Author: kaledora

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Multiple viewpoints can coexist:

Hyperliquid's airdrop marks a turning point, reflecting a complete rejection by the market of the trend dominated by "air software" supported by insiders, where these projects typically allocate only a small share to the community.

Raising huge amounts of money at ridiculous valuations, then launching at absurd fully diluted valuations (FDV), ultimately leading to a continuous decline in stock prices and selling off to retail investors, is a bad practice.

For most projects, unless the founders have previously earned tens of millions of dollars, it is difficult to operate without raising funds and without "insiders," even among team members.

Here are some thoughts on how to understand these seemingly contradictory viewpoints.

The Success of Hyperliquid

Hyperliquid's airdrop is a significant event in this cycle. I particularly appreciate the following four points:

1. It resets expectations on how, when, and to what extent token ownership should be allocated.
2. It reestablishes the importance of DeFi and user-centric applications in the industry.
3. It proves that selling pressure should be resolved quickly, rather than being delayed.
4. The cultural aesthetics of the community.

The cleverness of Hyperliquid lies in combining the token timeline of venture-backed projects with the distribution mechanism of ICOs. First, build the product, launch without tokens, iterate multiple times with users, adapt gradually to enhance the most valuable behaviors for the protocol through several seasons of points, and then release the token more than a year later (instead of raising funds before the product launch). But like community-funded projects, distribute tokens to users.

Ironically, in many areas where founders are eager to reduce selling pressure by limiting distribution and liquidity at the time of the initial token generation event (TGE), Hyperliquid has successfully maintained potentially the strongest buying pressure after release and achieved the broadest distribution among major protocols over the years.

Regarding selling pressure: the more protocols attempt to artificially disperse the pain of short-term speculators' sell-offs, the more acute the selling pressure becomes, making it nearly impossible for true long-term supporters to hold tokens (as the complex supply dynamics in the medium term will outweigh the strength of the project).

My final appreciation for Hyperliquid is its community's cultural aesthetics, although few mention it. "Community" refers to those who actually use the product. The love for community in cryptocurrency has evolved into an implicit demand that every product needs its own pseudo-religious cult, whether real or bot-generated, filled with exaggerated visual logos, slogans, and possibly real or bot-generated profiles on Discord, conveying some version of the same few slogans daily. Building a cult around images or slogans unrelated to the core product is a substitute for the cult that should revolve around your product itself.

The cult of Hyperliquid exists, but it is—or at least started as—a cult of users, not followers. To my knowledge, its most obsessed users do not even have their own self-referential consensus name. I’ve heard "bozos" is the de facto term, but overall, HL's crypto branding features are sparse. I'm not sure if I've seen any HL's pepe; there are PURR cats and PIP, but that's basically it. Aesthetically, it takes its clean brand seriously, with posts not filled with cartoon characters.

However, Hyperliquid's cult is exploding, and its social media is being thoroughly automated. Its followers seem to have tripled in the past few weeks, but when they start processing billions of dollars in transaction volume daily, there are only about 30,000 of them. Compared to other projects with hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers on Twitter (where you don’t recognize a single user!).

Even if You Can't (or Don't Want to) Replicate Them, You Can Still Learn Something from Hyperliquid

Ignoring the product, most founders building serious projects cannot simply avoid raising funds, the obvious reason being that they do not have $5 million to $10 million to fund a small development team for years. Those who have this privilege should consider investing and reaping the excess returns that could come from good execution. If you are a college graduate entrepreneur or an ordinary person in any way, this may not be your option.

Even if Hyperliquid sets unrealistic expectations in some ways for those who cannot operate without raising external capital, I believe this reset is actually a good thing if you are not raising huge amounts of money.

Readers only need to look at the type of announcements that provide the greatest status boost and always trigger the most bot-driven growth: fundraising announcements. In recent years, fundraising announcements have become a definitive status symbol in cryptocurrency; the bigger, the better. This creates natural pressure on founders to raise more and more funds at increasingly higher valuations, regardless of how much capital they actually need to reach the next stage. This is not unique to cryptocurrency, but if you believe in its fundamental spirit in any way, it certainly does not benefit cryptocurrency.

Even if you cannot avoid raising funds, you can raise more reasonable amounts, focus on the product, and avoid participating in the game of who can raise the largest funding round. Instead, compete on who can build the best product—this will be more interesting and hopefully better for the entire cryptocurrency space.

Conclusion:

HL puts DeFi in the lead and redefines the model of token distribution

• Selling pressure should be resolved quickly
• Reject groups that do not focus on the product
• The market has allowed you to focus more on product development rather than fundraising

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