09 · Testnet venue & testing
Testnet venue & testing
Getting started#
You need a wallet and some testnet USDC. Connect your wallet; the venue asks for one signature, and your accounts live under that address. Your money on the testnet sits in your own HyperCore testnet account, the same address. Get testnet USDC from Hyperliquid's own testnet faucet (the drip page on app.hyperliquid-testnet.xyz) into that account. The faucet is Hyperliquid's, so its limits and conditions are theirs and can change. You do not need any gas coin: the venue's signer pays the gas for every act you sign.
Then use it: DEPOSIT into an account from the PORTFOLIO or EARN card (the amount is printed on the button and you sign it), or just press an act and the button will say how much it needs (ADD $X AND TRANSACT). A trader can open an option or a PROTECT perp. A maker can start quoting from the EARN card; a CUSTOM maker can instead drive the venue from its own agent, and the card prints the exact recipe. When you are done, WITHDRAW or CLOSE ACCOUNT sends the dollars back to your HyperCore testnet account, within the daily limits in section 6.
One shared venue#
This is one shared venue, not a copy per browser. The chain holds the accounts of record and the service reads it; a screen is a client, reading the view over a live stream and calling an API to act. Two browsers are two wallets on the same book, with the same front, and neither sees the other's positions.
The chain: where everything computes#
The venue computes in contracts on the Elysium testnet (an Arbitrum Orbit chain settling to HyperEVM). The ledger holds every account, deposit, position, fee and funding charge. The front contract picks the best quote on each side from the makers' posted curves, and the margin contract applies the closed-form margin for sold options. What the contracts cannot see, a keeper on the service pushes in: the oracle's surfaces, the roster of makers standing, the marks, and the perp mark. The keeper also settles funding and tests accounts for liquidation. It does not set a price and clears no trade.
Money and the perps stay on HyperCore. Deposits and withdrawals move USDC between your HyperCore account and the ledger, and a PROTECT perp is a real position on HyperCore testnet, attributed to your account. You sign an intent for each act; the venue's signer submits it. The chip in the header names the ledger version and the last block the service has read, and says so when the service is behind the chain.
Only the latest minimal core lives on chain: each deploy deletes retired code at the root and is checked against a size budget, so the contracts carry nothing they do not use.
Testnet and mainnet#
The venue has two phases on the identical engine. Testnet is running now: every wallet is a real testnet wallet, deposits and payouts settle on HyperCore testnet, and no real money moves. A wallet's own accounts may fill each other, so one person can exercise both sides of a test. Mainnet starts when Elysium ships mainnet: the same venue on real funds, where a taker is never filled against a curve owned by its own wallet. Fees are already on at their launch levels on testnet, so what you see is what mainnet will charge.
Telling us what you found#
The FEEDBACK tab on the right edge of the screen (an icon beside DOCS in the top strip on a phone) opens a small panel: write what happened, or what you would like to see, up to 4,000 characters, add a contact line if you want a reply, and press SEND. You do not need to be connected. Only what you type is sent, with the page, the asset and the kind of account you were on; the venue stores neither your address nor your IP, and keeps them in memory for an hour only to limit each sender to ten messages an hour.
Every message goes into one queue. Similar ones are grouped so that the same ask counts once, with its quotes, and each group is sorted as a bug or a request, and as touching the contracts or only the screens. A person reads the queue and admits or rejects each group. Your text is treated as plain text and never as instructions.
The event log#
The service keeps an append-only event log of everything it sees: every request, fill slice, requote, settlement, oracle tick and account creation is written down with its wallet, its timestamp and its before and after numbers. A restart loses nothing, and replaying the log from event one reproduces the state hash exactly — which is what makes an independent audit possible at all.
How the testnet is tested#
Besides the contract checks described in section 10, the service is driven by scripted and agent-run populations. An agent swarm runs scripted takers, makers and an oracle actor against one venue and checks the venue's own export: units conserved per asset, cash, anonymity, and a log that replays to the same state hash. A format gate measures the interface at four widths. After each deploy that touches the interface, a population run drives ten actors as profit maximisers, one per traded role, against the live testnet venue, and files what is shown against what actually happened. A closing RETIRE step stops quoting and closes any account left with no actor behind it, so a batch does not leave junk curves on the live book.
The protocol an auditor follows — trace every printed number to the operator's own spreadsheet or to a closed-form invariant, then force the states that prove the mechanism rather than waiting for them — is the audit protocol.