefly about our next item until uh we're out of time, but I do hope that you guys are getting an understanding of the way that Hyperlid has uh leveraged the Ethereum world computer as a part of its stack. So core writer is uh this is getting into the more advanced features and corore writer is a really tricky thing to do. So, um, there's some pretty visible posts on Twitter about, uh, some of the difficulties of working with Corriter, but this is an effectively a way for you to fire, um, any sort of execution over to the Hyper Core side of Hyperlid from your smart contract. Um the thing is that it's not a synchronous execution and if something goes wrong on the order book side on the per side or whatever your smart contract is doing uh your smart contract won't revert. So for a solidity developer um this is kind of a shift in the way that you need to think about your app design and um the you know the order will send over to hyper core and um you know it won't execute immediately. So you need to be careful about how you design your apps and your smart contracts to use uh core writer. Uh but it is a way to actually um to write and modify the state of hyper core from your smart contract. On the EVM side of the chain um all the fees priority and base fee are all burned. It's just a a detail for for ETH nerds. Um, it's Cancun, no blobs. And so, again, getting back to tooling, um, we were we're given this chain that we love, um, with the tooling not quite working and, um, we the community are kind of trying to, uh, put it together, make it work a lot better. So, HyperVm Lib had a lot to do with making, um, Foundry work in particular. Um there's hypervm lib on the on the third bullet. Um this can help you mock up the pre-ompiles and um and other hyperlquid features uh for your testing. Also keep in mind that hypervm is still in the alpha stage. So it is a rough developer experience. In particular the test net is very difficult to work with. Um I personally am trying to work to um to improve it but you know we don't have a a block scanner. Um so it's it's really pretty tricky to work with. Um mainet EVM is um is in better shape. There's uh you know Etherscan runs a block uh scanner. The the team supports it a lot more. But I've made it my personal mission to make the developer experience better on testn net. And um this is just another point for designing your app. Just think about the processing order of blocks. And that's it. Thank you very much. This is a link to my Twitter account. I uh really appreciate you all coming. Hyperlid.