Hyperliquid has grown into one of the largest places to trade perpetual futures anywhere, centralised exchanges included. But Hyperliquid itself is the venue, the order book and the chain underneath. You never touch it directly. You trade through a wallet, and which wallet you pick decides what the whole experience feels like.
So what makes one wallet better than another for Hyperliquid? Four things, and each is checkable rather than a matter of taste: custody, market coverage, how the app feels to use, and fees. Here is each one, and where Based lands on it.
Custody: who holds your money
This is the axis that matters most, because it decides what can go wrong while you sleep. On a centralised exchange the exchange holds your balance, and history shows how that can end. A proper Hyperliquid wallet is self-custodial: your USDC sits under keys only you control, and trades execute against the order book without any company taking possession of your funds in between.
Based is a self-custody wallet, full stop. It is not a broker and not an exchange. Your margin stays in your wallet until a trade executes, and profits land back under your keys. The trade-off, stated honestly, is that nobody can reset your password. Write down the recovery phrase. What self-custody means covers this in plain terms.
Coverage: everything on Hyperliquid, in one place
Hyperliquid is no longer just a crypto venue. Builders deploy their own markets on the same engine, which is where stock perps come from. The full span now runs from BTC, ETH, SOL, DOGE, ENA, XPL and CASHCAT perps to stock markets on Micron, SK Hynix, Samsung, Intel, Nebius and Cerebras, plus names the public markets barely reach, like SpaceX, ChangXin Memory and Unitree.
Based puts all of it in one wallet, quoted in USD, open 24/7 including weekends. The same wallet that trades HYPE at noon can trade SanDisk earnings at 6pm and Korean memory news at 3am. Add prediction markets and the picture is simple: one wallet for the whole platform rather than an account per asset class.
Feel: built for humans, not protocol engineers
Raw protocol interfaces work, but they were built by and for people who enjoy that sort of thing. Most people want a trading app: clear prices, a position screen that shows your liquidation level before you need it, and buttons that do what they say.
That is the design brief for Based. It runs on iOS, Android and the web, it onboards like a normal finance app, and the markets read like a normal watchlist. Underneath it is all Hyperliquid; on the surface it is just easy. The strongest evidence is that more than 100,000 users have pushed over $44 billion in lifetime volume through it.
Fees: flat, public and discountable
Fees on Based are a flat schedule published on the fees page, not a tiered maze. Staking HYPE discounts the Hyperliquid side of the fee, and staking BASED discounts the Based side. You can verify every number before you trade, which is more than most venues offer.
The honest summary
If you want the most direct route onto Hyperliquid, a self-custodial wallet with the platform's full market span, a normal app experience and a public fee schedule, Based is built to be exactly that, and we think it is the best wallet for the job. If you want to judge for yourself, the Hyperliquid guide explains the venue and the getting started guide walks through your first trade step by step.