As HYPE continued to set new all-time highs, the debate over 'HYPE vs SOL' erupted on X. At the center of the storm was Kyle Samani, former co-founder and managing partner of Multicoin Capital and a leading figure in the Solana community. The outer ring of attackers consisted of Hyperliquid loyalists led by BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes.
Over the past weekend, Samani posted extensively on X, launching a high-intensity assault on Hyperliquid. He claimed the project was fundamentally centralized and faced serious regulatory issues. On May 30 at 6:30 AM, Samani wrote: 'Hyperliquid is just Binance 2.0 without a marketing team. It has made thousands of technical decisions that only work in a centralized environment, but not in a permissionless decentralized one. They are many steps behind on this path. Also, no real US company will work with them in the future.' On May 31 at 10:53, Samani added: 'Hyperliquid is as suspicious as Binance. All the charges the US DOJ leveled against Binance apply to Hyperliquid, and evidence for each crime is on-chain. The talk of "communicating with regulators" is nonsense.' While attacking Hyperliquid, Samani also took a swipe at his old rival ETH, calling it 'reputationally neutral but technically flawed,' meaning basically 'useless.' When asked by Bitcoin developer Udi Wertheimer which token he considered a success, Samani gave the unsurprising answer—Solana.
As expected, Samani's remarks drew fierce rebuttals from the community, especially given HYPE's strength. Investors like Hayes, developers like Wertheimer, and traders like Ansem all pushed back. Hayes's response was the most direct. On May 31, he tweeted pointedly at Samani: 'HYPE should at least surpass SOL before this cycle ends.' This morning, Hayes posted again, proposing a contest with a 100 HYPE prize pool for the most humorous and offensive response to Samani's attacks. He also challenged Samani directly, willing to bet $100,000 that HYPE will outperform the top ten cryptocurrencies in the remaining seven months of this year.
How Hyperliquid Became What Solana Aspires to Be
Over the past few years, Solana's greatest success has been building a high-speed, low-cost on-chain financial infrastructure. From meme coins, DeFi, to AI agents, assets and applications choose to launch and trade on Solana. The core logic is that liquidity flows to the most efficient market. However, Hyperliquid has taken this logic a step further. Unlike Solana, which provides infrastructure and waits for applications and liquidity to grow organically, Hyperliquid starts directly from the core need of crypto—trading. It accumulates users, fee income, and liquidity through its perpetual contract market, then gradually expands into spot, crypto stocks, prediction markets, and more financial products.
The result is an extremely rare positive flywheel: more traders bring more fee income; more income fuels HYPE buybacks and ecosystem incentives; rising HYPE prices attract more capital; and more capital further enhances platform liquidity and trading depth. The cash flow generated by this flywheel has even surpassed that of public chain ecosystems like Solana. In recent years, Solana's core narrative has been 'the internet capital market,' but as users, assets, liquidity, and pricing power continue to shift to Hyperliquid, the latter now seems far closer to this narrative. In other words, Hyperliquid appears to have become what Solana most aspired to be. As Solana's most loyal flag-bearer, Samani clearly dislikes this scenario.
Role Reversal: Solana Takes Up the Decentralization Banner
Looking closely at Samani's attack on Hyperliquid reveals a dramatic irony. In the years-long debate between Ethereum and Solana, the Ethereum camp's most common line of attack was to question Solana's decentralization. High validator node requirements, excessive hardware demands, frequent network outages, and over-reliance on a few core institutions—in the eyes of many Ethereum supporters, Solana was fast but fundamentally sacrificed decentralization for performance. Solana's response was simpler: users don't care. The vast majority of users want faster confirmation, lower fees, and a better product experience, not a report on node distribution.
In a sense, Solana's rise was itself a giant victory for the 'efficiency first' approach. But now, as Hyperliquid grabs market attention, Samani is wielding the same banner the Ethereum camp once loved. Centralization, regulatory risk, censorship resistance—these accusations sound eerily familiar, only the defendant was once Solana and is now Hyperliquid. This may seem like a double standard, but in Samani's eyes, Solana likely represents the optimal balance—Ethereum is decentralized enough but too clumsy, Hyperliquid is extremely smooth but essentially resembles a CEX, while Solana looks just right from every angle.
Ultimately, this dispute is not really about HYPE versus SOL, but the decade-old question plaguing crypto: should we prioritize decentralization or product and growth? Years ago, Ethereum and Solana argued over this. Now, Solana and Hyperliquid stand in the same place. Only this time, facing an even more aggressive challenger, Solana's faithful have become the ones raising the 'decentralization' banner high.