To buy actual shares, you need a broker. To trade a stock's price, you don't: perpetual futures on Hyperliquid track stocks like Nvidia and Tesla, and anyone with a self-custody wallet and USDC can long or short them. Based is that wallet.
The reason shares need a broker is structural. Exchanges only deal with member firms, so every retail trade routes through one. The broker takes your order, sends it on, holds the shares that come back and holds your cash in between. Everything about how you trade is downstream of that. The broker's hours are your hours. Its custody is your custody. Its account application, with identity checks and a linked bank account, is your front door.
What the broker does
Strip away the app and a brokerage does three jobs. Access: it's a member of the exchange and you aren't. Custody: it holds your cash and your shares, in its name, on your behalf. Settlement: when you sell, it handles the day-long process of moving shares one way and money the other.
Those jobs are real. For share ownership, a broker is still mandatory. For price exposure, software on an open network can handle all three.
The permissionless version
Based isn't a broker. It's a self-custody wallet that connects you to Hyperliquid, a decentralised platform built for trading. What trades there are perpetual futures, contracts that track a stock's price. Go long and you profit when the stock rises. Go short and you profit when it falls. You never own the share, so nothing needs to sit in a vault in your name.
Each of the broker's three jobs works differently. Access: the markets are permissionless, so there's no membership and nobody to approve you. Custody: your money stays in a self-custodial wallet where only you hold the keys, and Based never takes possession of your funds. Settlement: trades clear on the network in seconds rather than through a next-day cycle.
In practice there's no account application, no approval delay and no linked bank account, since you fund the wallet with USDC, a dollar-pegged digital currency. The markets also run 24/7, weekends included. The idea behind all this has its own explainer: permissionless trading.
The trade-offs
No dividends and no voting rights, because you don't own shares. If your goal is holding a company for twenty years and collecting the payout, a traditional broker like Interactive Brokers does that job and Based doesn't.
Perps also carry funding, small periodic payments between longs and shorts that keep the contract tracking the stock. Fees are flat and public, listed on the fees page. Leverage is available and cuts both ways: move far enough against a leveraged position and it's closed automatically, with the margin behind it gone. Nobody reviews your suitability first, so you're the risk department. Check the liquidation price before you confirm any trade, and read the perps guide on managing it.
Self-custody is a responsibility too. Only you control the wallet, which means no one can freeze it, and no support desk can move funds for you either. On Based you log in with email or Google, so keep that login secure. More on what self-custody means.
Who this is for
Traders, mostly. People reacting to earnings at 6pm, to news on a Sunday, to a move in NVDA or TSLA while the exchange is dark. People outside the US banking system who could never open a US brokerage account in the first place. And people who want their funds in their own hands between trades.
To start: set up a wallet, fund it with USDC, pick a market from the full list and keep your first position small.