Solana and Hyperliquid’s most loyal defenders are now at each other’s throats

Author | Azuma (@azuma_eth)

As HYPE continues to hit new highs, a heated debate around “HYPE vs SOL” has erupted on X.

At the center of this war of words is Kyle Samani, former co-founder and managing partner of Multicoin Capital and a flagship figure in the Solana community (see: The Man Who Could Shill SOL Best, Exits the Crypto World). Besieging him from the outside are the devoted “followers” of Hyperliquid, led by BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes.

The War of Words Between SOL Guards and HYPE Guards

Over the past weekend, Samani posted a flurry of messages on X, aggressively “opening fire” on Hyperliquid, accusing the project of being highly centralized at its core and having serious regulatory issues.

At 6:30 AM on May 30, Samani wrote: “Hyperliquid is essentially just a Binance 2.0 without a marketing team (Binance catches an innocent stray…). It has made thousands of architectural decisions that are only suitable for centralized environments but completely unsuitable for a permissionless, decentralized environment. Now, they are many steps behind on this path. Moreover, no real US company will ever cooperate with them in the future.”

At 10:53 AM on May 31, Samani added: “Hyperliquid is just as suspicious as Binance (again catching a stray…). All the accusations that the US Department of Justice made against Binance apply to Hyperliquid, and the evidence for every crime is documented. The talk of ‘engaging with regulators’ is pure nonsense; Binance had been engaging with regulators for years too…”

While attacking Hyperliquid, Samani didn’t forget to take another jab at his old rival ETH, calling it “reputably neutral but technically flawed,” in other words, “basically useless”…

Finally, when asked by prominent Bitcoin developer Udi Wertheimer about which token he considers a success story, Samani gave the predictable answer — Solana.

Unsurprisingly, Samani’s comments drew strong rebuttals from the community, especially given HYPE’s strong performance. Investors like Hayes, developers like Wertheimer, and traders like Ansem all pushed back against Samani’s views with varying degrees of intensity.

Hayes’s retort was the most direct. On May 31, Hayes posted a sarcastic message targeting Samani: “Before this cycle is over, HYPE should at least surpass SOL.”

This morning, Hayes posted again, suggesting he wanted to organize a content contest with a prize pool of 100 HYPE, requiring participants to respond to Samani humorously and offensively… At the same time, Hayes directly called out Samani, offering a $100,000 bet that HYPE would outperform the other tokens in the top ten 加密貨幣currency rankings for the remaining seven months of the year.

The Clash of Narratives: Solana vs. Hyperliquid

Over the past few years, Solana’s greatest success has been building a high-speed, low-cost on-chain financial infrastructure. From Memes and DeFi to AI Agents, various assets and applications have chosen to issue and trade on Solana. The core logic is that liquidity aggregates towards the most efficient markets.

However, Hyperliquid has taken this logic a step further.

Unlike Solana, which provides infrastructure and waits for applications and liquidity to grow organically, Hyperliquid directly targets the most core demand of the crypto industry — trading. It accumulates users, fee revenue, and liquidity through its perpetual contract market, before gradually expanding into spot trading, stocks, prediction markets, and more financial products.

As a result, Hyperliquid has formed an extremely rare positive flywheel: more traders generate more fee revenue; more revenue is reinvested into HYPE buybacks and ecosystem incentives; rising HYPE prices attract more capital; and more capital further enhances the platform’s liquidity and trading depth. The cash flow generation capacity of this flywheel has even surpassed that of public chain ecosystems like Solana.

In recent years, Solana’s core narrative has been the “Internet of Capital 市場s.” However, as users, assets, liquidity, and pricing power continuously shift towards Hyperliquid, the latter now seems to fit this narrative far better than Solana. In other words, Hyperliquid seems to have become what Solana aspired to be.

As Solana’s most loyal standard-bearer, Samani is evidently unwilling to accept this situation.

Samani’s Tactic: Using the Arguments Once Used Against Solana to Attack Hyperliquid

A closer look at Samani’s recent attacks on Hyperliquid reveals a rather dramatic phenomenon.

In the past debates between Ethereum and Solana, the most common attack from the Ethereum camp was questioning Solana’s degree of decentralization. High barriers for validator nodes, stringent hardware requirements, frequent network outages, and an ecosystem overly reliant on a few core institutions… To many Ethereum supporters, while Solana was fast, it was essentially sacrificing decentralization for performance.

The Solana camp’s response to this was quite simple: users don’t care about that. For the vast majority of users, what they need is faster confirmation times, lower fees, and a better product experience, not a research report on node distribution.

In a way, Solana’s rise was a massive victory for the “efficiency-first” approach. But now, when Hyperliquid starts capturing market attention, Samani is wielding the very flag that the Ethereum camp once loved to wave.

Centralization, regulatory risk, censorship resistance… These accusations sound somewhat familiar, except the “defendant” used to be Solana, and now it’s Hyperliquid.

This might seem somewhat hypocritical or “double-standard,” but perhaps in Samani’s eyes, Solana represents that optimal balance point — Ethereum is decentralized enough but overly cumbersome; Hyperliquid is extremely sleek but is essentially a CEX at its core. Meanwhile, Solana, from his perspective, looks “honest and upright”…

In a sense, the essence of this debate is not a competition between HYPE and SOL, but the age-old question that has persisted in the crypto industry for over a decade — should we prioritize decentralization, or should we prioritize product and growth?

Years ago, Ethereum and Solana debated this issue endlessly. Today, Solana and Hyperliquid find themselves in the same position.

Only this time, facing a more aggressive opponent, the followers of Solana have become the ones raising the banner of “decentralization.”

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