Introduction
What is Backtrade?
Backtrade is a perpetuals exchange that runs entirely in smart contracts on Hyperliquid's HyperEVM. In short:
- up to 1000× leverage on BTC and ETH
- one click to open or close, no order book to work
- every fill at the Hyperliquid mid: no slippage and no spread
- no funding payments, however long you hold
- an LP that starts empty and is filled by traders’ losses
- no wallet popup for each trade
How it runs
The Exchange contract on HyperEVM reads Hyperliquid’s best bid and best offer through a read precompile and uses their midpoint as the price of a synthetic position between you and the LP. Nothing is bought or sold on Hyperliquid’s own book. The USDC sits in the Exchange’s account on HyperCore, and every balance, position and claim is a ledger entry in the contract.
The app is the first frontend for these contracts. Orders reach them through our relayer, which submits the orders you sign in batches and pays the gas.
How trades work
Every trade is a swap between you and the LP: there is no matching engine and no other trader on the other side. When your order executes, the Exchange reads the mid for that block, opens the position at that price and stores its bust price. When you close, it reads the mid again and settles the result against the LP.
Because nothing changes hands on Hyperliquid, there is nothing to fund and nothing to slip: the fill is the mid whatever the size, within the per-market open-interest caps and the maximum position of $10,000,000.
The LP and TOKEN
The LP started at $0. Nobody seeded it: it grows from what losing traders pay in and shrinks by what winners are paid. When it cannot pay a win in full, the unpaid part becomes a claim in a first-in, first-out payout queue, and later losses pay the queue in order.
TOKEN is minted to traders who lose, for the part of the loss the LP keeps; nobody receives it any other way, and nobody can deposit into the LP. At launch it cannot be transferred between wallets, only staked and unstaked. The mint rate starts at a flat 100 TOKEN per dollar while the tracked LP is below $2,000,000 (including when it is negative) and falls smoothly after that; the owner can later switch it, once, to a fixed share of the supply per dollar, which pays up to 5× more for refilling an LP below zero.
Staked TOKEN earns USDC from two sources: 50% of every trading fee, and the LP’s value above $10,000,000.
No conventional trading fee
Opening is free, and there is no spread, no funding and no gas to pay. The cost of trading sits on the winning side: a win is measured beyond a tiny deadband, held back slightly on small moves, scaled by the asymmetric impact curve, and charged a fee of 2%. A loss costs exactly the loss; the loss fee of 2% is carved out of what the LP receives, not added on top.