When Hyperliquid was hit hardest by FUD, big names like @smartestmoney and @CL207 were buying in.
And that guy who publicly shorted the stock is being purged.
Hyperliquidated.
If you're selling/shorting $HYPE at a high price because of team unstaking or unlocking, I think that's fine. However, you need to understand that the short-term decline in $HYPE doesn't mean Hyperliquid's fundamentals have deteriorated. On the contrary, with the launch and expansion of Hyperliquid Hip-3, I believe Hyperliquid's fundamentals are improving. This is something that anyone with a clear understanding can see.
Also, I recently read an article (I won't post a link to which one), and I'd like to briefly share my thoughts on it.
The core argument of that article was that "the lack of alignment between the HyperEVM ecosystem and $HYPE has led to the market's valuation rating of Hyperliquid remaining at the application level of Aave and Uniswap, rather than the infrastructure level of Layer 1/Layer 2".
I think it's fair to say that the HyperEVM ecosystem and $HYPE are not yet aligned. The only truly valuable protocol in the HyperEVM ecosystem right now is $HYPE's LSD protocol.
However, one misconception to overcome is that the team launched HyperEVM not to raise the valuation of $HYPE, but to hope that the HyperEVM ecosystem projects can generate synergies with Hyperliquid's core PerpDEX product.
We cannot apply the traditional fat protocol, thin application theory to Hyperliquid—many projects launch Layer 1 to facilitate token sales, but we haven't seen this in the Hyperliquid team's behavior. Furthermore, most Layer 1 projects strive to develop their ecosystems to ensure their mainnet tokens have a support pool, i.e., sufficient exit liquidity.
Moreover, it has been proven that using higher values to determine the valuation of infrastructure is itself a long-standing misjudgment of value in the crypto world.
I recommend reading this article.
https://obviously.substack.com/p/crypto-is-priced-for-network-effects
Fees Don't Lie.
Layer 1 companies account for 90% of the total market capitalization, but their fees only account for 12% of the total fees. Cryptocurrency valuations are still based on the "fat protocol, thin application" theory. However, the data shows the opposite.
Hyperliquid might be able to change this. Applications are the most direct value capture layer, and the value of $HYPE lies in the long-term, substantial investment of fee revenue in the buyback of its own token. In the long run, the value of $HYPE is not driven by the narratives of HyperEVM and Hip-3, but by its fees.
Hyperliquid doesn't need the HyperEVM ecosystem as exit liquidity for $HYPE; in fact, its product fees are the exit liquidity for $HYPE. Ethereum is similar; it has a burning mechanism, but it can't capture enough fees. Layer 2 leverages Ethereum's security but hasn't been able to feed the value it creates back into $ETH. Therefore, many see Lightner as a turning point for Ethereum, hoping that as a Layer 2 component, Lightner can create incremental value for Ethereum.
Let's return to the topic of HyperEVM. Initially, developers on HyperEVM followed the logic of developing on other chains, building a complete DeFi ecosystem and memes for HyperEVM, such as LSD, lending, and DEX products. However, apart from LSD, these products did not provide any added value to Hyperliquid's core product, PerpDEX. This also prevented HyperEVM from aligning with $HYPE.
However, as I mentioned above, although Hyperliquid hasn't yet produced a phenomenal DeFi product that resonates with its core offerings, Hyperliquid doesn't currently need its ecosystem as a reservoir for $HYPE. Therefore, ecosystem projects and developers have ample time to develop. We've already seen such products emerge and develop (for example, @harmonixfi and @hyperbeat, which are about to go public at TGE), but gaining users and trust will still take time.
Therefore, I think this is a problem that we don't need to worry about at all.
Finally, returning to first principles, all the work and product updates by the Hyperliquid team serve its core product. To judge Hyperliquid's valuation ceiling solely through traditional cryptocurrency thinking is like the blind men and the elephant.
