As the oil market swung wildly in early March, one trader appeared to try to sway prices using crypto derivatives on Hyperliquid, showcasing how the maverick trading platform is encroaching on Wall Street’s turf, not always in welcome ways.

By Ryan Weeks The trader, operating through two accounts, placed over $170 million worth of unusual orders, according to a detailed analysis by Solidus Labs shared with Bloomberg News. Solidus says the trader seemed to be trying to manipulate prices through a tactic known as spoofing.

The accounts were sending large orders in one direction, then canceling them, while simultaneously executing trades on the other side of the bet, Solidus found. The market-surveillance firm has not identified the person or entity behind the transactions, but said they seemed to be trying to move prices in a manner that would book profits.

Solidus’s conclusion is difficult to verify, as efforts to manipulate markets involve not just tactics but intent. It’s possible that the accounts were inadvertently trading in this manner without anyone purposefully plotting a price impact.

“One account rapidly placing and canceling massive volumes of orders on one side of the book while trading on the other looks like classic spoofing,” said Spiro Antonopoulos, Solidus’s senior vice president and global head of government and investigations. “But proving intent requires going further — tracking the account’s behavior over time and following the money.”

Oil markets experienced historic volatility when most of the trader’s activity occurred, whipsawing on news about the Iran war. The trader made about about $119,000 from March 8 to March 10, according to Solidus’s calculations — a tiny fraction of the overall volume at stake in the trades.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Hyperliquid Labs, the platform’s main developer, emphasized the transparency available on its system of recording transactions.

“Every order, cancellation, and trade on the Hyperliquid blockchain is recorded on an immutable, transparent public ledger that can be reviewed in real time by anyone, including market participants and regulators,” the spokesperson said. “This structural openness allows independent scrutiny of on-chain activity without reliance on any single operator to collect, disclose, analyze, or process data.”A spokesperson for Trade.xyz, which listed the perpetual-futures contracts used by the oil trader, said the markets are designed to “resist manipulation” through order placement.

The spokesperson cited order limits on Hyperliquid — a technique borrowed from conventional markets — and the external inputs used to price its perps.

Trade.xyz “maintains ongoing monitoring and alerting across its markets,” the spokesperson said.

It’s possible these kinds of safeguards kicked in, disrupting the trader’s plan. Submitting orders on Hyperliquid is tied to cumulative filled volume. That means accounts whose orders far exceed what they execute are throttled.

Yet the activity itself suggests that Hyperliquid, and the perpetual-futures contracts it facilitates, are not just competing with traditional markets, but also opening a new route for misbehavior.

Spoofing has been illegal for many years in the US, and exchange operators including CME Group Inc. and Intercontinental Exchange Inc. have been urging regulators to rein in Hyperliquid. They have warned that trading on the platform could distort global oil prices and leave markets vulnerable to manipulation.

“Because these platforms are meant to exclude US actors, they could be seen as a lacuna in market design,” said Yesha Yadav, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School whose research is focused on digital assets. “The counterpoint here is that because it’s an illiquid contract, it’s potentially easier to detect.”

Rapid Expansion Perpetual futures, or perps, are derivative contracts that never expire and trade round-the-clock on blockchain-based networks. They mimic everything from stocks and indexes to oil and precious metals.

Over the course of this year, Hyperliquid’s expansion has propelled it from a fringe crypto platform to one that sits alongside the CMEs and ICEs of the world as a place to speculate or hedge risk. But because it operates largely outside US confines as a decentralized exchange, with a presence in Singapore but no formal headquarters or regulatory licenses, Hyperliquid is not quite the same.

Perps have been particularly helpful, even to conventional traders, when other markets are closed — especially during geopolitical crises like the Iran war.

In the case of the questionable trader that Solidus noticed, their accounts were active over three days beginning on March 8, when oil prices hit the highest level in years over concerns about disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. The next day was one of the most volatile in history as US President Donald Trump and other leaders made comments about the war.

For every $30 in orders the trader canceled on one side of the market, roughly $1 in trades was executed on the other, according to Solidus’s analysis of publicly available trading records. The trader in question accounted for more than 90% of all cancellations on Hyperliquid’s market, Solidus said.

Brent Perps One of the clearest examples occurred on the evening of March 9, according to the firm’s report.

In quick succession the trader pulled about $17 million in sell orders and executed $425,000 in buy orders, Solidus found. The price of the Brent perp dropped from $83.06 to $81.42 in the 10 seconds leading into and during the cancellations, then rose in the five seconds after to $83.51, and kept rising in the buyer’s favor to $87.56 within a minute.

The activity was primarily concentrated in perps tied to Brent crude, but also involved some linked to West Texas Intermediate and natural gas. All three perps were designed by Trade.xyz, whose efforts have turbocharged Hyperliquid’s foray into traditional assets.

Solidus, founded in 2018 by Goldman Sachs veterans, said the trader was likely a professional, high-speed liquidity provider. The volume and scale would be difficult for an individual to orchestrate.

The trader’s two main wallets have amassed $93 billion in lifetime notional volume on Hyperliquid — a figure that represents not just the money they put on the line, but the cumulative value of all the trades, including underlying assets.

The episode demonstrates “the novel market integrity questions facing regulators and operators” as commodity trading shifts toward always-on, open venues, Antonopoulos said. “Market participants routing activity to these venues already have a duty to surveil it, but do they have the coverage to see it?”