Three things most Hyperliquid guides still get wrong

1. Maximum leverage is 40x, not 50x

The claim, as widely published: Hyperliquid offers up to 50x leverage. This appears in a great many current guides and comparison articles, often in the first paragraph.

What the exchange reports: the highest maximum leverage across all 178 live perpetual markets is 40x, and it applies to BTC alone. The figure below is read from the exchange's own market metadata on every build, so it changes when the exchange changes.

There is a second layer the 50x claim also misses. Maximum leverage is not a fixed property of a market: it steps down above published position-size thresholds. A BTC position above $150M of notional is capped at 20x, not 40x.

Why it matters. Leverage sets your maintenance margin, and maintenance margin sets how far the price can move against you before the position is closed. Someone planning around 50x is planning around a margin buffer that does not exist. Our leverage guide works through the arithmetic, and the liquidation calculator does it for your own numbers.

2. The referral discount is capped, not lifetime

The claim: a referral code gives a lifetime 4% discount on trading fees. The word lifetime is doing real work here, and it is not in the documentation.

What the documentation says: referral rewards apply for a user's first $1B in volume, and referral discounts apply for a user's first $25M in volume. There are two further conditions that get dropped in the retelling: the code must be applied before the wallet's first trade, and the discount does not extend to vaults or sub-accounts, because the clearinghouse treats those as independent accounts.

Why we are the ones saying this. We publish a referral code and we earn from it, so this is the correction that costs us something. We would rather you knew the cap. For most traders the allowance will never bind, which makes the accurate version almost as attractive as the exaggerated one and considerably more useful. The referral page states the full terms, and the discount is explained here.

3. Deposits are not Arbitrum-only, and a wallet is not required

The claim: to use Hyperliquid you need a crypto wallet, and you must first bridge USDC to Arbitrum. Two separate assumptions, both from an earlier version of the onboarding flow.

What the documentation says. USDC is accepted from Arbitrum, Ethereum, Base, Polygon. Native assets are accepted directly from their own chains:

And on wallets: the app offers an email login. You enter an address, type a six-digit code, and a wallet is created for you behind the scenes that you can export later. No extension, no signature step, no seed phrase to write down before you start.

That is a meaningful omission in a beginner guide, because the wallet requirement is the step that stops most people. Our deposit guide covers every route, and the account guide compares the two login methods honestly, including why email login is not a long-term custody plan for a large balance.

Why we publish this

Not to score points. Stale numbers in guides are a structural problem rather than a moral one: an article is written once, the exchange keeps changing, and nobody goes back. The figure gets copied into the next article, and the next, until it is what everyone knows.

The only defence is to stop writing numbers into pages. Every figure on this site comes from a data layer rebuilt from the documentation and the exchange's public API, and the build fails if a page tries to hardcode a rate. That is why this page can carry a timestamp rather than a publication date.

If you find something wrong here, the same standard applies to us. Tell us and we will fix it and record the change in the changelog. Our editorial policy describes how pages are checked.