As HYPE continues to set new highs, a heated debate has erupted on X about "HYPE vs SOL."

The central figure in this verbal clash is Kyle Samani, former co-founder and managing partner at Multicoin Capital and a towering figure in the Solana community (refer to "The Man Who Best Screams SOL, Exits the Crypto World"), while those lining up outside the battle are loyal "believers" of Hyperliquid, led by Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX.

The War Between S-Guardians and H-Guardians

Over the past weekend, Samani himself unleashed a barrage of posts on X, launching an intense offensive against Hyperliquid, accusing the project of being fundamentally highly centralized and facing severe regulatory issues.

On May 30 at 6:30, Samani wrote: "Hyperliquid is essentially just a Binance 2.0 without a marketing team (Binance innocent bystander…). Its architectural design includes thousands of technical decisions tailored exclusively for centralized environments—none of which are suitable for permissionless decentralized systems."

"They've already fallen far behind on this path. Moreover, no genuine U.S. company will ever collaborate with them in the future."

On May 31 at 10:53, Samani added: "Hyperliquid is just as suspicious as Binance (again, innocent bystander…). All the charges brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against Binance apply equally to Hyperliquid, and all evidence of criminal conduct is documented. The so-called 'engagement with regulators' is pure nonsense—Binance has been claiming that for years too…"

While attacking Hyperliquid, Samani couldn’t resist one more jab at his old rival ETH, calling it “reputationally neutral but technically flawed”—in other words, “essentially useless”...

Ultimately, when responding to Bitcoin developer Udi Wertheimer’s question about “which token qualifies as a successful case study in your mind,” Samani delivered the unsurprising answer—Solana.

Naturally, Samani’s remarks provoked fierce rebuttals from the community, especially given HYPE’s dominant momentum. Investors like Hayes, developers like Wertheimer, and traders like Ansem all responded with varying degrees of force.

Hayes’s counterattack was the most direct. On May 31, he posted sarcastically targeting Samani: "Before this cycle ends, HYPE should outperform SOL—at minimum."

This morning, Hayes announced another challenge: a 100-HYPE content contest requiring participants to humorously and provocatively respond to Samani… Meanwhile, he directly challenged Samani, offering a $100,000 bet that HYPE will outperform all other tokens in the top ten of the crypto rankings over the remaining seven months of the year.

Narrative Clash Between Solana and Hyperliquid

Over the past few years, Solana’s greatest success has been building a high-speed, low-cost on-chain financial infrastructure. From Meme coins and DeFi to AI Agents, various assets and applications have chosen Solana for issuance and trading—the core logic being that liquidity naturally concentrates in the most efficient market.

In contrast to Solana’s approach of providing foundational infrastructure and waiting for applications and liquidity to grow organically, Hyperliquid dives straight into the most fundamental need in crypto—trading—by accumulating users, fee revenue, and liquidity through perpetual contracts, then gradually expanding into spot trading, token stocks, prediction markets, and beyond.

From results, Hyperliquid has created an extremely rare positive feedback loop: more traders generate higher fee income; increased revenue fuels HYPE buybacks and ecosystem incentives; rising HYPE price attracts more capital; additional capital strengthens platform liquidity and trading depth. This flywheel has generated cash flow capabilities that now surpass even those of public blockchain ecosystems—including Solana.

For several years, Solana’s core narrative has been the “Internet Capital Market.” But as users, assets, liquidity, and pricing power continuously shift toward Hyperliquid, the latter now appears far better aligned with this narrative than Solana itself. In essence, Hyperliquid seems to have become exactly what Solana always aspired to be.

As Solana’s most devoted standard-bearer, Samani clearly cannot accept such a scenario.

Samani’s Tactics: Borrowing Solana’s Past Criticisms to Attack Hyperliquid

A closer look at Samani’s current assault on Hyperliquid reveals a strikingly theatrical irony.

Over the past few years, in the ongoing debates between Ethereum and Solana, the most common tactic from the Ethereum camp has been questioning Solana’s degree of decentralization—high validator entry barriers, excessive hardware requirements, frequent network outages, and over-reliance on a small number of core institutions. To many Ethereum supporters, Solana may be fast, but it sacrifices decentralization for performance.

Solana’s response has always been simple: users don’t care. For the vast majority of users, what matters is faster confirmation times, lower fees, and superior user experience—not a research report on node distribution.

In a sense, Solana’s rise was a massive victory for the “efficiency-first” paradigm. Yet now, as Hyperliquid begins capturing market attention, Samani picks up the very banner once wielded by the Ethereum camp.

Centralization, regulatory risk, censorship resistance—these accusations sound eerily familiar. Only now, the “defendant” has shifted from Solana to Hyperliquid.

This feels somewhat hypocritical—but perhaps in Samani’s eyes, Solana represents the ideal balance: Ethereum is sufficiently decentralized but painfully slow; Hyperliquid is sleekly optimized but essentially a CEX; whereas Solana, well, just looks “solid and trustworthy”...

In essence, this dispute isn’t really about HYPE versus SOL—it’s about the decade-long dilemma in crypto: Should decentralization take priority, or should product excellence and growth come first?

Years ago, Ethereum and Solana clashed over this issue. Now, Solana and Hyperliquid stand in the same position.

Only this time, facing a far more aggressive opponent, Solana’s believers have taken up the banner of “decentralization” in defense.

Original: BlockBeats