The broken defense of Solana's guardians: In order to tear apart Hyperliquid, they actually picked up the script that Ethereum once criticized itself?
Author: Odaily Planet Daily Azuma
As HYPE continues to rewrite new highs, a debate has erupted on X around "HYPE vs SOL."
At the center of the verbal battle is Kyle Samani, the former co-founder and managing partner of Multicoin Capital, a flagbearer of the Solana community (refer to "The Man Who Calls SOL the Most, Exits the Crypto World"), while the attackers from the outside are represented by Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX, and loyal "believers" of Hyperliquid.
The Verbal Clash Between S Guards and H Guards
This past weekend, Samani himself posted a large number of updates on X, actively launching a high-intensity "attack" on Hyperliquid, criticizing the project for being fundamentally centralized and having serious regulatory issues.
On May 30 at 6:30, Samani wrote: "Hyperliquid is essentially just a Binance 2.0 without a marketing team (Binance is innocently caught in the crossfire...). It has made thousands of technical decisions in its architectural design that are only suitable for centralized environments and are completely unsuitable for permissionless decentralized environments. They are already far behind on this path. Moreover, no real American company will cooperate with them in the future."
On May 31 at 10:53, Samani further stated: "Hyperliquid is as suspicious as Binance (again caught in the crossfire...). All the accusations made by the U.S. Department of Justice against Binance apply to Hyperliquid, and evidence of each crime is documented. The so-called 'communication with regulators' is pure nonsense; Binance has been communicating with regulators for years..."
While attacking Hyperliquid, Samani did not forget to take a jab at his old rival ETH, claiming it is "reputation-neutral but technically flawed," in other words, "completely useless"...
Ultimately, when responding to renowned Bitcoin developer Udi Wertheimer's question about "which token you consider a success," Samani gave the unsurprising answer—Solana.
Unsurprisingly, Samani's remarks provoked fierce rebuttals from the community, especially at a time when HYPE is so strong. Investors like Hayes, developers like Wertheimer, and traders like Ansem all responded to Samani's views with varying degrees of counterattacks.
Among them, Hayes's rebuttal was the most direct. On May 31, Hayes posted a "yin-yang" message to Samani, stating: "Before this round of market ends, HYPE should at least surpass SOL."
This morning, Hayes posted again, proposing a content competition with a prize pool of 100 HYPE, requiring participants to humorously and offensively counter Samani... Meanwhile, Hayes directly challenged Samani, stating he is willing to bet $100,000 that HYPE will outperform the other top ten cryptocurrencies in the remaining seven months of this year.
The Narrative Conflict Between Solana and Hyperliquid
In recent years, Solana's greatest success has been in building a high-speed, low-cost on-chain financial infrastructure. From Meme, DeFi to AI Agent, various assets and applications have chosen to issue and trade on Solana, with the core logic being—liquidity gathers in 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 naturally, Hyperliquid directly addresses the core demand of the crypto industry through perpetual contract markets, accumulating users, fee income, and liquidity, and gradually expanding into spot trading, coin-stock, prediction markets, and more financial products.
As a result, Hyperliquid has formed an extremely rare positive flywheel—more traders bring more fee income; more income feeds back into HYPE buybacks and ecological incentives; HYPE price increases attract more capital; more capital further enhances platform liquidity and trading depth. The cash flow capability created by this flywheel has even surpassed that of public chain ecosystems, including Solana.
In recent years, Solana's core narrative slogan has been "Internet Capital Markets," but as users, assets, liquidity, and pricing power continue to shift towards Hyperliquid, the latter now seems to align much more closely with this narrative than Solana. In other words, Hyperliquid seems to have become the embodiment of what Solana aspires to be.
As Solana's most loyal flagbearer, Samani is clearly unwilling to see this situation.
Samani's Tactic: Using the Criticism of Solana from Years Ago to Attack Hyperliquid
A close observation of Samani's attacks on Hyperliquid reveals a rather dramatic phenomenon.
In recent years, during the debates between Ethereum and Solana, the most common attack method from the Ethereum camp has been to question the degree of decentralization of Solana. High thresholds for validation nodes, high hardware requirements, frequent network outages, and an ecosystem overly reliant on a few core institutions... In the eyes of many Ethereum supporters, although Solana runs fast, it essentially sacrifices decentralization for performance.
The response from the Solana camp has been quite simple—users do not care about these issues. For the vast majority of users, what they need is faster confirmation speeds, lower fees, and better product experiences, rather than a research report on node distribution.
In a sense, Solana's rise itself is a huge victory for the "efficiency-first" approach. However, now that Hyperliquid has begun to capture market attention, Samani has raised the very flag that the Ethereum camp loved to wave back in the day.
Centralization, regulatory risks, censorship resistance... these accusations sound somewhat familiar, except that the former "defendant" was Solana, and now it has become Hyperliquid.
This seems somewhat "double standard," but perhaps in Samani's eyes, Solana represents that optimal balance—Ethereum is sufficiently decentralized but too clumsy, Hyperliquid is extremely smooth but essentially resembles a CEX, while Solana, in contrast, appears to be so "prominent"...
In a sense, the essence of this debate is not the competition between HYPE and SOL, but rather an old question that has persisted in the crypto industry for over a decade—should we prioritize decentralization or prioritize products and growth?
Back then, Ethereum and Solana argued endlessly over this issue. Now, Solana and Hyperliquid find themselves in the same position.
Only this time, facing a more aggressive opponent, Solana's believers have become the ones waving the "decentralization" banner.
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