What is slippage in crypto trading? Live Hyperliquid costs and how to cut them

What is slippage? Slippage is the gap between the price you expected when you sent an order and the average price you actually got. A market buy that walks up through several price levels of the order book fills above the best ask, and a price that moves while the order is on its way fills it somewhere else. On Hyperliquid at 21:36 UTC on Nov 11, 2026, a $100,000 market buy of BTC cost 0.07 bps more than the mid price, about $0.67, while the same order on BCH, the 60th-largest market by open interest, cost 9.3 bps, about $93.

Lower execution costs with Senpi

Senpi publishes this guide. When a strategy runs on Senpi, the runtime handles execution for you:

• Maker-first by default. Senpi’s runtime places strategy entries as post-only maker orders first, at 0.015% instead of 0.045% at the base tier. A maker fill gets your limit price, with no walk through the book. When getting filled matters more, it falls back to a market order after a timeout you control (fee-optimized execution).
• 0% Senpi fee on paid plans (0.03% on the free trial), so Hyperliquid’s own maker and taker fees are the trading fees you pay.
• A stop from the first fill. Strategies built from a rule or a template carry the Dynamic Stop-Loss (DSL), and each can have its own daily-loss or drawdown halt. Copy strategies carry at most a flat stop.

A strategy you confirm runs as code on Senpi’s runtime, and by default no AI model makes live trading decisions. Each strategy trades from its own strategy wallet; the agent holds no key and cannot withdraw.

What a market order cost on Hyperliquid, Nov 11, 2026

The cost of a market buy of $10,000, $100,000 and $1 million, walked through the live order book and measured against the mid price. It doesn’t include the taker fee.

On BTC, ETH and SOL, a $100,000 market buy cost less than 1 bp, under $10. HYPE cost 2.4 bps, BNB, the 20th-largest market, 4.3 bps, and BCH 9.3 bps. A $1 million buy of BNB cost about 14 bps, around $1,440: past the top of the book, each extra dollar costs more.

What causes slippage

• Order size against depth. A market order fills against resting orders from the best price outward. The more it needs, the further it walks.
• The spread. A market buy starts at the best ask, half the spread above the mid: 0.07 bps on BTC and 0.87 bps on BCH at the snapshot.
• Moving prices. In fast markets the book changes between the moment you decide and the moment the order arrives, so the fill can land well away from the price on screen.
• Small markets and quiet hours. Depth falls on smaller markets and at quiet hours, so the same order costs more.
• Stop-market orders and liquidations. Both fire as market orders, often together and in fast moves, so they tend to fill when the book is thinnest.

Slippage tolerance

Slippage tolerance is the worst price you’ll accept, as a percentage away from the expected price. On a decentralised-exchange swap, such as on Uniswap, the swap fails if the price moves more than the tolerance before it executes. A wide tolerance on a swap also invites sandwich attacks, where a bot trades just before and after you to profit from your price impact.

Hyperliquid’s API has no separate market order type: every order carries a price. A market order is a limit order priced past the market that fills what it can at once and cancels the rest; the official Python SDK sends it as immediate-or-cancel, priced 5% from the mid by default. Stop and take-profit orders become market orders with a 10% tolerance unless you set a limit price (order types). A tight cap protects you from a bad fill but may leave the order partly filled; a loose one fills fully at whatever the book offers.

How to reduce slippage

1. 01Use limit orders when you can wait. A limit order never fills worse than its price. Post-only (ALO) guarantees a maker fill or none, at 0.015% instead of 0.045% at the base tier.
2. 02Split big orders. Hyperliquid’s TWAP order sends suborders at least 30 seconds apart over 5 minutes to 7 days, each allowed to slip at most 3%, which gives the book time to refill between them.
3. 03Check the book first. Compare your size with the depth near the mid; how to read Hyperliquid market data shows where to find it.
4. 04Trade deep markets. The same $100,000 cost 0.07 bps on BTC and 9.3 bps on BCH.
5. 05Set a sensible tolerance. Cap market orders a little above the cost the book shows, so a sudden gap leaves the order unfilled instead of filling far away.
6. 06Let the runtime work maker-first. Senpi places strategy entries as post-only orders first and falls back to a market order only after a timeout you control.

Transaction cost analysis: measure what you actually paid

Transaction cost analysis (TCA) compares each fill with the price when you decided to trade. The standard measure is implementation shortfall: the gap between the decision price and the average fill price, plus fees, as a share of the order.

Example: you decide to buy $100,000 of HYPE at a mid of $73.03. The market order fills on average 2.4 bps higher, $24 of slippage, and pays the 0.045% taker fee, $45: an implementation shortfall of $69, or 6.9 bps. As a post-only maker order it would have cost the $15 maker fee, if it filled.

Hyperliquid charges 0.015% for maker orders and 0.045% for taker orders at the base tier on crypto perps. Senpi adds 0% on paid plans and 0.03% on the free trial or without a paid plan.

This is educational material, not financial advice. The market readings are data, not trade signals, and leveraged perps can lose money quickly.