Portfolio Margin Financing
A portfolio margin (PM) account keeps its collateral on HyperCore, Hyperliquid's ledger, where your perps live. Option premiums and expiry settlements are paid in USDC on Hypercall. Moving cash from HyperCore to Hypercall takes time, so most PM accounts will at some point owe cash on Hypercall before it arrives.
PM financing fills that gap automatically. When a premium or settlement is due and your Hypercall cash is short, the lending pool lends the difference. Cash that later reaches your Hypercall account repays it. You do not apply for a loan or click anything.
Who pays what, in order
When you owe cash (you bought an option, or a position settles against you):
- Hypercall cash first. Any USDC already on your Hypercall account pays.
- Then a loan. The pool lends the shortfall, up to the cash it has available.
- Then a pending obligation. Whatever the pool cannot fund at expiry is recorded as an amount you owe to the accounts on the other side of the settlement. It accrues interest at the pool's borrow rate and is due within the cure period, 3 days.
Expiry settlement is netted per underlying and expiry: all of your options on one underlying that expire at the same time settle as one amount, so a winning leg pays a losing leg before anything is borrowed.
Premiums are all or nothing. A premium loan is refused if your account is below maintenance margin, if you are in payment default, if the pool does not have the full amount, or if the loan would push pool utilization past its crisis cap. In that case the buy is refused rather than partly financed.
Selling options does not borrow. The premium you receive for a sale is credited to your Hypercall cash, and writing options does not reserve or draw pool capacity.
If you are on the winning side of a settlement and a payer could not pay in full, part of your settlement can arrive as a pending claim instead of cash. It is paid, with interest, as the payer repays. Settlement on the instrument itself never halts.
What a loan costs
Borrowing is priced by pool utilization: borrowed USDC divided by the pool's capacity (its available cash plus what is lent out). The rate is a kinked line.
| Utilization | Borrow APR |
|---|---|
| 0% | 0% |
| 30% | 2% |
| 60% (kink) | 4% |
| 80% | 52% |
| 100% | 100% |
- Below the kink, the rate rises slowly, from 0% to 4% APR.
- Above the kink, it rises steeply, from 4% to 100% APR at full utilization. The steep leg is there to pull repayments in and new lenders in when the pool runs tight.
- Interest compounds continuously on a 365-day year. A new rate applies only from the moment utilization changes; it never reprices interest already accrued.
- Pending obligations accrue at the same rate as loans. That interest goes to the accounts holding the matching claims.
GET /v1/pm-pool returns the live rate and utilization, and GET /v1/pm-pool/history returns the rate history.
How debt is repaid
- Automatically. Cash that reaches your Hypercall account, from any source, repays what you owe. It pays pending obligations first (oldest first), then interest, then principal.
- Manually. Deposit USDC to your Hypercall account and it repays in the same order.
GET /v1/pm-financinglists your loans and unpaid settlements. - Surplus cash goes back to HyperCore. Once you owe nothing, Hypercall sweeps your Hypercall cash (for example settlement winnings or premium from a sale) to your account on HyperCore. A sweep moves the whole balance once it reaches 100 USDC, only if the account stays above initial margin afterwards, and never while the account is in liquidation.
- Debt counts against margin. What you owe is subtracted from your PM equity, so it reduces your available margin and is part of your liquidation math.
Recovery: when debt is not repaid
Hypercall only reaches into your HyperCore collateral in two cases:
- Payment default. A pending obligation is still unpaid after its cure period. Only the overdue amount can be collected, and only from your HyperCore USDC. Today, Hypercall does not sell your spot holdings to collect it. While you are in default, new premium financing is refused.
- Below maintenance margin. Your account is in liquidation, and the whole liability can be collected as part of it. See Liquidation.
A healthy account that is current on its obligations never has a loan collected from HyperCore. The loan simply stays open, accruing interest, until cash repays it.
Withdrawals
Open loans block withdrawals. Any open loan principal, unpaid interest, active recovery or written-off debt blocks both USDC and spot withdrawals from the PM account. Repay first, then withdraw.
Every withdrawal must also leave your account above its initial margin requirement, with anything you owe subtracted from equity. Withdrawals are disabled while the account is in liquidation.
Where the money comes from
The pool is funded by lenders who deposit USDC and receive pool shares. See PM Lending Pool for how that side works and what lenders risk.