Decentralized Finance and mobile integration: the next wave of consumer-grade applications is on the way.

Author: Max @IOSG

Key Takeaways TL;DR

• Retail investing in traditional finance (tradfi) has become mobile (zero commission + app user experience), and this trend is spreading to the cryptocurrency space—retail users seek 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 frontends while balancing the execution efficiency of CEX with the advantages of DEX (self-custody, quick token listing, fewer regional/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 about 3-6% of HL perpetual contract trading volume, with different target user groups (crypto-native users, Web2 retail users, professional traders).
• Why now? “Hyper-speculation” + the creator content loop has elevated retail users' risk appetite; mobile applications have compressed users' onboarding time, simplified the complexity of crypto, and added sticky features (copy trading, fiat deposits, card payments, money markets, yield tools).
• Core Argument:
• The crypto mobile trading front benefits from the strong tailwind of the Web2 mass audience and retail behavior.
• The cryptocurrency market needs to provide more crypto-native mobile applications for mainstream Web2 consumers to achieve growth in scale and trading volume.
• Compared to Web3 business models, this field has true sustainable scalable revenue characteristics, and the marginal cost of expansion is very 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 present relevant viewpoints.

1. Background

Overall, the scale of retail investor participation in traditional investments has seen tremendous growth over the past decade. This trend began in 2019 when several large U.S. brokerage firms reduced stock trading commissions to zero in order to compete with Robinhood, significantly lowering trading costs for small accounts. The 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 Finance Survey showed a significant increase in stock market participation—58% of U.S. households directly or indirectly held stocks, with the direct ownership rate jumping from 15% to 21%, marking the largest increase on record.

Retail trading's share in daily market activities continues to stand out: it currently accounts for 20-30% of US stock trading volume, significantly higher than pre-pandemic levels. This phenomenon is not limited to the United States; it is similarly evident globally: the number of investment accounts in India surged from tens of millions before the pandemic to over 200 million by 2025. Investment channels are also continuously expanding — record inflows into ETFs in 2024-2025, combined with the rise of fractional share trading and mobile brokerage services, provide retail investors with more convenient investment tools. The cost impact of zero commissions, the channel impact of mobile trading applications, and the liquidity impact of ETFs have all jointly driven a massive influx of retail investors into the public markets, making consumer-level investment applications an important structural force in the market.

Mobile Trading App

Since 2021, the mobile trading application segment within 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 is expected to reach approximately $254.9 billion by 2033, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.1%.

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

# Social Driven (Everything Gamified, Gamblingized)

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

On a social level, communities like Wall Street Bets on platforms such as Reddit are filled with users showcasing massive gains and losses. The phenomenon of daily gains or 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 currency and view their investment portfolios as game chips. Coupled with rising living costs, widening wealth gaps, and negative emotions towards “involution,” many working-class individuals believe that the only way to achieve the American Dream is through “super speculation”—taking extremely high risks for the chance of extraordinary returns.

Mobile trading applications have successfully captured this social cultural dividend. By offering short-term options, leveraged products, instant execution, and a gamified interface experience, these applications 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 experience.

# Application Features

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

In the trading experience, by eliminating friction points of traditional brokerage models and incorporating new value points such as fractional share purchases and regular investments, these platforms simultaneously lower the capital threshold and cognitive threshold. Drawing on the familiar consumer design language of mainstream applications, they shorten the trading decision-making path, while personalized features (such as curated asset lists and portfolio performance analysis) continuously maintain user engagement.

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

2. 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 domain.

In the past five years, the usage of cryptocurrency wallet applications has surged, demonstrating the market's demand for mobile-native crypto products. As trading and profits are inherent characteristics of cryptocurrencies, perpetual contracts and DeFi have naturally become 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 trading and DeFi frontend products have begun to build upon 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 provides developers with a clear incentive layer, allowing them to earn a share of transaction fees when users trade through their front end. These features not only lower the development barrier 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 front ends choose to build on Hyperliquid.

Why choose DEX? Traders are generally attracted by the structural advantages of DEX: it offers broader access opportunities by eliminating KYC and jurisdictional restrictions, faster listing of tokens, and a richer selection of tokens, along with the autonomy of fund custody. Previously, CEX attracted retail users because they significantly reduced the complexity of market participation: they provide multiple trading markets within a single mature network application, featuring instant execution, low slippage, and high liquidity, along with integrated wallet management, stable income, fiat channels, and other auxiliary functions. However, users must bear significant counterparty risks and relinquish asset self-custody.

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

So how is all of this related to mobile wallet transactions?

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

Currently, most mobile trading front-ends offer similar functionalities centered around perpetual contract trading, but some applications have begun to go beyond perpetual contracts, providing users with more auxiliary products. Overall, these applications generally have the following features:

• Fiat deposit channels: Supports various deposit methods such as credit card/debit card, bank transfer, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo, etc.
• Investment Strategy Tool: Provides systematic investment plans, take profit and stop loss functions, and early access to new tokens.
• Currency Market Integration: One-stop access to DeFi lending protocols
• Yield Generation: Earn returns through an automatic compounding vault
• Dapp Explorer: Search and connect to emerging decentralized applications
• Debit Card/Credit Card Services: Spend directly using self-custodied funds

The implementation of these functions is attributed to the Hyperliquid infrastructure, which greatly simplifies the development difficulty of perpetual contract main products, allowing the team to focus on innovation in other derivatives fields. Due to the modular nature of the entire ecosystem, most HL-based projects can easily achieve parallel development across multiple domains. Many applications can offer rich functionalities, mainly owing to: 1. The low development threshold of Hypercore builder code; 2. The high willingness to integrate with other protocols.

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

# Basedapp

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

# Mass.Money

Following closely in the competition of mobile trading front ends is Mass.money. Unlike Based app, this platform focuses more on the Web2 retail user base, a positioning that is fully reflected in the 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 exchange, among other full-featured services. Its interface design deeply incorporates gamification elements and heavily draws on the design language of Web2 consumer applications.

However, due to their higher fee structure and wider product range, their average revenue per user and transaction volume are significantly higher than Basedapp.

# Dexari

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

# 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 user experience similar to that of CEX, but fully based on Hyperliquid infrastructure. Its product suite integrates DeFi staking features and money market access services, so the application primarily serves Web3 native traders.

Comprehensive Perspective

Overall Overview

Overall, the daily consolidated average revenue of all relevant mobile trading front-ends (including some applications not mentioned) is about $50,000, which translates 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. For reference, Hyperliquid's HLP vault accounts for about 5%.

Hyperliquid mobile trading front-end revenue

3. Conclusion

Core Viewpoints

1. The front-end of cryptocurrency mobile trading benefits from the strong tailwinds 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 have adopted 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 previously mentioned, the user growth and adoption rates of traditional financial mobile applications such as Robinhood, Wealthsimple, and TD Ameritrade have significantly increased, mainly due to their low entry barriers and business models that are eager to promote short-term high-leverage and gambling-like 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 applications like 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 applications, the Web3 market will hand over huge 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 been virtually 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, especially considering that it occurred 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 major obstacles 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 are not going to use complex wallets or transfer funds across multiple chains. What they need are products packaged in a familiar way, providing easy deposit channels and friendly experiences, just like Robinhood or Wealthsimple accounts.

Crypto mobile trading front-end applications are indeed the solution – they package products in a traditional financial way familiar to Web2 users, fundamentally eliminating the cognitive barriers 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. A real revenue model that has practical sustainable scale effects and extremely low expansion costs compared to Web3 business models

The front end of cryptocurrency mobile trading 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, subsequently 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 a contrasting strategy: optimizing scale using existing infrastructure to first achieve revenue generation, and refinancing only when necessary. By becoming an aggregator of different products and adopting a basic fee structure, this type of front end has a structural advantage of integrating multiple verticals at a very low cost, while also focusing on the user experience interface to enhance user acquisition and retention rates. 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 real business layer and value layer for Web3, replacing past extractive models. This will bring increasing credibility to the entire Web3 industry.