Author: Max @IOSG

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Core View TL;DR

· Retail investing in traditional finance (tradfi) has achieved mobilization (zero commission + app user experience), and this trend is spreading to the cryptocurrency space—retail users are seeking a fast, familiar, and low-friction mobile-native trading experience.

· Hyperliquid's tech stack (HyperEVM + CoreWriter + Builder code) significantly lowers the development threshold for mobile front ends while balancing the execution efficiency of CEXs with the advantages of DEXs (self-custody, fast token listing, fewer geographical/KYC restrictions).

· The wave of native mobile applications based on HL has begun: BasedApp, Mass.Money, Dexari, Supercexy. These applications have a daily trading volume of 50,000 USD (monthly recurring revenue of 1.5 million USD), accounting for approximately 3-6% of the HL perpetual contract trading volume, with diverse target user groups (crypto native users, Web2 retail users, professional traders).

· Why now? The “super speculation” and the creator content cycle have heightened retail users' risk appetite; mobile applications have compressed the onboarding time for users, simplified the complexities of crypto, and added sticky features (copy trading, fiat deposits, card payments, money markets, yield tools).

· Core argument:

• The encrypted mobile trading front benefits from the strong tailwind of the Web2 mass audience and retail behavior.

• For the cryptocurrency market to achieve growth in scale and trading volume, more crypto-native mobile applications need to be provided for mainstream Web2 consumers.

• Compared to Web3 business models, this field has true sustainable scalable revenue characteristics, and the marginal cost of expansion is extremely low.

In the past few months, there has been a significant increase in mobile trading + DeFi applications aimed at retail consumers, most of which are built on the Hyperliquid infrastructure. This article aims to delve into this vertical field, analyze the applications currently dominating the market, and provide relevant insights.

1. Background

Overall, retail investor participation in traditional investments has seen tremendous growth over the past decade. This trend began in 2019, when several large U.S. brokers reduced stock trading commissions to zero in order to compete with Robinhood, significantly lowering trading costs for small accounts. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 further accelerated this process: lockdown policies, stimulus checks, and continuously optimized mobile experiences brought millions of new investors into the market. As of 2022, the Federal Reserve's Consumer Financial Survey shows a significant increase in stock market participation—58% of American households hold stocks directly or indirectly, with the direct ownership rate jumping from 15% to 21%, marking the largest increase in history.

The proportion of retail trading in daily market activities continues to stand out: it currently accounts for 20-30% of the trading volume in U.S. stocks, far exceeding pre-pandemic levels. This phenomenon is not limited to the United States; it is also evident globally: the number of investment accounts in India has surged from tens of millions pre-pandemic to over 200 million by 2025. Investment channels are also continuously expanding—record inflows into ETFs in 2024-2025, along with the popularity of fractional trading and mobile brokerage services, have provided retail investors with more convenient investment tools. The cost impact of zero commissions, the channel impact brought by mobile trading applications, and the liquidity impact from ETFs have jointly driven retail investors to enter the public market on a large scale, making consumer-grade investment applications an important structural force in the market.

Mobile Trading App

Since 2021, the vertical field of mobile trading applications in the retail trading market has continued to expand, driven by the increase in mobile device penetration and the rise of a new generation of self-directed investors. The global investment application market size is expected to reach approximately $254.9 billion by 2033, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.1%.

Why are mobile trading applications so favored by retail investors? The main reasons can be summarized in two dimensions:

Social Driven (Everything Gamified, Gambling-ified)

Contemporary social culture is dominated by dopamine loops, gamification mechanisms, and hyper-speculative behavior. The rise of the creator economy and short video platforms (such as TikTok and YouTube Shorts) has reshaped user behavior patterns, with people seeking instant gratification, while mobile trading apps perfectly meet this demand on multiple levels.

On a social level, platforms like Reddit and communities such as Wall Street Bets are filled with users showcasing massive gains and losses. The phenomenon of daily profits and losses exceeding $100,000 has become normalized, and retail users are gradually desensitized to such amounts. Many users disconnect their Robinhood account funds from real money, treating their investment portfolios as game chips. Coupled with rising living costs, widening wealth gaps, and negative sentiments about “involution,” many wage earners believe that the only way to achieve the American Dream is through “super-speculation”—taking on extremely high risks to seek extraordinary returns.

Mobile trading apps have successfully captured this social cultural dividend. By offering short-term options, leveraged products, instant execution, and a gamified interface experience, these apps have successfully attracted users from casinos to the stock market. Users only need a mobile phone to simultaneously obtain dopamine stimulation, gaming pleasure, and speculative experiences.

Application Features

In terms of application features, mobile trading applications have achieved significant optimizations across multiple dimensions. In the user onboarding process, they have compressed the account opening procedure from cumbersome paperwork that takes several days to nearly instantaneous online operations. All user processes from identity verification to trade execution are integrated within a single interface, enabling users to comprehensively manage their investment portfolios.

On the trading experience side, by eliminating friction points of traditional brokerage models and integrating new value points such as fractional share purchases and regular investments, these platforms simultaneously lower financial and cognitive barriers. By drawing on consumer design language familiar to mainstream applications, they shorten the trading decision-making path, while personalized features (such as curated asset lists and portfolio performance analysis) continue to maintain user engagement.

In addition, post-investment features such as performance segmentation reports and automated tax declarations make the experience closer to a full-service financial application where users can complete all operations, rather than just a simple trading terminal. On the social side, content elements further reduce barriers to use by providing an easy-to-share interface, promoting social engagement and incentives (such as the usage behaviors driven by the WSB forum). These characteristics together explain why mobile platforms have become the default investment channel and a lasting driving force for retail market participation.

II. What impact does this have on the cryptocurrency industry?

The mobile-first application trend has extended from the traditional finance/Web2 market to the Web3 space.

In the past five years, the usage of cryptocurrency wallet applications has surged, indicating a market demand for mobile-native crypto products. Given that transactions and profits are inherent characteristics of cryptocurrencies, perpetual contracts and DeFi naturally became the first areas to be transformed in the “mobilization” process.

With the rise of Hyperliquid since the end of 2024 and the launch of its modular high-performance trading infrastructure, many mobile perpetual contract DEX trades and DeFi front-end products have begun to build on the HL infrastructure and flood the market.

Why Hyperliquid and DEX?

From a developer's perspective, the infrastructure of HyperEVM is highly attractive due to the powerful tools it provides. CoreWriter and precompiled contracts allow smart contracts on HyperEVM to interact directly with HyperCore perpetual contract positions, enabling unique use cases and near-instant execution. The builder code offers developers a clear incentive layer, allowing them to earn transaction fee sharing when users trade through their front end. These features not only lower the development threshold but also make HyperEVM one of the most developer-friendly platforms, attracting top teams and talent. This is also why 99% of crypto mobile trading fronts choose to build on Hyperliquid.

Why choose DEX? Traders are generally attracted by the structural advantages of DEX: providing broader access opportunities by eliminating KYC and jurisdictional restrictions, faster listing of coins, and a richer selection of tokens, as well as the autonomy of fund custody. Previously, CEX attracted retail users because they significantly reduced the complexity of participating in the market: offering multiple trading markets within a single mature network application, featuring instant execution, low slippage, and high liquidity, while integrating auxiliary functions such as wallet management, stable returns, and fiat gateways. However, users have to bear huge counterparty risks and forfeit asset self-custody rights.

Hyperliquid is the platform that perfectly integrates all of this. This on-chain decentralized exchange not only enjoys the structural advantages of DEX perpetual contract platforms but also possesses CEX-level liquidity, execution efficiency, and overall user experience. Therefore, it becomes the most ideal liquidity layer for building mobile cryptocurrency trading applications.

So what does all this have to do with mobile wallet transactions?

Thanks to the availability of this modular high-performance architecture, the development cost of building mobile trading front ends has become extremely low - this is exactly why a large number of related applications are beginning to emerge in the market.

Currently, most mobile trading frontends provide similar functionalities centered around perpetual contract trading, but some applications have begun to move beyond perpetual contracts, offering users more auxiliary products. Overall, these applications generally possess the following features:

· Fiat deposit channels: Supports various deposit methods such as credit/debit cards, bank transfers, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo, etc.

· Investment Strategy Tools: Provides dollar-cost averaging plans, take profit and stop loss functions, and early access to new tokens.

· Currency Market Integration: One-stop access to DeFi lending protocols

· Earn interest: Generate returns through an automatic compound interest vault.

· Dapp Explorer: Search and connect to emerging decentralized applications

· Debit/Credit Card Service: Use self-custodied funds for spending directly.

The realization of these functions is attributed to Hyperliquid's infrastructure, which greatly simplifies the development difficulty of the perpetual contract main product, allowing the team to focus on innovations in other derivative fields. Due to the modular nature of the entire ecosystem, most HL-based projects can easily achieve parallel development across multiple fields. Many applications can provide rich functionalities, mainly due to: 1. The low development threshold of the Hypercore builder code; 2. The high willingness of other protocols to integrate.

In addition, major applications are competing mainly in user experience/interface design and social brand building. The most promising representatives in the market currently include:

Basedapp

Currently, the Based app is the most关注度 highest and fastest-growing mobile trading front-end application in the market. In addition to providing perpetual contracts and spot trading, the platform has also innovatively launched a debit/credit card solution that connects directly to users' trading wallets, supporting payment needs in daily consumption scenarios. Its long-term goal is to transform into an emerging digital bank similar to Etherfi.

Mass.Money

Following closely in the mobile trading front is Mass.money. Unlike the Based app, this platform focuses more on the Web2 retail user base, a positioning that is fully reflected in its product design: in addition to standard HL perpetual contracts and spot trading, it also integrates Apple Pay deposit channels, social copy trading features, DeFi currency market access, and cross-chain EVM spot exchanges, among other full-service offerings. Its interface design deeply incorporates gamification elements and heavily borrows design language from Web2 consumer applications.

However, due to their higher fee structure and broader product offerings, their revenue per user and transaction volume is significantly higher than Basedapp.

Dexari

Following Mass.money is Dexari. This is a mobile trading front end focused on professional traders, purely centered on trading functionalities. Therefore, its main product features include HL perpetual contracts and spot trading, with user experience and interface design emphasizing asset discovery features, analytical tools, and execution efficiency. Their goal is to become the Axiom (benchmark for professional trading) in the mobile trading front end space.

Supercexy

Last but not least is Supercexy. The platform has not chosen a purely mobile front-end route, while also optimizing the web-based perpetual contract DEX trading experience, aiming to provide a CEX-like user experience, but entirely based on Hyperliquid infrastructure. Its product suite integrates DeFi staking functions and money market access services, thus the application primarily serves Web3 native traders.

Comprehensive perspective

Overall Overview

Overall, the daily aggregated average revenue from all relevant mobile trading frontends (including some applications not mentioned) is about $50,000, which corresponds to approximately $1.5 million in monthly recurring revenue (MRR). These applications account for about 3%-6% of the total trading volume of Hyperliquid perpetual contracts. By comparison, Hyperliquid's HLP vault accounts for about 5%.

Hyperliquid Mobile Trading Frontend Revenue

3. Summary

Core Ideas

1. The front end of cryptocurrency mobile trading benefits from the strong tailwind of the Web2 community and retail behavior.

The trend of “hyper-speculation” in society has fundamentally changed the behavior patterns of retail consumers. As evidenced by the growth of Polymarket and Kalshi, most users adopt high-risk preference strategies in the current environment. Against the backdrop of historically high market speculation demand, mobile trading applications have become the most directly benefited product form. As mentioned earlier, user growth and adoption rates of traditional financial mobile applications like Robinhood, Wealthsimple, and TD Ameritrade have significantly increased, mainly due to their low entry barriers and business models that promote short-term high-leverage and gambling-style products to users. Clearly, retail users need simple ways to gain risk exposure and allocate capital, making mobile trading applications the most reasonable solution.

Cryptocurrency mobile trading applications are essentially no different; if product discoverability can be effectively built, they can similarly benefit from these consumer behaviors. The integration of crypto products into their apps by Robinhood, Wealthsimple, and Revolut is clear evidence of this. Even with extremely high fees, crypto products within these traditional financial applications still see significant adoption, indicating a strong demand from retail users for convenient access to the mobile crypto market. Without dedicated crypto mobile trading apps, the Web3 market will hand over significant value capture opportunities to Web2 competitors.

2. To achieve growth in scale and trading volume in the cryptocurrency market, it is necessary to provide more crypto-native mobile applications for mainstream Web2 consumers.

Since 2023, there has basically been no new retail capital inflow into the market. The current total market capitalization of stablecoins is only about 25% higher than the historical peak in 2021. This four-year growth rate is dismal for any industry—this is happening even in the context of stablecoins enjoying the most favorable regulatory environment and strong presidential support for the crypto industry.

The market needs solutions to attract new retail liquidity, but the significant barriers to new retail capital entering the market remain unresolved. The main obstacles are: first, the public believes that participating in the crypto market requires complex operational processes; second, there is a lack of accessible applications that truly understand the needs of Web2 users. Web2 retail users will not use complex wallets or transfer funds across multiple chains. What they need are products packaged in a familiar way, similar to how Robinhood or Wealthsimple accounts provide easy funding channels and user-friendly experiences.

The encrypted mobile trading front-end applications are the solution—they package products in a traditional financial manner familiar to Web2 users, fundamentally eliminating the cognitive barrier of crypto complexity and lowering the participation threshold. This is the only effective way for cryptocurrencies to break out of the Web3 circle and gain mainstream exposure.

3. Compared to Web3 business models, there are real revenue models with practical sustainable scale effects and extremely low expansion costs.

The mobile trading front of cryptocurrencies marks the beginning of a new generation of applications in the Web3 market— a more sustainable and compliant development path. Unlike previous traditional crypto products (whether infrastructure or DApps), most projects in the past did not focus on scaling or revenue generation as this was not the core incentive direction. The North Star metric for most founders was to acquire initial users at any cost, regardless of how inefficient or extractive their growth funnel was, followed by raising venture capital, locking up tokens through over-the-counter sales or waiting for the vesting period to end without improving the product. Typical cases include: Story Protocol ($IP), Blast, Sei Network ($SEI).

The encrypted mobile trading front end adopts an opposite strategy: optimizing scale using existing infrastructure to first achieve revenue generation and refinancing when necessary. By becoming an aggregator of different products and adopting a basic fee structure, this type of front end has a structural advantage to integrate multiple verticals at a very low cost, while also focusing on the user experience interface to enhance user acquisition and retention. This combination means that revenue can be generated from day one, with exponential growth achieved as operations continue. The end result builds a more sustainable practical business layer and value layer for Web3, replacing the extractive models of the past. This will bring increasing credibility to the entire Web3 industry.