VALR brings 200+ Hyperliquid perpetual markets to Africa's largest exchange with Hydromancer

Client

VALR was founded in Johannesburg in 2018 and has become Africa's largest crypto exchange by trading volume, serving more than 1.9 million registered users and over 1,900 institutional clients. It is regulated by South Africa's FSCA, holds a provisional licence from the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority, and is backed by Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and F-Prime Capital. In July 2026, VALR launched more than 200 perpetual markets powered by Hyperliquid's onchain liquidity — global equities and indices, commodities, FX, and hundreds of crypto tokens — traded from the VALR app users already know, with every position verifiable onchain.

Why Hydromancer?

Routing orders to Hyperliquid is the easy part. The hard part is keeping an exact, real-time picture of every user's onchain account state — positions and margin, fills including liquidations, funding payments, deposits and transfers — around the clock on 24/7 markets. Through Hyperliquid's public API that means polling each user one by one, which doesn't scale to an exchange's user base. A regulated exchange also needs what public APIs don't offer: SLAs, direct support, and the ability to request features.

Solution

After a testnet phase building a production-like setup together, VALR's engineering team replaced its direct Hyperliquid data calls with Hydromancer and went live on mainnet. VALR runs on Hydromancer's unique WebSocket streams — leverage updates, builder order updates, and market data for every Hyperliquid market in a single allActiveAssetCtx stream. Because VALR users can't export their wallets, every action on an address that approved VALR's builder fee is a VALR action — so Hydromancer built a new family of endpoints scoped to builder approval instead of builder codes: builderApprovedFills (REST and WebSocket, liquidations included), builderApprovedFundingEvents, and builderApprovedNonFundingLedgerUpdates, plus last-touch builderLiquidations and multi-DEX allActiveAssetCtx subscriptions covering the main DEX and HIP-3 markets together.

Results

• ✓VALR tracks its whole user base through a handful of builder-level streams instead of one request per user per data type — adding a user no longer adds a polling loop
• ✓Funding for every user arrives in one feed, replacing an hourly loop over every account
• ✓Pricing reworked for exchange-scale account-state polling: clearinghouseState is now 40x cheaper

What's next

Distribution and trust increasingly come from regulated, local platforms, while liquidity lives on open, onchain rails. As HIP-3 brings more equities, commodities, and new asset classes onto Hyperliquid, Hydromancer will keep supporting VALR as it opens global markets to its users. The builder-approved endpoint family is now available to any team running a custodial or embedded-wallet integration on Hyperliquid.