I just found out that Hyperliquid has activated a pretty interesting feature on their testnet: cross-margin for HIP-3. Basically, what it does is allow all your perpetual contracts on cross-margin to share the same collateral, even if you're trading across multiple DEXs simultaneously. That’s a significant change because until now, margin experience on these protocols was more fragmented.

What I find clever is how they structured it. When you use a unified account, the system protects your assets across different DEXs up to their maintenance margin levels. Essentially, it prevents your position from being liquidated automatically just because of sharp price fluctuations on another DEX. It’s that kind of detail that shows they thought about the user experience without sacrificing the system’s solvency.

For now, this is on the testnet and qualifies for the mainnet bug bounty program, so it’s not in production yet. The important thing is that the HIP-3 deployer has to manually enable it for each specific asset. And there’s a clear restriction: this cross-margin feature doesn’t work through DEX abstractions, so if you want the expected cross-margin behavior, you need to go directly to unified accounts or combined margins.

It’s interesting to see how these permissioned protocols are evolving in liquidity composition. If this works well on mainnet, it could significantly change how people operate with leverage in these spaces.