To Hyperliquid: Stop talking about "decentralization" and learn from BNB's "strong operations"
There are no secrets in the crypto market, only the speed at which they spread.
It's definitely worth writing a follow-up to Perp DEX. Nearly 20 projects are set to embark on the TGE path in Q1 2026. From Aster's trading volume to StandX's order book points, the noise being emitted into the market is making everyone uneasy.
This shouldn't lead to doubt about Hyperliquid. The synergistic flywheel between HyperEVM and HYPE failed to materialize, but Lightners couldn't crush the new king. We're so engrossed in firsthand information about the Binance vs. FTX battle that the Perp DEX War has become a secondhand memory.
Trapped in a New Chapter of Hype
"Lighter is not Lighter, Hyper is even more Hyper."
Lighter is undoubtedly a successful project. After Hyperliquid confirmed the Perp track, it successfully gained a foothold and created the established impression that Hyperliquid is Binance's counterpart, and Lighter is Hyperliquid's counterpart.
The turtle can't keep stacking up. Considering the competitive landscape of exchanges, it's extremely difficult for OKX, outside of Binance, to operate OKB. Coinbase's market capitalization is more than 5 times that of Kraken.
The trading system has a natural monopoly effect; even the second-largest player in the industry cannot achieve self-sustaining growth. Perp DEX has already entered a red ocean phase, making it impossible for large-scale market growth to occur. What remains is a zero-sum game for TGE.
First, let's set the record straight about BNB. Binance's main site and BNB Chain require a connector, something HYPE has yet to accomplish.
Image caption: Binance and Hyperliquid comparison. Image source: @zuoyeweb3
Project teams need the "listing effect" on Binance, so they are willing to pay the most expensive channel fees, from spot and futures trading on Binance's main site to pre-market trading, and even Alpha for wallets and EASY Residency for YZi Labs.
Binance needs projects to engage in "traffic management" outside of its main platform to delay the death curve after listing. Therefore, BNB Chain's "own children" (such as PancakeSwap and ListaDAO) need to accept the project's assets and use operational actions to continue the next wave of listing effects.
This is the true role of BNB and BNB Chain for Binance, but this is based on the premise that Binance's main site has a listing effect, which in turn triggered Hyperliquid's self-breakthrough.
If we want to correct the above logic, the rise of Hyperliquid is proof of this. Perp has long followed the established logic of "spot first, then contract", but Hyperliquid does not follow this. Instead, it focuses on "trading Perp" itself . This is based on the entire industry, especially since exchanges can no longer guarantee the listing effect, and the mainstreaming of trading has become an industry consensus.
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OKX tokens are unable to maintain project prices after listing, lacking both liquidity and an on-chain DeFi ecosystem, and can only act as secondary distributors for project teams. OKB lacks the ability to capture on-chain value and can only be used as in-site coupons, thus losing the fundamental function of a token.
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Hyperliquid provides traders with a professional experience. After the FTX crash, HyperCore became synonymous with on-chain transactions. The larger the transaction, the more Hyperliquid liquidity support is needed.
To add a point, Aster and CZ have promoted "privacy/dark pool trading," but they have been unable to shake Hyperliquid's market share. Apart from a few money laundering needs, privacy is not a priority for traders, and the requirement for KYC on Binance's main site is irrelevant.
Image caption: Major cryptocurrencies traded; Image source: @asxn_r
The truly fundamental and irreversible trend is that people only trade mainstream cryptocurrencies such as BTC/ETH, and new coins only have a certain trading volume when they are listed. This is true for new generation L1 cryptocurrencies such as BeraChain, Monad, and Sonic.
The "listing effect" that top exchanges relied on for survival, and the transaction fees that second- and third-tier exchanges depended on, have all become history. This may be the real reason behind exchanges' self-operated Perp DEX and their focus on trading everything, including traditional finance (stocks, forex, and precious metals).
However, none of this will harm Hyperliquid's liquidity. In the article "RFQ Structure: Market-Level Market Makers, an Alternative Choice for Latecomers to Perp DEXs ," I pointed out that Variational's advantage/feature lies in opening up its market maker structure to ordinary retail investors, which is a real market demand. However, most Perp DEXs' volume-boosting competitions are a kind of "early-stage debt" waiting to be cashed out at the TGE moment.
If you think Bitget can seize Binance's derivatives market by using gold marketing, then StandX's order book points can challenge Hyperliquid's market share.
The better the liquidity of a market, the more it will become the daily venue for traders. In the Perp DEX field, where the listing effect is even more lacking, the profiles of arbitrageurs and real users are even more divergent. Don't forget that most people are still relying on CEXs to buy dual tokens to win, let alone actually going to the blockchain to practice Perp.
Image caption: Perp DEX trading volume. Image source: @TheBlock__
Ligher accepts foreign exchange, and Edge builds its own chain. Without surpassing HyperCore's liquidity, it has inevitably become more complex to support its narrative, which will conversely reduce its token's ability to capture value, ultimately evolving into something similar to OKB—an in-site coupon. To seriously address the regulatory expectation of a "discount" for Hyperliquid, starting with BitMEX, CEXs/DEXs have never been excluded from the market due to US regulatory actions; only theft and crashes have resulted in significant changes in market share.
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Stolen Groups: KuCoin (2020), ByBit (2025, over $1.4 billion stolen)
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The group experiencing a sharp drop: BitMEX, March 12, 2020 - disconnecting from the network cable.
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Honorary Group: Huobi – Sun's pGala Incident
Furthermore, only SBF's FTX was killed by Coindesk's FUD, and it lost because it lacked the experience of CZ. From this perspective, 1011 is just an annual routine for established exchanges like Binance.
Now is a rare moment of relaxed regulation from the SEC. Binance has officially listed in Abu Dhabi, Hashkey has completed its Hong Kong IPO, and Hyperliquid is not in a state of being unregulated. Even though the Hyperliquid team insists on the appearance of "decentralization," it can refer to Binance's separate entity regulation and include the core clearing part in the regulatory framework.
The law is the entry barrier for the weak, while compliance is the price paid by the strong to secure their place in the market.
Public blockchains require strong operational capabilities.
"Turning back the clock of history, retro has become the main theme."
The listing effect on CEXs and the volume-washing effect on DEXs are both declining. Hyperliquid has no liquidity issues. HYPE has crossed the cutoff line and will not become the next FTT.
This is not the whole story. HYPE is still out of sync with the HyperEVM ecosystem, unable to create a "false prosperity" similar to BNB, rather than a DeFi system similar to the ETH mainnet . This misalignment is already evident: Ethereum is bleeding, and Hyperliquid is stalling . I will not elaborate further here.
This article focuses on the causes of the phenomenon and where the solution lies.
The relationship between rocket fuel and thrust is logarithmic, as is the relationship between HyperCore trading volume and HYPE coin price.
Limited to a chemical rocket architecture, this means that the fuel mass needs to increase exponentially to achieve a linear speed increase. Currently, HyperCore transaction fees support the price of HYPE, but HyperCore's trading volume cannot increase indefinitely, especially with Binance and Perp DEX fully diverting traffic.
Image caption: Token price and trading volume. Image source: @zuoyeweb3
Note that the above only illustrates the changes in price movement. HYPE's initial price was in the single digits, but it only truly stabilized at $30, which is the initial fair valuation "in the public eye." The trading volume has also been modified to better illustrate the relationship between the token price and HyperCore's trading volume.
Note that this does not conflict with the fact that Perp DEX cannot destroy Hyperliquid. In the crypto world, the only assets are BTC/ETH, and the overall Perp market size has already reached its peak at this stage.
Let's analyze where the Hyperliquid team's "laissez-faire" attitude comes from. The reason may not be complicated, but it is cruel enough. The Hyperliquid team still uses BTC as the standard for public chains and FTX as the reference for derivatives exchanges. They want to learn the good and avoid the bad.
USDH's auction ticketing system is quite convincing. Hyperliquid's official nodes do not participate in voting, nor do they designate any teams or provide official support for liquidity. As a result, USDH lacks sufficient development potential and has no significant advantages compared to USDC and USDe.
The Hyperliquid team's "laissez-faire" approach is currently the biggest problem with HyperEVM. This is not to say that Hyperliquid lacks the willingness and ability to operate. You may remember that Hyperliquid first gained attention because of Meme, and the subsequently launched Unit also served as an "official" cross-chain bridge. USDC has also long relied on Arbitrum to directly connect to HyperCore.
But all of this is limited to HyperCore. Perhaps in the view of the Hyperliquid team, HyperCore is the product, and HyperEVM is the ecosystem. The product needs strong operation, and the ecosystem needs to be open enough.
Unfortunately, times have changed. Today's public blockchains are more like super apps, and like internet giants, no new mass-market products have emerged for many years. TON/Monad/Berachain/Sonic are all like this. Plasma is not like a stablecoin public blockchain at all, but more like a Vault come to life.
The excessive maturity of on-chain infrastructure has led to the absence of direct network effects for public chains/L2. They either need to focus on existing resources like ETH L1/Solana, introduce RWA as a SaaS variant service like Canton, or artificially maintain it like BNB Chain.
However, Jeff wanted to avoid the disaster caused by FTX's strong operation, so he chose a conservative strategy in the HyperEVM ecosystem. As a result, the project team could only rely on community self-governance and could not build an interaction with HYPE. They could only live and die quickly after distributing HYPE.
Even HyperCore's operations follow the principle of minimalism. You can follow the Hyperliquid, Jeff, and Hyper Foundation accounts; there is basically no interaction with the project team.
This situation was suitable for the DeFi Summer of 2017 or 2020, when there was a lack of corresponding products on the chain. Creating such products meant traffic and profits, and there was even excessive imagination about the tokens. These conditions have now disappeared.
Hyperliquid doesn't even need to drastically change its style; it only needs to learn from BNB's playstyle to build its own unique growth flywheel.
HYPE's way out lies in imitating BNB.
Image caption: The relationship between ecology and application; Image source: @zuoyeweb3
Observing the public chains/L2 that are currently surviving, it is not a simple interaction between ecological prosperity and the strong value capture ability of the mainnet token. The reality is far more complex than the theory. The only one that fits the established impression is ETH itself, and the rest cannot be simply categorized.
In other words, ideals are ideals because they never manifest in reality.
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Single-application groups: TRON and Polygon both survive on a single application, the former's USDT and the latter's Polymarket;
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Technology-oriented group (era-defying group): Polkadot and ATOM are advanced in technology and concepts, but their tokens cannot capture economic value;
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Purely token-driven: Monad/Berachain, no further explanation needed, their historical mission was accomplished once the tokens were issued.
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Ecosystem Prosperity Group: Solana and Ethereum
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Existentialist group: Ripple, Avalanche, existence is everything, everything is existence.
Furthermore, Binance's main site and HyperCore are both in the "well-rounded" category. Their tokens have extremely strong value capture capabilities, and their products are multi-functional: spot/Perp trading, wealth management, staking, and even transfers. They are not public chains, but they are better than public chains.
BNB Chain's value lies in being a component of Binance's main site as a "public blockchain." Even after Long Ma left and Rong Ma arrived, Binance has never given up on BNB Chain for this reason: many things are easier to do on a public blockchain than on an exchange, and the value of traffic is long-term.
However, Hyperliquid's HIP-3 is also an overflow of HyperCore liquidity, essentially competing with HyperEVM for traffic entry points. This traffic battle is now happening not only between HIP-3 project teams, but also between Builder Code and HyperEVM project teams.
Hyperliquid aims to become the liquidity AWS, but its internal organizational structure is not well-defined.
BNB Chain is not the perfect form Binance is looking for, but it is enough for Hyperliquid to learn from.
BNB Chain is a distribution channel for Binance's main site and cannot generate its own revenue without strong operations, let alone support Binance itself. However, it is sufficient for the current stage of HyperEVM.
There is a possibility of moving forward between not compromising the principle of minimum operations and maintaining the openness of HyperEVM. The failed HIP-5 proposal, which "handpicked" the leaders in various tracks such as lending, swap and LST, was too crude, and using the HYPE iteration to buy back project tokens is also not feasible.
Ecosystem collaboration does not violate any principles. The Hyperliquid team hardly interacts with any project teams, perhaps because they prefer off-chain collaborations similar to the MM Alliance, but on-chain exposure is still needed.
If even the most basic HyperEVM operations are not implemented, we will likely see HYPE at $50. Lacking the imagination of HyperEVM network effects, HYPE will lose the support of exponential growth potential.
Without the assistance of HyperEVM, HyperCore would have to rely on liquidity to reach the level of OKX, but that would still not be enough to build a HYPE flywheel.
In short, for the on-chain ecosystem, the "decentralized" HyperEVM has no way out.
Conclusion
“Hyperliquid is lighter and more capital-efficient than Binance, Lighter is not lighter than Hyperliquid, and Aster is eager to become more complex.”
Perp DEXs like TGE, or those similar to TGE such as Aster and Edge, will all develop their own L2/public chains as part of a plan to boost valuations, just as PumpChain is part of a token issuance plan.
Now is the critical moment for Hyperliquid to become more complex and leverage its scale advantage for the future.
As mentioned before, Hyperliquid is not good at innovating a certain type of product (Jeff has also worked on prediction markets), but it excels in engineering and combination capabilities. If FTX is not a good role model, then BNB Chain is a good one to imitate.
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