Hyperliquid PnL, the leaderboard and public profiles
Verified against Hyperliquid docs: Margining and Hyperliquid public info API · by Hyperliquid Academy
The two PnL numbers
They answer different questions, and confusing them is how people think they made money they did not keep.
| Unrealised | Realised | |
|---|---|---|
| Applies to | An open position | A closed one |
| Priced at | The current mark price | Your actual fills |
| Includes entry fees | Not reflected in the mark | Yes |
| Includes exit fees | No — the exit has not happened | Yes |
| Includes funding | Accrues separately against the position | Yes, all of it |
| Can it change | Every second | No, it is banked |
Unrealised PnL is a mark-to-market estimate. It is honest about what the position is worth at this instant and says nothing about what you will get for it.
Realised PnL is the number that matters. It is what survived the round trip after the taker fee going in, the taker fee coming out and every hourly funding payment in between.
Where a multi-day position quietly loses
On a hold of several days, funding is routinely larger than both trading fees combined. A position that looks flat on price can close at a loss purely from being on the paying side of a positive rate for a week.
That is why the funding column in the position panel is worth watching as closely as the unrealised number above it.
What the leaderboard is
A ranking of addresses by trading performance over a window you choose. It is built from the same public data anyone can query, which is the first clue about how public your own trading is.
Two things to hold in mind when you read one.
Ranking by absolute profit favours size. A large account making a modest percentage outranks a small account doubling its money. Neither ordering tells you who traded better.
A short window favours luck. Any high-leverage account that was pointed the right way for a month appears alongside accounts with a durable process, and the leaderboard cannot distinguish them. The distinction shows up over a longer window and in how the returns were produced.
Your profile is public, and there is no setting
This is the part that surprises people arriving from a centralised exchange, so it is worth being blunt.
Every order, fill, position, deposit and withdrawal is written to a public ledger under your address. Anyone can read it, at any time, without an account. Explorers and analytics dashboards built on the public API follow individual addresses in real time.
There is no privacy toggle because the exchange is not holding the data on your behalf. It is not that sharing is switched on by default; it is that publication is what settlement means here.
What that exposes, concretely:
- Your open positions, their size and their direction
- Your entry price and your liquidation price
- Your unrealised profit or loss, right now
- Every trade you have ever made from that address
Which matters at size
On a small account this is trivia. On a large one it is information other people can act on: a visible liquidation price is a target, and a crowded, visible position is the raw material for a squeeze. Traders running real size treat address hygiene as part of risk management rather than as a privacy preference.
The only privacy control you have
The address. That is the entire toolkit.
Trade from an address that is not your public identity. Not one tied to an ENS name, a donation address or a wallet you have posted anywhere.
Watch the funding trail. An address funded directly from a verified exchange withdrawal is linked to that account from its first transaction, whatever it does afterwards.
Separate accounts by purpose if it matters. Sub-accounts and separate addresses keep unrelated activity from being read as one story.
None of that is anonymity. It is the difference between trivially linkable and merely difficult. Why no KYC is not the same as private covers the wider point.
Reading someone else’s numbers
If you are on the leaderboard to find someone to follow, three questions get you most of the way.
How much leverage produced this? A 300% year at 20x is a different claim from a 300% year at 2x. The first is one bad week from zero.
How long is the record? Anything under a couple of market regimes is a sample, not a track record.
What is the largest drawdown? The number nobody quotes, and the one that tells you whether you could have held the position through the middle of it.
Vaults are the built-in way to act on the answer, since they let you deploy capital alongside a trader rather than trying to mirror their fills by hand.
Exporting your own history
Your trade history is downloadable from the app, and it is worth doing periodically rather than at the moment you need it. Tax authorities want dated fills, not a screenshot of a leaderboard rank, and the public ledger is not an excuse for missing records — it is a record that already exists and that they can read too.
Where to go next
Following a trader through a vault, and what closing actually realises, including the funding you will only see in the final number.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between realised and unrealised PnL?
Unrealised is the paper value of an open position at the current mark price. Realised is what you actually kept once it closed, after trading fees and after every funding payment you made or received while it was open.
Does the PnL figure include fees and funding?
Realised PnL does. Unrealised PnL is a mark-to-market number, so it does not yet reflect the fees you will pay on the exit, and funding accrues against the position separately.
Can I hide my profile from the leaderboard?
No, and there is no setting for it, because the data is not held by the exchange in the first place. Every fill is on a public ledger. The only privacy control available is which address you trade from.
How is the leaderboard ranked?
By performance over a selected window, with the account's own returns rather than a follower count. Sorting by absolute profit favours large accounts, and by percentage favours small ones, which is worth remembering before treating either as a skill ranking.
Should I copy someone from the leaderboard?
Look at how the returns were produced before deciding. High leverage and a favourable month produce the same headline figure as a durable edge, and only one of them repeats. Vaults are the built-in way to follow a trader with your own capital.
Can other people see my liquidation price?
Your position and its parameters are derivable from public data, so in effect yes. On a large position that is information other traders can act on, which is a genuine consideration at size.
Sources
- Hyperliquid docs: Margininghyperliquid.gitbook.io
- Hyperliquid public info APIapi.hyperliquid.xyz
We link the primary source for every number on this page. If a figure here disagrees with the Hyperliquid documentation, the documentation is right and we want to know.