How PerpLog Is Compensated: Builder Revenue, Founder Ratchet, HYPE Accumulation

Updated April 17, 2026

The social contract

This page exists so the same information is visible to anyone at any time — users, community, regulators, journalists, future hires. Everything below is committed publicly. Any change requires a public announcement 60 days ahead of effect. If you notice any discrepancy between this page and what actually happens in our real-time revenue dashboard, that is a bug — report it and we will correct it.

Fee inflow

PerpLog charges 0.01% (1 basis point) on every trade executed through the Position Sizer — collected on-chain via the Hyperliquid builder code quasareum.eth. This is 10× below the Hyperliquid builder-code maximum (0.1%) and among the lowest builder fees in the Hyperliquid ecosystem. It is framed on the landing page and never hidden.

Users who stake HYPE on Hyperliquid automatically pay less on PerpLog too. The discount mirrors Hyperliquid's own staking tiers exactly, up to 40% off at Diamond tier. See the fee model page for the full tier table.

Why builder-code revenue, not redistribution

When Jeff Yan designed builder codes, he described them as “franchising out the user experience”(Matt Huang / Paradigm). The canonical analogy in Hyperliquid's ecosystem docs is “YouTube for DeFi developers — creators earn revenue from their videos, builders earn from their innovations.” Over $70M of builder revenue has flowed to developers since October 2024. Every sustainable builder keeps that fee as operational revenue — Phantom Wallet ($100k/day from its HL integration), PVP.trade ($7.2M lifetime), trading bots in the $1–5M range. None of them run a prize pool to roundtrip user money.

PerpLog was initially designed with a 70/24/6 revenue-redistribution model mirroring Hyperliquid's HYPE supply allocation. After re-reading the actual builder-code intent, that redistribution layer was removed — it was a product-specific complication layered on top of a mechanism Yan designed for the opposite purpose. The current model is simpler, more Yan-aligned, and eliminates the subsidy where mediocre high-volume traders would have funded contest prizes for skilled traders.

Internal waterfall

Daily USDC revenue flows through this priority order. Every subsequent bucket receives only what the previous buckets have already covered.

Infrastructure. Firebase, Cloudflare, Google Cloud, AI APIs, domains. Actual cost, itemized per category on /stats/revenue. Typically a few hundred USD/month at current scale, climbing to a few thousand as traffic grows.
Founder cash draw. Ratchets with MRR per the table below. Hard ceiling of $50k/month regardless of MRR. Deliberately below typical SaaS founder compensation at equivalent ARR — the real upside is HYPE accumulation (#5), not cash extraction.
Team salaries.Market-rate EU tech, as hires come online. Cash + HYPE equity pattern mirroring Hyperliquid's own team compensation. Published when the first hire lands.
Runway reserve. 3–6 months operating buffer rebuilt once the above are covered.
Surplus → HYPE accumulation. Every remaining dollar is periodically swapped from USDC to HYPE on the Hyperliquid spot market and staked (delegated to a validator). This step is run manually by the founderon a best-effort cadence — the auto-execution cron was considered and rejected for security reasons (putting the fee-receiving wallet's private key on a server for convenience wasn't worth the blast-radius increase versus a manual cycle every few weeks). Internal vesting on team HYPE: 1-year cliff from acquisition date, monthly unlock after. The accumulation wallet is quasareum.eth (0x42c137538bee9d7eca612b41a807b5fb7b863c20) — the same wallet that receives the builder-code fees; cannot be structurally separated from the founder's personal identity without losing the HL staking tier discount on founder trading. We don't render a live balance KPI on /stats/hype-position because publishing a first-row readout tied to a known-identity wallet is voluntary targeting exposure — but the wallet is on-chain and anyone curious can query the HL delegatorSummary info endpoint directly to verify the stake.

Founder cash ratchet

MRR (fee revenue)	Founder cash / mo	Expected team size	Infra
< $5k	$3k	Solo part-time	< $500
$5k – $15k	$8k	Solo full-time	$500–$1k
$15k – $40k	$12k	Solo or +1 junior	$1k–$2k
$40k – $100k	$18k	1–2 hires	$2k–$4k
$100k – $300k	$25k	3 people	$4k–$8k
$300k – $700k	$32k	4–5 people	$8k–$15k
$700k – $1.5M	$40k	6–8 people	$15k–$25k
> $1.5M	$50k (hard ceiling)	8–12 people	$25k+

At $1.5M+ MRR, founder cash is capped at $50k/month ($600k/year) — below the typical SaaS CEO comp at equivalent ARR ($500k–$1M normal). The real founder upside kicks in through the HYPE accumulation bucket, not by raising the cash ceiling.

Why HYPE accumulation (and not USDC)

Three compounding effects:

Ecosystem buy pressure. Every fee dollar (after infra + cash + reserve) pushes HYPE up on the open market. Mirrors the Hyperliquid Assistance Fund pattern — 99% of HLP profits convert to HYPE buybacks.
Skin in the game.PerpLog's treasury is the same asset the community holds. Team wealth depends on HYPE appreciating. No USDC hoard, no way to extract value without the ecosystem seeing it on-chain.
Self-reinforcing fee discount.Staked HYPE qualifies PerpLog's own hot wallet for HL staking-tier discounts, which lowers our trading costs, which means more margin on every trade we execute on HL directly.

What this rejects by default

Prize pools and redistribution contests. See the fee model page for why.
Subscriptions and tiered access. Everyone sees the same PerpLog. Fees scale with usage via builder code, not with sign-up tiers.
VC allocations, private token rounds, pre-launch allocations. No outside capital has equity in PerpLog. No tokens will be issued.
Founder cash exceeding the ratchet. Exceeding the schedule requires a public announcement explaining the raise (emergency hire, specific project). A 60-day notice period applies to any ratchet modification.