Hyperliquid only accepts one deposit asset on its native network: USDC on Arbitrum. Every deposit, no matter where your funds start, has to land on Arbitrum as native USDC before the Hyperliquid bridge will credit your perps account. That single rule is why most failed deposits trace back to the same handful of mistakes — wrong chain, wrong USDC variant, or sending tokens to the bridge contract from a CEX.
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This guide walks through the deposit flow from each common starting point: Ethereum, Solana, Base, Optimism, and centralized exchanges. It also covers the errors that most often cost users their funds and how to avoid them.
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Hyperliquid runs its own L1, but the deposit bridge lives on Arbitrum. Per the Hyperliquid documentation, the only supported deposit path is sending native USDC on Arbitrum to the Hyperliquid bridge contract. The minimum deposit is 5 USDC, and amounts below that are not credited.
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That means the question "how do I deposit to Hyperliquid from chain X" always reduces to: "how do I get native USDC to Arbitrum from chain X." Once your USDC is on Arbitrum, the deposit is a single transaction in the Hyperliquid web app.
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Two specific traps to flag before any deposit:

If your USDC sits on Ethereum, you have two production-grade routes to Arbitrum: Circle's CCTP and Across.
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Option 1: CCTP (Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol). CCTP burns USDC on Ethereum and mints native USDC on Arbitrum, so there's no wrapped variant to worry about. The flow is roughly 13–19 minutes end-to-end because Circle waits for Ethereum finality before authorizing the mint. Circle's CCTP documentation covers the mechanics; most front-ends (the official Circle UI, Hyperliquid's deposit page, or aggregators) wrap the burn-and-mint into one click.
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Option 2: Across. Across uses an intent-based relayer model — a relayer fronts you USDC on Arbitrum within seconds, then settles against Ethereum once the message clears. For deposits under a few million dollars, Across typically lands in 5–30 seconds. The Across docs detail the fee structure (a small relayer fee plus the L1 gas reimbursement).
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Step-by-step from Ethereum:

For a step-by-step focused specifically on the bridge step, see PLACEHOLDER-bridge-usdc-to-hyperliquid.
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Solana USDC has to cross to Arbitrum before Hyperliquid can credit it. CCTP supports Solana → Arbitrum natively as of 2024, so this is the cleanest path. Bridge providers like deBridge and Mayan also offer one-click Solana-to-Arbitrum routes that often abstract a swap step (SOL → USDC) into the same transaction.

Solana users sometimes try to send SPL USDC directly to an EVM address. That will not work — SPL and ERC-20 are separate token standards on separate networks. The bridge step is non-optional.
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Base and Optimism are both supported origins for CCTP and Across. The deposit flow mirrors Ethereum, with one practical advantage: gas is far cheaper, so fees are usually under a dollar.

Watch for the same USDC.e trap on Optimism. Native USDC on Optimism is 0x0b2C639c533813f4Aa9D7837CAf62653d097Ff85; the bridged variant is a different contract. Most modern wallets default to native, but double-check before bridging.
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If your USDC sits on Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, OKX, or similar, the simplest path is a direct withdrawal to Arbitrum. Most major exchanges support Arbitrum as a withdrawal network for USDC, and the withdrawal lands as native USDC.

If your exchange does not support Arbitrum withdrawals (some smaller venues only support Ethereum), withdraw to Ethereum first, then bridge to Arbitrum using CCTP or Across before depositing.
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Once native USDC is on Arbitrum in your wallet, the deposit itself is two transactions on first use:

After the first deposit, subsequent deposits skip the approval step. Withdrawals back out flow through the same bridge in reverse and take roughly 5–7 minutes for the Hyperliquid validators to sign off.
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"I sent USDC.e and nothing showed up." The Hyperliquid bridge ignores USDC.e. Your funds are still in your wallet on Arbitrum — they were never accepted. Swap USDC.e for native USDC using a DEX like Uniswap on Arbitrum, then redeposit.
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"I sent USDC on Ethereum to the bridge contract." The Hyperliquid bridge contract address only exists on Arbitrum. Sending Ethereum-mainnet USDC to that address means the funds went to an unrelated contract (or nowhere) on Ethereum. This is generally not recoverable. Always verify the destination chain in your wallet before signing.
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"I withdrew from Coinbase to my Arbitrum address but USDC didn't arrive." Check that you selected Arbitrum as the withdrawal network, not Ethereum. If you selected Ethereum by mistake, the USDC arrived on Ethereum mainnet at the same address — bridge it to Arbitrum from there.
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"My deposit shows confirmed on Arbiscan but Hyperliquid hasn't credited me." Hyperliquid waits for Arbitrum finality (about 1 minute) before crediting. If more than 10 minutes pass, verify the deposit was sent from the same wallet you have connected to Hyperliquid — the bridge credits the sender address, so depositing from a different wallet than the one you're trading with creates orphaned balances.
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Hyperliquid's single-asset, single-chain deposit model is simpler than dYdX's (which uses Cosmos-based deposits via Noble) but stricter than Aevo's or Drift's, which accept multiple chains and assets natively. The trade-off: Hyperliquid's bridge has fewer attack surfaces and lower operational complexity, but it forces every user through Arbitrum USDC.
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For a deeper comparison of the two leading onchain perps venues, see support/en/articles/15039717.
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This guide synthesizes the Hyperliquid official documentation (deposit flow, minimum deposit, bridge contract behavior), Circle's CCTP technical documentation (burn-and-mint mechanics, supported chains, finality windows), and the Across Protocol documentation (intent-based relay model, fee structure). Native USDC contract addresses are taken directly from Circle's published deployments and verified on Arbiscan and Optimism block explorers as of May 2026.
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