Hyperliquid vs Aster — the cheaper venue is the one that caps your profit
These two venues agree on the things most comparisons spend their word count on. Both are self-custody: you connect a wallet, nobody holds your coins, there is no identity check and no account anyone can freeze. Both run perpetual futures on their own Layer 1. From there they diverge, and not along the axis you would guess. Aster is cheaper on every fee row — genuinely, including a flat zero maker fee. It also publishes a rule that Hyperliquid has no equivalent of: above 500x, your profit stops growing.
Key takeaways
- Aster wins the fee row, and the fee row is worth $1.00. On a $10,000 market round trip it is $8.00 against $9.00. Switching that same trade from market to limit orders saves $3.00 on Hyperliquid alone — three times more than the venue choice.
- “Aster” is four products, and the famous numbers come from different ones. The 0% maker fee is Aster Pro. The 1001x is a separate product with its own fee schedule. No single Aster screen offers both.
- Above 500x, Aster caps your profit and Hyperliquid has no such rule. Roughly 300% net ROI at 1001x. Because its liquidation formula uses a 60% lost rate, the cap always sits 5× further from entry than the liquidation price — the same multiple at any leverage in that band.
- Hyperliquid publishes the numbers Aster describes in words. Maintenance-margin tiers per asset, a 4%-per-hour funding cap, an explicit “no clearance fee”. Aster states that it charges an Insurance Clearance Fee, that maintenance margin rises with position size, and that it may adjust the funding cap — without printing any of the three figures.
What is the difference between Hyperliquid and Aster?
Both are perpetual futures venues where you keep your own keys. That single shared property removes most of what our DEX versus CEX comparison spends its time on: there is no custody question here, no identity check on either side, and no company that can freeze either account. What is left is a comparison of two rulebooks.
The rows fall into three groups. Two are identical and they are the important ones — custody and KYC — because they mean neither venue is safer than the other in the way people usually mean. Four rows are fees and leverage, and Aster wins them. The remaining six are about what each venue tells you, and Hyperliquid wins those without much of a contest.
Which one is actually cheaper to trade?
Aster, on every published row, and by amounts that are smaller than the way they are usually advertised. Here is the site’s standard example — a $10,000 perpetual position opened and closed, at the entry tier with no volume history — with a major centralised venue included for scale.
| Round trip on $10,000 | Rate each way | Cost | Against the cheapest here |
|---|---|---|---|
| A major CEX, market orders (Binance, OKX, Bybit regular tier) | 0.0500% | $10.00 | +$2.40 |
| Hyperliquid, market orders, base tier | 0.045% | $9.00 | +$1.40 |
| Hyperliquid, market orders, staking 10 HYPE and using a referral code | 0.0411% | $8.21 | +$0.61 |
| Aster Pro, market orders, USDT perpetual | 0.04% | $8.00 | +$0.40 |
| Aster Pro, market orders, paying fees in $ASTER (−5%) | 0.038% | $7.60 | — |
| Hyperliquid, limit orders, base tier | 0.015% | $3.00 | −$4.60 |
| Aster Pro, limit orders, USDT perpetual | 0% | $0.00 | −$7.60 |
Three things in that chart are worth more than the ranking. First, the venue gap is $1.00 and the order-type gap is $3.00: on either venue, how you place the order is worth three times more than which venue you place it on — the same conclusion our Binance versus OKX page reached about three centralised venues, and a reason to read how order types actually work before optimising anything else.
Second, Aster’s zero maker fee is real and it is the strongest number on this page. A trader who works limit orders pays nothing to trade on Aster Pro and $3.00 per round trip on Hyperliquid. Over two hundred round trips a year that is $600 against nothing. If your strategy is genuinely maker-side, this row alone can decide the question.
Third, and less comfortable: Aster’s own two pages disagree about its taker fee. The dedicated fee page states 0% maker and 0.04% taker on USDT perpetuals. The Perpetuals overview page, under “Key Features”, states “Lower-than-CEX fees: 0.01% maker fee, 0.035% taker fee”. Both were read on the same morning. We use the fee page because it is the page whose job is fees, but a venue that cannot keep two of its own pages in agreement about its headline number is telling you something about how carefully the rest is maintained. Hyperliquid publishes one fee table with seven tiers, six staking discounts and a code sample for developers to reproduce the arithmetic.
Why does “Aster” mean four different things?
Because it is four products behind one name, and the numbers that circulate about Aster come from different ones. Its own overview says so plainly: “Aster offers four seamless trading types” — Perpetuals (the order-book venue, called Aster Pro), Shield Mode, 1001x, and spot.
This matters because the two figures every comparison quotes about Aster cannot both be true of the same screen. The 0% maker fee is Aster Pro. The 1001x is a different product with a different fee schedule. You cannot open a 1001x position at the Pro maker rate, because 1001x does not have a maker rate — it is a one-click market product on on-chain liquidity. Here is what each one actually offers:
| Which Aster are you using? | Max leverage | Trading fee | Profit capped? | Can you add margin? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aster Pro — order-book perpetuals, USDT-margined | per asset, not published | 0% maker / 0.04% taker | No | Yes |
| Aster Pro — USD1 general perpetuals | — | 0% maker / 0.005% taker | No | Yes |
| Aster Pro — RWA perpetuals | — | 0% maker / 0.009% taker | No | Yes |
| 1001x — BTC/USD below 500x | up to 499x | 0.08% to open and 0.08% to close | No | Yes |
| 1001x — BTC/USD, Degen Mode | 500x, 750x, 1001x | 0% to open, a dynamic PnL fee to close | Yes — ≈500% at 500x and 750x, ≈300% at 1001x | No |
| 1001x — ETH/USD | 250x | 0.08% each way | No | Yes |
| 1001x — other crypto | 75x | 0.08% each way | No | Yes |
| 1001x — forex perpetuals | 200x | 0.02% each way | No | Yes |
Hyperliquid has one product and one rulebook. Its maximum leverage runs from 3x to 40x depending on the asset, its margin-tier page lists the brackets by name — BTC 40x up to $150M of notional, ETH 25x up to $100M, and so on down — and the fee tier you are on applies across perpetuals, HIP-3 markets and spot at once. That is less product surface and considerably more published detail.
What does 1001x actually buy you?
A very short trade with a ceiling on it. This is the section most comparisons of these two venues never write, because it requires reading Aster’s leverage page past the headline.
Two sentences in that documentation do all the work. The first: for leverage of 500x and above, “Maximum net profit ROI is capped: Approximately 500% for 500× and 750× leverage, Approximately 300% for 1001× leverage”. The second, from the Degen Mode page, is the liquidation formula, which uses a liquidation lost rate with a default value of 60%. Put them together and something falls out that neither page states.
| Leverage on Aster’s 1001x product | Liquidated after a move of | Profit stops after a move of | Ratio | On $100 of margin, best case |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 500x | 0.1200% | +1.0000% | 8.33× | $500 |
| 750x | 0.0800% | +0.6667% | 8.33× | $500 |
| 1001x | 0.0599% | +0.2997% | 5.00× | $300 |
| Hyperliquid, 40x (its maximum on BTC) | 1.27% | no cap | — | whatever the move gives |
Read the ratio column. The distance to your profit ceiling is always the same multiple of the distance to your liquidation — 5 times at 1001x, 8.33 times at 500x and 750x — no matter which leverage you select inside the band. Turning the leverage up does not change the shape of the trade. It only makes both distances smaller, so the whole thing resolves faster.
And at 1001x, “smaller” means something specific. On $100 of margin against BTC at $100,000:
The liquidation sits $59.94 from entry. That is 0.060% of the price — inside the range a single large market order can produce, and well inside a normal minute. The profit ceiling sits $300 above entry. The entire life of the trade, in both directions, happens inside a $360 band. By comparison, Hyperliquid’s 40x maximum on the same $100 leaves $1,266 of room — about 21 times more — and puts no ceiling above it at all.
That is the honest framing of 1001x, and it is neither a scandal nor a bargain. It is a product for taking a very short-dated view with a defined maximum outcome on both ends, and Aster deserves credit for publishing the cap rather than burying it. What it is not is “more leverage, therefore more upside”. Above 500x, more leverage buys you a faster resolution, not a larger one. Our page on how leverage and margin actually work explains why that distinction is the whole game.
Two more rules from the same page belong here, because they change how a losing 1001x position behaves: above 500x you cannot add margin to an open position, so the only defences are your stop and closing the trade; and the venue charges a “dynamic PnL fee” on closing in Degen Mode whose formula is not published, in exchange for zero opening fees.
What happens when you actually get liquidated on each?
Different things, and only one venue tells you what they cost.
Hyperliquid. Its Liquidations page states that “Unlike CEXs there is no clearance fee on liquidations”. The ordinary route sends a market order for the full position to the order book; if enough fills for the margin requirement to be met again, “any remaining collateral remains with the trader”. The exception is the backstop: if equity falls below two thirds of the maintenance margin before the book absorbs the position, a liquidator vault takes it and the maintenance margin is not returned. On a cross-margin account the backstop takes every cross position and all cross margin, not only the losing one. Positions above 100,000 USDC are liquidated in 20% slices with a 30-second cooldown between them. Every one of those numbers is published.
Aster Pro. Its Liquidations page describes a sequence: all open orders are cancelled, “a single large Immediate-or-Cancel (IOC) order” is sent to reduce the position, and if that is not enough the remainder closes at the bankruptcy price and the position is handed to the insurance fund with the account marked bankrupt. A portion of the liquidation fee goes to that fund and appears in your history as an “Insurance Clearance Fee”. The rate is not on the page.
Aster does publish one thing Hyperliquid has no equivalent of, and it is genuinely in the trader’s favour: automatic settlement of a negative balance. If your USDT perpetuals account ends up below zero after a liquidation, the insurance fund covers it — provided all four of its conditions hold: the account has no open positions in either margin mode, the negative balance is no greater than 5,000 USDT, and no funds have been transferred in after the liquidation to offset the loss. That last condition is the one that catches people: depositing to “fix” a blown account disqualifies it from the clean-up it would otherwise have received.
Both venues also make the same observation about small positions — Aster writes that “smaller positions are generally more likely to be fully liquidated, as they have less margin buffer and may not qualify for partial liquidation”, which is the same effect we priced out in Hyperliquid versus Binance Futures. On a retail-sized position, liquidation usually means the whole of the margin on any venue, whatever the fee schedule says.
Does Aster’s privacy change your results?
It changes what other people can see. Whether that changes your results depends entirely on how large you trade.
Aster’s case for itself is specific and worth quoting, because it is a real criticism of the design Hyperliquid uses: “On fully transparent platforms, every order, position size, and liquidation level is visible to anyone watching the chain… Position hunting – where traders coordinate to push the market against a visible liquidation – has cost traders hundreds of millions of dollars.” A hidden order never appears in the public book, and the position it creates is excluded from public data feeds: size, direction and PnL all stay private.
Three limits, all from Aster’s own page. Hidden orders are always limit orders — there is no hidden market entry. The privacy is from other participants, not from the venue, which necessarily sees the position in order to margin it. And the sentence that matters most for anyone hoping this is a risk reduction: “Matching, margin, and liquidation operate on the full position size.” Your liquidation price is exactly where it would be without the feature. Nothing about being hidden moves it.
The cost of that privacy runs in the opposite direction and is rarely stated. Hyperliquid’s total transparency is what allows anyone — including you — to verify from the chain that the venue is doing what it claims: every order, cancel, fill and liquidation is on-chain with one-block finality. When positions are encrypted before they reach the chain, that verification is not available to you either. For a retail position that no one is hunting, the transparency you give up is worth more than the privacy you gain. For a position large enough that its liquidation level is a target, the trade reverses. Be honest with yourself about which one you are.
What about funding, and the costs neither fee page shows?
Three differences here, and the third is a cost that exists on one venue and not the other.
- Funding runs on different clocks and different prices. Hyperliquid charges every hour, at one eighth of the eight-hour rate, and its documentation states in italics that payment is computed on the oracle price, not the mark price. Aster defaults to eight hours, with some contracts at four or one, and computes on the mark price. The practical consequence is the same as with any stamped funding: on Aster a trader who is flat before the stamp pays nothing, and on Hyperliquid there is no stamp to dodge. Our page on funding and liquidation on Hyperliquid prices the hourly version in dollars.
- Only one venue publishes a funding cap. Hyperliquid caps funding at 4% per hour and notes, candidly, that this is “much less aggressive capping than CEX counterparts” — a worst case you can at least compute. Aster writes that it “reserves the right to adjust the funding rate floor, cap, and the funding interval” without stating what they currently are. You cannot size around a number that is not printed.
- Aster charges an “open loss” that Hyperliquid has no equivalent of. Its Costs of Opening Positions page works through the arithmetic: alongside the initial margin, a long order is charged the gap between the mark price and the order price whenever that gap is against you. In Aster’s own worked example, a 1 BTC market long needs 5,207.18 of collateral against the 5,149.91 of initial margin — an extra 57.27 — while the equivalent short needs 5,147.35 and no open loss at all. The market-long estimate also builds in a 0.05% buffer above the best ask. It is not a fee, it is a collateral requirement, but it is money you must have and it makes longs structurally more expensive to open than shorts on the same size.
There is also a timing detail on Aster worth one sentence, because it costs money and nobody expects it: “There is a 15-second deviation between the actual time and when the funding fee is charged. For example, if you open a position at 16:00:05 UTC, you may still be charged a funding fee for that interval.” If your plan was to open just after the stamp, open a minute after it.
IF THE TABLES ABOVE SETTLED IT FOR YOU
Everything on this page is arithmetic you can check before depositing anything. Two things are not arithmetic and they apply to both venues, because both are self-custody: you hold the keys yourself, so a lost seed phrase is lost money — no support desk, no company able to reverse a mistake, no account to recover. And the leverage you set is the leverage you live with: Hyperliquid’s Margining page states that leverage is only checked upon opening a position, with monitoring left to you, and above 500x Aster does not let you add margin to an open position at all. If that is the trade you want, change the margin mode and the leverage before you type a size, and set the stop in the same ticket as the entry. If you would rather work limit orders at zero maker fee, the second link is the venue that offers them.
Referral links — each venue pays us a share of its fees at no extra cost to you, and Hyperliquid’s published referral rules give you 4% off your first $25M of volume. Neither changes a number on this page. Education only; most retail traders lose money.
Where can each one cost you?
Every venue on this site gets one paragraph saying plainly where it is worst. Here are two.
Where Aster can cost you. The documentation is the problem before the product is. Two official pages disagree about the headline taker fee. The maintenance-margin tiers are described and not printed, so you cannot compute a liquidation price from public information the way you can on the other venue. The Insurance Clearance Fee is named without a rate. The funding cap is reserved without a number. The Degen Mode closing fee is called “dynamic” and left there. Four products share one brand, so a number quoted about “Aster” may belong to a screen you are not on. And 1001x sits one tab away from a venue whose ordinary product is perfectly reasonable — with a liquidation distance of 0.060% and a profit ceiling most users will never read about.
Where Hyperliquid can cost you. It is more expensive on every fee row here, and its maker fee is real money next to Aster’s zero. Its BTC maintenance margin of 1.25% is wide, so it closes positions that a venue with a tighter requirement would carry. Funding lands every hour with no stamp to time around, capped at 4% per hour — a ceiling that, on a 20x position, is enough to liquidate you in a single hour with the price standing still. Leverage is checked once and never again, and the BTC order form opens at 20x in cross margin by default. And every position you hold is public by construction, which is exactly the condition Aster built its product to remove.
Anyone opening a first derivatives account. Both venues are self-custody, which means every operational mistake is permanent: wrong chain, wrong address, lost phrase, signed transaction you did not read. This page assumes you already know what a perpetual is, what funding does and what a maintenance margin is. If any of those is fuzzy, start with spot versus futures, then leverage and margin, then come back.
Anyone who read “1001x” as an opportunity. On $100 of margin it is a $59.94 move from liquidation on a $100,000 BTC — a distance the price can cover while you are reading this sentence — with your maximum outcome fixed at $300 and no way to add margin once you are in. That is a defined-outcome bet, not a leveraged trade, and it should be sized as one.
Which one should you use, and when?
Neither is the better venue in general. Each is the better venue for a specific person.
- Aster, if you work limit orders and you want the lower cost. Zero maker fee on Pro is the strongest single number on this page, the taker rate is below Hyperliquid’s, and hidden orders are a real feature with a real use if your size is large enough to be worth hiding. You are accepting a documentation gap in exchange: you will not be able to compute your own liquidation price or your worst-case funding from what is published.
- Hyperliquid, if you want to check the venue’s arithmetic yourself. Every rule you need is published: maintenance margin per asset, the liquidation formula, the funding cap, the fee tiers with a code sample. Positions are on-chain and verifiable. You pay $1.00 more per $10,000 round trip for that, and $3.00 more if you are maker-side. Our Hyperliquid profile, fee breakdown and step-by-step guide cover the setup.
- Neither, if the appeal was the leverage number. 1001x and 40x are not two points on one scale. One is a defined-outcome product with a profit ceiling and no way to add margin; the other is an ordinary perpetual venue. Choosing between them on the size of the number is choosing between two different things on a label they do not share.
And the answer that fits most readers of this page: place the stop before the position exists, and most of this comparison stops mattering. Fee rows, clearance fees, cap ratios and cushion widths only come into play at a level you chose not to defend. Neither venue can charge you anything for a liquidation that does not happen.
Common mistakes
- Quoting “0% maker and 1001x” as one offer. They are two different Aster products. The 1001x screen has no maker rate at all.
- Reading the profit cap as a detail. At 1001x it stops your upside at 5 times the liquidation distance, which is the whole shape of the trade.
- Assuming a bigger leverage number means a bigger possible win. Above 500x on Aster it means a faster resolution, not a larger one.
- Treating “not published” as “zero”. Aster’s Insurance Clearance Fee has a rate; the page simply does not print it. Budget for it.
- Depositing into a blown Aster account to tidy it up. It disqualifies the negative-balance settlement you would otherwise have qualified for.
- Timing funding the same way on both. Aster’s eight-hour stamps can be avoided — but not within 15 seconds of the stamp, by its own note. Hyperliquid’s hourly charge cannot be avoided at all.
- Opening a long and a short of the same size on Aster and expecting the same margin. Open loss makes the long cost more, by the gap between mark and order price.
- Thinking hidden orders move your liquidation price. They do not — margin and liquidation run on the full position.
Frequently asked questions
Is Aster cheaper than Hyperliquid?
Yes, on the published entry-tier rates, and by less than most people expect. Aster Pro lists 0% maker and 0.04% taker on USDT perpetuals; Hyperliquid’s base tier is 0.015% maker and 0.045% taker. On a $10,000 market-order round trip that is $8.00 against $9.00 — a gap of $1.00. The maker row is where the difference is real: $0.00 against $3.00. One caveat worth knowing before you quote either figure: Aster’s Perpetuals overview page states 0.01% maker and 0.035% taker, which contradicts its own dedicated fee page. We use the fee page.
What does the 1001x profit cap on Aster actually mean?
It means that above 500x leverage, Aster’s documentation limits your net profit ROI — to roughly 500% at 500x and 750x, and roughly 300% at 1001x. Past that point the position stops paying you more, while the liquidation risk continues unchanged. Combined with the published liquidation formula, which uses a default 60% liquidation lost rate, the cap always sits at the same multiple of the liquidation distance: 5× at 1001x and 8.33× at 500x and 750x, whatever leverage you pick inside those bands.
Does Hyperliquid charge a liquidation fee and does Aster?
Hyperliquid’s Liquidations page states in one line that “Unlike CEXs there is no clearance fee on liquidations”; ordinary liquidations go to the order book and surviving collateral stays with you, with one exception — below two thirds of the maintenance margin a backstop takes over and the maintenance margin is not returned. Aster does charge: its Liquidations page describes an “Insurance Clearance Fee” paid into its insurance fund. Aster does not publish the rate, so we cannot tell you what it costs — check the venue’s current trading rules.
Which venue liquidates you sooner?
On the same money, Aster at its ceiling, by a wide margin. $100 of margin on BTC at $100,000 survives a $1,266 move on Hyperliquid at 40x and a $59.94 move on Aster’s 1001x product — about 21 times less room. That is not a criticism of Aster; it is what choosing 1001x over 40x means arithmetically. At comparable leverage the two are far closer, but Aster does not publish its Pro maintenance-margin tiers, so an exact comparison there is not possible from public documentation.
Do hidden orders on Aster protect me from liquidation hunting?
They hide you, which is not the same as protecting you. Aster states that a hidden order never appears in the public order book and that the resulting position is excluded from public data feeds — size, direction and PnL included. The limit is in its own documentation: “Matching, margin, and liquidation operate on the full position size.” Your liquidation price is exactly where it would otherwise be; what changes is that other participants cannot see it. Hidden orders are also always limit orders, so they are not available for market entries.
Can I use Hyperliquid or Aster in the US or the UK?
Neither venue accepts US persons on these products. For UK readers this site shows no venue referral links at all, because the FCA’s financial-promotion regime prohibits referral incentives for cryptoassets. Both are self-custody venues reached with a wallet, which means no company is checking your eligibility for you — read the venue’s own terms for your country before depositing, because being able to load a website is not the same as being permitted to hold a position on it.
Which one should a beginner start with?
Neither. Both are self-custody perpetual venues, which means a lost seed phrase is lost money with no support desk, and both put leverage far beyond what a new account should touch within one tap. If you cannot yet explain what funding is, what a maintenance margin does and what happens to a position you are not watching, start with spot versus futures and leverage and margin. The venue is not the decision in front of you yet.