🏄 Riding the HYPE wave

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Happy Friday!

Another company is looking to take advantage of the, well, hype around US markets. 

Yesterday, SOL Strategies (a publicly-traded company in Canada) filed the necessary paperwork to make its US debut. 

The list just keeps getting longer and longer.

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On this week’s Empire podcast, Santiago Santos and Jason Yanowitz touched on Hyperliquid, which Yanowitz disclosed as his third-biggest liquid holding now (that isn’t a stock).

“ Hyperliquid at a hundred, I wouldn’t flinch twice,” Santos said. 

He also said, “What is going to drive valuations of crypto assets for the foreseeable future? It's going to continue to be trading, and that's the killer use case on a dollar-per-dollar basis. Which venue is gonna attract more trading? For every dollar it gets invested onchain, probably Hyperliquid more than a third or 40%.”

Yanowitz noted that Hyperliquid’s managed to hit the sweet spot for the overall market through two things: the lack of venture capitalists and the buybacks. 

It also has very few exchange listings, despite being such a big narrative at the moment. 

“ Hardly any big custodians support them. They've got the no VC narrative and the buybacks. But I think they have this one intangible thing that very few people in crypto have ever been able to achieve, which is they've been able to make a massive amount of retail users very rich,” Yanowitz noted. 

As Blockworks Research’s Boccaccio wrote back in April, it’s the only DEX that’s managed to compete with CEX volumes. And that’s not an easy feat.

However, some folks are a little skeptical about the potential growth opportunity here. 

But interestingly enough, Ansem noted: “If you believe what [the] founder has said in interviews and acknowledge how they've operated the past couple years, then you understand that they intentionally did not take outside capital when they could have. Because they self-funded development of the protocol, and…they've decided to operate as lean as possible with the focus on long-term vision.”

Which lines up with what makes Yanowitz so bullish on Hyperliquid. 

Ansem also added that there’s a ton of room for growth, which feeds into the argument that it’s still early days — not only for Hyperliquid, but this space in general.

It’s one of the big narratives right now, and it doesn’t look like that’s going away anytime soon. 

And now you know. 

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Last week, I asked: Do you think stablecoins will continue heating up, or are we due for a cool-off period?

We’re all in agreement, apparently. The majority of you said we’re just getting started. Though we had a few folks note they care more about crypto overall winning. But hey, one good killer use case can make a big difference, right?

This week, I’m wondering: