Hyperliquid, a high-performance decentralized exchange, just took a major step toward trustless infrastructure by expanding its validator set from 16 to 21 nodes and making them fully permissionless. Now, anyone can spin up a validator node – if they stake 10,000 HYPE tokens (locked for one year) – to compete for one of the 21 active slots. This opens the door for a much broader community of validators to secure the network, rather than a limited, hand-picked set.