Highlights
- Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan says manual borrowing functionality for HyperCore is now live on testnet.
- Mainnet borrowing remains restricted to portfolio margin mode only, for now.
- HyperEVM smart contracts can now reach HyperCore's lending functionality through CoreWriter and read-only precompiled contracts.
- The change marks a step toward opening Hyperliquid's native lending capability to the smart-contract layer built on top of it.
Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan confirmed via Discord that manual borrowing functionality for HyperCore, the exchange's native trading engine, is now live on testnet, according to PANews. The update gives testnet users direct control over borrowing positions rather than relying solely on the automated portfolio margin system that currently governs all borrowing on Hyperliquid's live mainnet.
From Automated Margin to Manual Control
Today, every borrowing function on Hyperliquid's mainnet operates exclusively through portfolio margin mode, an automated system that manages collateral and borrowing exposure across a user's entire position set rather than letting users manually open or size individual borrow positions. The testnet rollout of manual borrowing represents a meaningful expansion of that model, giving users — and, more importantly, developers building on top of the chain — finer-grained control over how borrowing positions are opened, sized, and managed, rather than being confined to whatever the portfolio margin engine calculates automatically.
Why the HyperEVM Connection Is the Real Story
The more structurally significant piece of this update is that HyperEVM smart contracts can now access HyperCore's lending functionality through CoreWriter and read-only precompiled contracts. HyperEVM is Hyperliquid's Ethereum-compatible smart contract environment, built alongside HyperCore, the exchange's core order-book and trading infrastructure. Historically, these two layers have operated with a degree of separation — HyperCore handles native trading and now lending, while HyperEVM hosts general-purpose smart contracts. Opening a pathway for HyperEVM contracts to read from and write into HyperCore's lending functionality effectively lets DeFi builders on Hyperliquid construct products — vaults, structured lending strategies, automated borrowing bots — that plug directly into the exchange's native liquidity rather than needing to bridge or replicate it through separate contracts.
What This Means for the Hyperliquid Ecosystem
Hyperliquid has built its reputation primarily as a high-performance perpetuals exchange, and extending programmable access to its lending layer pushes it further into direct competition with dedicated DeFi lending protocols that have historically lived on general-purpose chains like Ethereum. If smart-contract developers can reliably borrow against HyperCore-native collateral, it opens the door to more sophisticated on-chain strategies — leveraged yield products, automated liquidation engines, and cross-protocol composability — built natively on Hyperliquid rather than requiring users to move assets elsewhere. That composability has been a major driver of growth for other L1 and L2 ecosystems in past cycles, and Hyperliquid appears to be positioning HyperCore's lending rails as its next expansion vector.
Related: Kinetiq Unveils Elysium L2 to Speed Up Hyperliquid, Uses HYPE as Gas
What to Watch Next
The key milestone ahead is whether manual borrowing graduates from testnet to mainnet, and on what timeline — Yan's comments did not include a firm mainnet date. Developers and traders should watch for early testnet activity metrics and any follow-up announcements on when portfolio margin's exclusivity on mainnet borrowing will end, since that transition will determine how quickly HyperEVM-based lending products can actually go live for real users.
