The bet is straightforward, even if the execution won't be: turn a sprawling crypto protocol into something your college roommate might actually use.
Based, a Singapore startup that's spent the past year quietly building a consumer gateway to Hyperliquid—one of the fastest-growing perpetual trading protocols in digital assets—has closed an $11.5 million Series A. Pantera Capital led the round, which wrapped the week of February 17, 2026, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute Ventures, and Karatage. The deal included both equity and token warrants, and Pantera secured an observer seat on Based's board.
It's a meaningful vote of confidence for a company trying to do what few crypto startups have managed: make decentralized finance accessible without dumbing it down.
The Hyperliquid Angle
Based has effectively positioned itself as the front door to Hyperliquid, a protocol that allows traders to speculate on price movements through perpetual futures contracts—"perps" in industry parlance. But the platform doesn't stop there. Users can access prediction markets through Polymarket, manage assets via a self-custodial wallet, and spend crypto at mainstream retailers using a Visa-linked card. All within a single interface.
"If Hyperliquid is building a house for all of finance, Based is already the front door to that house," said Jay Yu, a partner at Pantera Capital, in a statement announcing the investment.
The analogy isn't entirely a stretch. Hyperliquid has attracted serious volume—traders looking for speed and low fees without centralized exchange counterparty risk. Based captures a slice of that activity through builder-code fees on trades routed through its platform, both on Hyperliquid and Polymarket. Add in card-related revenue streams—interchange fees, foreign exchange margins—and the company has logged roughly $40 billion in cumulative trading volume and generated nearly $14 million in revenue to date.
Those are numbers that tend to get venture capitalists' attention, particularly in a market where many crypto projects remain revenue-light.
A Growing (But Still Niche) User Base
Based reports more than 100,000 registered users, with approximately 30,000 active monthly, spread across five regions. It's a respectable start, though hardly TikTok-scale. The real intrigue may lie in what the company calls "Based Cloud"—infrastructure that allows partners to spin up custom perpetual trading front ends. The most prominent example is HyENA, a decentralized exchange that uses Ethena's USDe stablecoin as collateral and has already processed over $1.5 billion in volume within months of going live.
The company's Hype Card, meanwhile, promises to let users spend crypto at 70 million merchants across 160 countries, with deposit support for Solana, Arbitrum, Polygon, and Hyperliquid. It's an ambitious product, though not without hiccups. Based discontinued its Singapore card operations last November and withdrew its application for a payment services license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. The company says the move was strategic—focusing resources on international expansion rather than navigating Singapore's increasingly stringent regulatory environment.
Whether that was a pivot or a setback depends on whom you ask.
What Comes Next
Based plans to deploy the fresh capital across three main areas: geographic expansion, deeper on-chain infrastructure, and team growth. The company currently employs around 15 people and aims to double that headcount, with a particular focus on AI engineers and payments-legal counsel. The latter signals just how complex the regulatory landscape has become for any crypto company attempting to bridge digital assets and traditional commerce.
CEO Edison Lim, who previously led engineering at Zilliqa and worked at a licensed over-the-counter trading platform in Singapore, describes Based's vision as "one app to invest globally and spend locally." That's the tagline version. The more ambitious play involves what Lim calls "agentic commerce"—AI-driven financial agents capable of identifying opportunities across perpetual and prediction markets, executing trades autonomously, and facilitating spending decisions on behalf of users.
Details remain sparse, but the company expects to share more in Q2 2026. If it sounds far-fetched, consider that autonomous agents managing DeFi portfolios are already in early deployment across several protocols. The question is whether consumers will trust them.
Origins and Evolution
Based didn't start here. The company evolved from Suberra, a web3 subscriptions and payments project that raised $2.7 million across pre-seed and seed rounds in 2022, backed by Spartan, Delphi, and Hashed. That earlier incarnation never quite found product-market fit—a common fate in crypto, where pivots are less stigmatized than in traditional tech.
The shift to positioning itself around Hyperliquid appears better timed, coinciding with growing institutional and retail interest in decentralized perps trading. Whether Based can convert that interest into sustained user growth, particularly outside the crypto-native audience, will likely determine whether this $11.5 million buys the company a seat at the table or just more runway.
For now, the company operates under the tagline "Trade Everything, Spend Everywhere." It's catchy, if a bit aspirational. Then again, in crypto, aspiration has always been part of the product.
