Ryan, co-founder of Syncracy Capital, said in a conversation published by The Rollup and translated by Baihua Blockchain that he sees the current digital-asset cycle as a candidate to become the biggest bull market in the sector’s history. Hyperliquid sat at the center of that discussion. Ryan said that when Donald Trump mentioned Hyperliquid during a televised press conference, HYPE jumped from around $59, where he had seen it minutes earlier, to near $70 while he was on a call with co-founder Dan.
Ryan recounts the moment Trump mentioned Hyperliquid
The host opened by revisiting an earlier HYPE trade, saying he and Robbie had lived through two 80% drawdowns in an asset that faced regulatory resistance, which made the position difficult to hold. Even so, they had tracked it for more than two years, kept it as a core portfolio position, and said the portfolio had delivered strong excess returns through the bear market.
Ryan said the Trump moment came out of nowhere. He was sitting in the same spot, on a call with Dan, when messages started pouring in telling him HYPE was already trading near $70. Just a few minutes before, he had seen it at about $59. The move turned almost vertical. At first they did not know why, and then learned that Trump had referred to Hyperliquid directly during a live televised news conference.
He added that Hyperliquid had already pushed Stars-related features to public testnet back in July and August. In Ryan’s reading, the team only ships core features to public testnet when it wants the public to start experimenting and preparing for what comes next. Based on their own data work, Hyperliquid has typically taken about three months to move from public testnet to mainnet, with six months as the outer limit. That led them to believe the rollout was already in motion. He said they did not expect a public mention from the top of U.S. politics, but the project had prepared strategically for this stage.
Ryan said one of the most persistent questions around Hyperliquid had been simple: if U.S. regulators moved to restrict it, what would that mean for growth? He now sees that overhang beginning to fade. In his words, the U.S. capital market is the largest and most important center of financial liquidity in the world, and breaking through that gate would materially raise Hyperliquid’s ceiling.
From an early revenue rerating story to an "exchange everything" thesis
Ryan said the initial investment case was relatively straightforward. At launch, Hyperliquid was valued at about $3 billion while generating roughly $200 million in annualized revenue, and the business was still growing at a steep pace. Outside airdrop recipients, there was barely any circulating supply in the market. The main way to acquire the token was to bridge assets onto Hyperliquid itself. Ryan called that design strategically elegant because any fund or individual that wanted to build a position had to become a real platform user first, while no institution was sitting on pre-allocated cheap inventory.
At that point, he said, Hyperliquid was already among the top four revenue-generating applications and blockchains in the industry, while several assets ahead of it did not appear to have durable fundamentals. He believed the market had left substantial room for rerating, to the point that even a threefold to fivefold move could still leave the asset undervalued.
He said Syncracy had long worked with a broader macro thesis: an on-chain venue where any asset can trade on a permissionless blockchain network, with derivatives as the long-duration anchor of that opportunity. By early 2025, after deeper conversations with the core trading team and market-making firms, Ryan said he developed what he described as a generational holding conviction.
In his view, the market has spent too long treating on-chain perpetuals as a battle confined to Web3-native competition. He thinks the real target is the global financial system. The first step is taking share from major centralized exchanges including Coinbase, Bybit and BN. The longer-term benchmark is firms such as CME in traditional finance.
That is why the key metric for his team was never market share against other on-chain venues alone. It was Hyperliquid’s share relative to BN and Bybit. Ryan said that measure kept rising and repeatedly hit fresh highs, reinforcing the growth case.
The metrics Ryan watches now
The host noted that before some of the major headlines landed, HYPE spent time consolidating around $40, and some market participants focused on short-term fee pullbacks while overlooking the steady increase in HIP-3’s share of total trading volume.
Ryan said Hyperliquid cannot be judged through a single data point. He looks at a broader operating dashboard that includes:
- changes in market share relative to top venues such as BN, Coinbase and Bybit;
- its penetration into global CFD, futures and options volume;
- absolute growth in platform trading volume and the compounded growth rate of net protocol income;
- net deposit flows and the growth curve of average on-chain account net worth.
As long as those operating indicators keep compounding, he said, short-term price swings in the secondary market matter far less because the floor of the system’s intrinsic value is still rising.
Ryan tied that view to the product stack now taking shape around Hyperliquid: cross-margin portfolio systems, spot markets, HIP-3, and regulated HIP-3 and HIP-4 compliance frameworks. The longer-term vision, as he described it, is a venue where users can post nearly any major asset as full collateral and trade financial instruments from anywhere in the world. He framed that as a structural advantage of blockchain architecture, with global assets clearing on one permissionless ledger.
He also stressed that the build-out remains early. Even if perpetuals are viewed in isolation, he said their share of global CFDs or retail options remains below 1%, yet the business is already producing striking levels of cash flow and protocol revenue.
For that reason, Ryan said investors should not let monthly fluctuations dominate their thinking when a protocol has strong internal compounding. He contrasted the current environment with earlier crypto cycles marked by circular liquidity and reflexive speculation that could evaporate when macro assets sold off. What he sees now is a more durable shift: the number of real on-chain traders and the scale of on-chain settlement are compounding each year, and the commercial revenue captured by base protocols is expanding with them.
A barbell approach: cash-flow businesses on one side, store-of-value assets on the other
The host said his own portfolio uses a barbell structure. One side is concentrated in on-chain businesses with self-sustaining economics, large total addressable markets and durable token models. The other side is made up of store-of-value assets. He named Bitcoin, gold and HYPE as core long positions and said the portfolio has been expanding into application-layer assets with real cash flow, while avoiding infrastructure names and excess L1/L2 middle layers that lack meaningful business moats.
Ryan said high-quality on-chain businesses that function as "profit machines" are changing the industry narrative. In traditional finance, he noted, the purpose of a business is to use capital to generate real profit. Crypto drifted away from that common sense for years, leaning instead on artificial liquidity metrics and attention games to justify valuation. In a changed macro environment, he said, crypto can no longer rely on being the only outlet for global speculative excess. Protocols have to prove why they deserve to be held.
He also argued that revenue distribution is not the only valid expression of healthy fundamentals. Some businesses retain all cash flow and reinvest it into expansion instead of turning on fee switches for token holders. Ryan used Morpho as an example, saying its loan and borrow balances and real demand have shown a steep, hockey-stick-style increase, and that reinvestment into protocol expansion can be rational during a high-growth phase.
Hyperliquid, by contrast, uses a different model. Ryan described it as a fully transparent on-chain system that executes buybacks and burns programmatically through smart contracts, comparing it to Ethereum’s deflationary clearing design. Whichever route a project takes, he said, the real question is whether the system keeps creating positive economic value. That, in turn, is making asset selection clearer as market capital narrows toward a smaller set of businesses that actually work.
Why Ryan sees store-of-value markets as winner-take-most
When the discussion moved to Bitcoin and Zcash, Ryan said store-of-value markets are governed by harsh winner-take-most dynamics, if not outright dominance by the leader.
He pointed to the long history of money and precious metals. Gold holds the overwhelming share of value across a market worth tens of trillions of dollars, while silver and other secondary metals trail far behind, and later tiers lose most of their monetary premium. In a fully global, permissionless blockchain market, he said, that power-law effect should be even stronger. In practice, only one or two assets are likely to survive as true inter-cycle beacons of value storage.
Ryan said Bitcoin has already secured the central role through its first-mover position, the deterministic 21 million hard cap, and a global liquidity network. If the market were to recognize a complementary competitor, he argued it would be less likely to be a single-purpose monetary fork and more likely to be the native asset of a top smart-contract chain that carries the deepest real economic activity, the strongest liquidity, and broad collateral demand.
He said a credible store-of-value asset needs a very large holder base, deep liquidation capacity, and broad collateral usefulness across markets. In his view, those conditions tend to emerge only around leading smart-contract networks.
On Zcash specifically, Ryan said the cypherpunk idealism behind its early development was real, but pure hacker vision has been pushed to the margins through several market cycles. He acknowledged that some market participants are trying to reframe Zcash as an institutional-grade "private Bitcoin," but said actual on-chain behavior does not show much capital settling there as either a high-frequency privacy currency or an everyday unit of value.
Privacy, he said, is better understood as a functional module that can be added to general-purpose smart-contract chains through technical upgrades. Without overwhelming liquidity depth, the market has little need for a second Bitcoin with overlapping utility. Once monetary network effects accumulate around the leader, they tend to reinforce themselves nonlinearly.
Social trading, transparent ledgers, and crypto as a financial MMORPG
The host referred to a recent essay in which Ryan compared the current on-chain trading ecosystem to "the world’s largest MMORPG." He noted that traders have increasingly become public figures, and that some now display unrealized gains and losses so large that the spectacle rivals, or even exceeds, the public attention around elite professional athletes.
Ryan said the core idea running through Hyperliquid, Pump and Solana is the same: 24/7, globally liquid, low-friction free trading remains blockchain’s clearest killer application. Once anyone in the world can issue and trade assets with low friction, large-scale financial game play is bound to emerge as speculative cycles unfold. Speculation, in his view, is embedded in the history of finance and is not going away because one cycle ends.
He contrasted today’s on-chain social trading with earlier versions. In the past, users discussed strategies on traditional social platforms, used third-party screenshots to prove performance, and then executed copy trading through cumbersome cross-platform workflows. The major change now is that the full experience has been pulled into a native on-chain loop. On an immutable and fully transparent distributed ledger, any account’s historical PnL, position changes and entry points can be cryptographically verified. Smart contracts can also support atomic copy-trading execution at the same moment. Ryan said that combination of transparent verification and real-time settlement is a structural advantage centralized platforms cannot reproduce.
He added that earlier cycles also produced stories of large fortunes, but without a unified identity layer, those wins usually remained attached to isolated anonymous wallet strings and did not turn into lasting social credibility. With transparent ledgers now tied to persistent on-chain identity, individuals displaying tens of millions of dollars in public PnL can become financial celebrities with real distribution power. That, he said, is drawing capital and attention into the ecosystem for liquidity matching and strategy following.
Ryan did caution that speculation built on low-liquidity meme assets is cyclical and often zero-sum. Still, he said, social trading as a product format has much broader commercial reach. Meme assets may be an efficient wedge that brings mass attention on-chain, but as infrastructure improves, the category is already expanding into mature perpetuals, tokenized equity-like assets and traditional financial derivatives. Under a unified transparent ledger, user groups are splitting naturally by risk preference and forming distinct investing communities. Ryan said that process is still in its early stage.
Creator incentives and the rise of on-chain financial personalities
The host said real-time, on-chain-verifiable PnL is replacing the marketing-heavy sales tactics that once dominated paid groups and copy-trading scams, while creator incentives and live rankings are pulling both retail traders and market-making capital into the space.
Ryan described creator rewards as a compliant and modernized upgrade of the traditional paid-community model. In older setups, the lack of an auditable performance record often allowed people without real trading ability to sell fear and aspiration to less informed users. In transparent on-chain environments, by contrast, a trader’s income and reputation depend directly on whether the strategy works and whether users actually convert.
He said top traders once hesitated to reveal their strategies because doing so could erode alpha, but on-chain protocols can now return part of trading fees and creator incentives to strategy providers at scale. That gives them a more predictable revenue stream, in some cases larger than the payoff from their own position swings. Ryan said some leading platforms are paying millions of dollars a week to top strategy creators, with annualized capital formation above $100 million. That means top providers can earn several million dollars from creator revenue share alone.
He said the spillover from that model is already visible. Beyond standard revenue shares for token deployers, business partnerships, dedicated market-making support and invitations to major offline events are pushing leading on-chain traders toward the status of supercharged personal brands. Just as important, Ryan said, the same logic can be applied far beyond leveraged trading. Future on-chain experts could include senior credit analysts focused on fixed-income protocols, prediction-market strategists, or specialists in tokenized real-world asset allocation.
Ryan ended by saying that in a deeply connected digital world, "finance as content" has become an increasingly visible trend. Even users who do not trade leveraged products at high frequency may still log in every day, because real-time price moves, publicly verifiable wealth reshuffling and intense battles between longs and shorts are compelling forms of content on their own. As more asset classes move into on-chain clearing, he said, the growth curve behind that narrative is only beginning to appear.
The host closed by saying that as core assets such as HYPE continue to build a stronger base in the secondary market and press to new highs, the path for the sector is becoming easier to read. Ryan thanked him for the invitation and said he appreciated the chance to discuss the deeper structural shifts now under way.