The Hyperliquid yield map: who actually does what
A quick disclosure first, because it matters: I run Altcopy. One of my products, the Index, allocates to native Hyperliquid vaults. So when I tell you native vaults are still worth your attention, you should know I have a position. That's exactly why this map includes the parts that don't flatter me — the dead vaults, the fee traps, the cases where you're better off elsewhere. An honest guide names its own conflicts.
If you've spent ten minutes looking at "earning yield on Hyperliquid," you've probably felt what I felt: there's a lot. Hyperbeat, Veda, Upshift, Felix, HyperLend, Liminal, Mizu, native vaults, HLP… and almost no one explains how they differ. They get lumped together as "vaults" and they are not the same thing. So before any of them earns a dollar of your capital, here's the map. Four families.
1. Operators — "we run the money."
These pick a strategy and trade it for you. Liminal tokenizes delta-neutral funding trades; Hyperbeat is a "super app" bundling yield, staking and lending; Mizu auto-farms across protocols. Think of an operator as a bus with a driver: you get on, you don't touch the wheel, you trust the route.
2. Lending markets — "we're the rails."
Felix lets you mint a stablecoin against collateral; HyperLend is the big Aave-style money market. No manager — you supply to a pool and earn the interest borrowers pay. The risk isn't bad trades; it's smart-contract risk and bad debt.
3. Curator platforms — "we're the vault factory."
Veda is the infrastructure behind Kraken's and Lido's vaults — the engine under someone else's brand. Upshift lets vetted institutional managers run vaults on its rails. These are the machinery destinations are built on, more than destinations themselves.
4. Native vaults — "watch everything, trust the chain."
The original Hyperliquid vaults, right inside the app at app.hyperliquid.xyz/vaults. A leader trades; you copy by depositing. Two things make them unusual: every position is visible on-chain, and the leader is forced to keep 5% of their own money in the vault.
The distinction that trips everyone up. Native vaults live on HyperCore (the exchange). The newer wave — Veda, Upshift, anything called a "HyperEVM vault" — lives on HyperEVM (the smart-contract layer next door). Same chain, two different rooms. Don't assume a slick HyperEVM frontend and a native vault are the same product.
So which is for you? Wrong question this early. The right one is: what am I actually trusting? With an operator or native vault, a person's judgment. With a lending market, the code and the collateral. With a curator platform, whoever they let onto the roster. None removes the need to look under the hood — at custody, fees, and whether the manager eats their own cooking. Those are the next posts:
- Can a vault actually steal your money?
- The fees nobody explains.
- Why native vaults are still a good bet.
- How to actually pick one.
If you only remember one thing: the jungle is the point. The more crowded this gets, the more it pays to know which family you're standing in before you deposit.
Not financial advice. I run vaults; assume I'm biased and check everything yourself — which is the whole spirit of these posts.