More than two months ago, when the $JELLYJELLY incident occurred, the market's views on the future of Hyperliquid were polarized. Some said that Hyperliquid would be FTX 2.0; some said that Hyperliquid's future was still bright.
Yesterday, $HYPE broke through $44 and hit a record high. Since James Wynn's crazy operation, Hyperliquid and the rising $HYPE have actually gotten rid of the haze and entered a new chapter.
Under the strong price performance of $HYPE, the HyperEVM ecosystem is also quietly growing and developing. How do the builders of the HyperEVM ecosystem view this ecosystem? What is the difference between Hyperliquid + HyperEVM and Binance + BNB? In terms of market value, is $HYPE overvalued or undervalued?
With these questions, BlockBeats interviewed Hyperlend co-founder @0xNessus.
The journey of Hyperlend
BlockBeats: Can you briefly introduce Hyperlend to us?
Ness: Hyperlend is like AAVE for the Hyperliquid ecosystem. It is the only project on HyperEVM that is fully officially licensed to run the latest code. We provide lending services, and users can borrow using $HYPE as collateral. Of course, there are also flash loans, and users can use this to execute any strategy they want.
Of course, in addition to these core basic functions, based on our positioning as "Hyperliquid Financial Infrastructure", we provide basic liquidity channels, on-chain risk management mechanisms, and asset-collateralized credit lines that other dApps can access. By simplifying complexity and providing deep, composable liquidity, we aim to become the preferred yield layer on Hyperliquid - where users can earn income on idle assets and obtain leverage for any strategy.
We are currently focusing on introducing new features for the Hyperliquid ecosystem, such as tokenizing the HLP vault - users can deposit money into the HLP vault through Hyperlend, and this part of the deposit will be given to the user in the form of tokens, which is equivalent to the "voucher" of the HLP vault deposit. This token can be used as collateral on Hyperlend to borrow stablecoins, which means that users can leverage more funds and deposit more money into the HLP vault to achieve higher returns.
We are also exploring the use of perpetual cooperative positions as collateral, hoping to change the limitation that long-term positions cannot play a greater role on CEX. Users will be able to open positions on Hyperlend, and this position will be created on Hyperliquid through our code, and a tokenized certificate representing the position will be obtained. In this way, if you want to open a long-term Bitcoin long or short position, you can use the position as collateral to borrow stablecoins to do more things while keeping the position open. We are also very much looking forward to this innovation.
BlockBeats: When the $JELLYJELLY incident happened more than two months ago, was your confidence in Hyperliquid shaken? What did you think of this incident at the time, and what do you think of Hyperliquid's handling of the incident?
Ness: I think they may not have considered or overlooked the meme coins that were listed on Hyperliquid but had low liquidity at the beginning. So there were smart users or entities that took advantage of this loophole, but overall the team handled it very quickly and responsibly.
This also makes me more confident in the HLP vault. Since it went online, this vault has made a lot of money - I remember that the total profit has exceeded 60 million US dollars, which is unmatched by any other market-making vault. And now they have set two different risk parameters for the vault, which I think makes it more "watertight" than before.
Overall, I think this team is very professional and the decisions they make are based on the interests of the users.
Comparison between Hyperliquid, Binance and other on-chain futures exchanges
BlockBeats: What are the similarities and differences between Hyperliquid + HyperEVM and Binance + BNB Chain?
Ness: On the surface, both are high-performance exchanges + supporting smart contract networks, but this superficial similarity masks their fundamental differences in architecture.
Hyperliquid chose "transparency first": every transaction, fund change and liquidation is executed directly on the chain, leaving an unchangeable public audit record. Binance, on the other hand, intentionally closes its order book and risk control engine within the server, and its order depth or solvency cannot be independently verified by the outside world. BNB Chain also inherits this opacity - because the deepest liquidity of the exchange has never really entered its on-chain ecosystem.
The real watershed is HyperEVM - Hyperliquid's unique execution layer, with built-in precompiled contracts and interactive code interfaces. These precompiled functions allow any developer to access Hyperliquid's complete order book with just one call. Liquidity is no longer a "walled garden" but a "public asset"; on-chain strategies do not need to indirectly access centralized levels of depth through packaged assets or fragmented AMMs.
This architectural choice brings combinatorial capabilities that BNB Chain does not have. For example, a BTC‑USDC perpetual contract can be opened directly from a HyperEVM smart contract and tokenized into an ERC‑721-like asset. The position itself becomes movable collateral - it can be transferred over-the-counter, used in lending protocols such as Hyperlend, or packaged into structured products without closing the position. On Binance, perpetual contracts can only be locked in the exchange and cannot be withdrawn, transferred, or re-pledged on-chain.
Since HyperEVM natively routes orders to Hyperliquid, principal efficiency is preserved. Whether it is a vault, a robot or an ordinary user's wallet, only one contract interaction is required to obtain the "maximum amount available in the order book", thereby eliminating the basis risk and slippage common in on-chain derivatives. On BNB Chain, developers must simulate liquidity through AMM or rely on off-chain market makers, resulting in increased latency and more complex systems.
Taken together, these design decisions result in two completely different development experiences:
- Hyperliquid closes the gap between DeFi verifiability and the depth of top centralized exchanges;
- Binance and BNB Chain continue to separate these two worlds - real liquidity only exists in the centralized core, and the chain only provides limited peripheral transparency.
BlockBeats: Why are whales like James Wynn keen on placing orders on Hyperliquid? Compared with platforms such as GMX or dYdX that can also realize on-chain perpetual contract transactions, what is unique about Hyperliquid?
Ness: For Wynn, it wasn’t the spread or funding rate that attracted him, it was the “show effect”. Hyperliquid’s fully on-chain order book broadcasts every large position in real time, making whale trading a public spectacle that the cryptocurrency community can watch second by second. Wynn took full advantage of this visibility - he deliberately opened a super-large long position, and anyone could see his liquidation price, thus creating a constant stream of attention: memes, comments, and millions of impressions, which are simply not possible on those semi-transparent platforms.
Some people think this is a calculated marketing operation. After amplifying the tension caused by his position, Wynn claimed that "market makers hunted his position on Hyperliquid" and called on traders to migrate to Binance; the timing was quite coincidental, and I think he was likely motivated to make such a statement.
The current status and future prospects of HyperEVM, benchmarking $BNB?
BlockBeats: There are already some native assets on HyperEVM, such as the meme coin $BUDDY and the NFT series Hypio. Do you think HyperEVM will be as popular as Solana or Base in the future?
Ness: To be honest, I don’t play meme coins, so I don’t know... But I think that as HyperEVM becomes more powerful and can handle more transactions, or increase the gas limit, more and more people will be interested in trading meme coins or other similar assets. Just like Solana’s success is largely due to that wave of meme coin craze, and Solana can process thousands of transactions per second on the chain with extremely low gas costs.
If there is no meme coin, users may not have such strong demand for it. I think the Hyperliquid community is very cohesive, and there will definitely be meme coins belonging to HyperEVM in the future.
BlockBeats: What do you think of the current development of HyperEVM? Is there anything that needs to be improved?
Ness: Recently, more and more people have started trading meme coins on HyperEVM, which has led to a large number of transactions being sent to small blocks. However, the Gas limit of these small blocks is only 2 million, which means that the number of transactions that each block can accommodate is very limited. Once it is filled, a higher Gas fee will be required.
At that time, the gas cost soared to about $20 per transaction, which was very high. Jeff and the entire team noticed this problem, and they quickly made adjustments to shorten the block time of small blocks from 2 seconds to 1 second, which would allow more transactions to pass faster and also help reduce gas pressure.
As long as there is such community feedback, HyperEVM will continue to improve and grow. The Hyperliquid team is always working hard to help the community and provide support as much as possible. Now of course they have their own development path and focus on what they have at hand, and the community is running on its own. But when the community's voice becomes louder, the Hyperliquid team will still stand up and listen to help everyone, which we are all very grateful for.
BlockBeats: If you compare $HYPE and $BNB, do you think $HYPE is undervalued, overvalued or performing normally?
Ness: Underestimated.
Even if it is just a pure public chain coin vs public chain coin, $HYPE still has at least 5 times of room for growth. If the value of Binance as an exchange is superimposed on $BNB, and the value of Hyperliquid as an exchange is superimposed on $HYPE, I think there will be more room. Hyperliquid repurchases about $3 million worth of HYPE every day, which is about $1 billion in buying orders on an annual basis.
If this momentum continues, the market value of $HYPE may reach an astonishing level by the end of this year.
