More than two months ago, when the $JELLYJELLY incident occurred, the market's view on Hyperliquid's future became polarized. Some said Hyperliquid would be FTX 2.0; others said Hyperliquid's future remains bright.
Yesterday, $HYPE broke through $44 to set a new all-time high. Since the crazy operations by James Wynn began, Hyperliquid and the continuously rising $HYPE have already emerged from the shadows, entering a new chapter.
With the strong price performance of $HYPE, the HyperEVM ecosystem is also quietly growing. How do the builders of the HyperEVM ecosystem view this ecosystem? What are the differences between Hyperliquid + HyperEVM and Binance + BNB? Is $HYPE overvalued or undervalued in terms of market cap?
With these questions in mind, Rhythm BlockBeats interviewed Hyperlend co-founder @0xNessus.
The journey of doing 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 has official full permission to run the latest code. We provide lending services, allowing users to borrow using $HYPE as collateral. There are also flash loans, which users can use to execute any strategies they desire.
Of course, besides these core basic functions, based on our positioning of 'Hyperliquid financial infrastructure', we provide basic liquidity channels, on-chain risk management mechanisms, and other asset collateral credit lines that dApps can access. By simplifying complexity and providing deep, composable liquidity, we aim to become the preferred yield layer on Hyperliquid — users can earn returns on idle assets here and also obtain leverage for any strategy.
We are currently focusing on introducing new features for the Hyperliquid ecosystem, such as tokenizing the HLP treasury — users can deposit into the HLP treasury through Hyperlend, and this deposit will be given to users in the form of tokens, serving as a 'voucher' for the HLP treasury deposits. This token can be used as collateral on Hyperlend to borrow stablecoins, meaning users can leverage more funds to deposit more money into the HLP treasury for higher returns.
We are also exploring using perpetual collaboration positions as collateral, hoping to change the limitations of long-term positions that cannot play a greater role on CEX. Users will be able to open positions on Hyperlend, and this position will be genuinely created on Hyperliquid through our code, while receiving a tokenized certificate representing the position. This way, if someone wants to open a long position or short position on Bitcoin, they can do more things with stablecoins by using their position as collateral while maintaining the open position. We are also very excited about this innovation.
BlockBeats: More than two months ago, during the $JELLYJELLY incident, did your confidence in Hyperliquid waver? How did you view this incident, and how do you view Hyperliquid's handling of it afterward?
Ness: I think they may not have considered or overlooked those meme coins with low liquidity that went live on Hyperliquid. So some clever users or entities exploited this vulnerability, but overall, the team handled it very quickly and responsibly.
This has also strengthened my confidence in the HLP treasury. Since its launch, this treasury has earned a lot of money — I remember the total returns have exceeded $60 million, which cannot be matched by any other market-making treasury. Moreover, they have now set two different risk parameters for the treasury, making it 'more impeccable' than before.
Overall, I think this team is very professional, and their decisions are made from the perspective of user interests.
Comparison between Hyperliquid and Binance as well as other on-chain contracts.
BlockBeats: Compared to Binance + BNB Chain, what are the similarities and differences between Hyperliquid + HyperEVM?
Ness: On the surface, both are high-performance exchanges + corresponding smart contract networks, but this superficial similarity hides their fundamental differences in architecture.
Hyperliquid chose 'transparency above all': every transaction, fund change, and liquidation is executed directly on-chain, leaving an immutable public audit trail. In contrast, Binance intentionally keeps its order book and risk control engine closed within their servers, making it impossible for outsiders to independently verify its order depth or solvency. BNB Chain also inherits this opacity — because the deepest liquidity of the exchange has never truly entered its on-chain ecosystem.
The real watershed is HyperEVM — this is Hyperliquid's unique execution layer, built with precompiled contracts and interactive code interfaces. These precompiled features allow any developer to access Hyperliquid's complete order book with just one call. Liquidity is no longer a 'walled garden' but becomes a 'public asset'; on-chain strategies do not need to access centralized-level depth indirectly through wrapped assets or fragmented AMMs. This architectural choice brings composability that BNB Chain lacks. For example, a BTC-USDC perpetual contract can be opened directly from HyperEVM's smart contract and tokenized into an asset similar to ERC-721. This position itself becomes movable collateral — it can be transferred off-chain, used in lending protocols like Hyperlend, or packaged into structured products without needing to close the position. On Binance, perpetual contracts can only be locked within the exchange, and cannot be withdrawn, transferred, or re-staked on-chain.
Since HyperEVM natively routes orders to Hyperliquid, capital efficiency is preserved. Whether it's the treasury, bots, or regular user wallets, just one contract interaction can obtain the 'maximum amount available from the order book', eliminating common basis risks and slippage in on-chain derivatives. In contrast, developers on BNB Chain must simulate liquidity through AMM or rely on off-chain market makers, leading to increased delays and a more complex system.
In summary, these design decisions have led to two completely different development experiences:
- Hyperliquid has narrowed the gap between DeFi verifiability and the depth of top centralized exchanges;
- Binance and BNB Chain continue to separate these two worlds — true liquidity only exists at the centralized core, with limited peripheral transparency on-chain.
BlockBeats: Why are whales like James Wynn keen to open positions on Hyperliquid? What unique advantages does Hyperliquid have compared to platforms like GMX or dYdX that can also achieve on-chain perpetual contract trading?
Ness: For Wynn, what attracts him is not the spread or funding rate, but the 'show effect'. Hyperliquid's fully on-chain order book broadcasts every large position in real time, turning whale trading into a public spectacle that the crypto community can watch second by second. Wynn fully capitalized on this visibility — he deliberately opened an oversized long position, making his liquidation price visible to anyone, thus generating continuous attention: memes, comments, millions of exposures, which simply cannot be achieved on those semi-transparent platforms.
Some people believe this is a well-planned marketing operation. After Wynn amplified the tension from his position, he claimed that 'market makers hunted his position on Hyperliquid' and called for traders to migrate to Binance; the timing is quite coincidental, and I think he is likely incentivized to make such statements.
Current status and future prospects of HyperEVM, benchmarking against $BNB?
BlockBeats: There are already some native assets running on HyperEVM, such as the meme coin $BUDDY and the NFT series Hypio. Do you think HyperEVM will become popular among degens like Solana or Base in the future?
Ness: To be honest, I don't play meme coins, so I don't know... But I think as HyperEVM's performance continues to improve, able to 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, which largely came from that wave of meme coin hype, and Solana is able to process thousands of transactions per second on-chain at extremely low gas costs.
Without meme coins, user demand might not be so strong. I believe Hyperliquid's community is very cohesive, and in the future, there will definitely be a meme coin belonging to HyperEVM.
BlockBeats: How do you view the current development situation of HyperEVM? What still needs improvement?
Ness: Recently, more and more people have started trading meme coins on HyperEVM, leading to a large number of transactions being sent to small blocks. However, the gas limit for these small blocks is only 2 million, meaning the number of transactions each block can accommodate is very limited, and once filled, higher gas fees need to be paid.
At that time, gas costs soared to around $20 per transaction, which is very high. Jeff and the entire team noticed this problem and quickly adjusted the block time of small blocks from the previous 2 seconds to 1 second, allowing more transactions to pass through faster, which also helps reduce gas pressure.
As long as the community provides such 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. Of course, they now have their own development path, focusing on the things at hand, and the community is operating on its own. But when the community's voice grows louder, the Hyperliquid team will still step up to listen and help everyone, and we are all very grateful for that.
BlockBeats: If we compare $HYPE and $BNB, do you think $HYPE is currently undervalued, overvalued, or performing normally?
Ness: Undervalued.
Even if it's just a simple public chain coin vs. public chain coin, $HYPE still has at least 5x upside potential. If we add the value of Binance as an exchange to $BNB, while also adding the value of Hyperliquid as an exchange to $HYPE, I think the potential will be even greater. Hyperliquid is repurchasing approximately $3 million worth of HYPE daily, which translates to about $1 billion in buying power annually.
If we maintain this momentum, the market cap of $HYPE could reach an astonishing level by the end of this year.
