#ETF与衍生品 Seeing Hyperliquid drop from 80% to 20% market share, I’ve seen this scene too many times before. The ICO frenzy in 2017, Uniswap’s dominance in 2020, the synthetic assets race in 2021—each time following the same script: a product leverages first-mover advantage and execution to crush competitors, then makes a strategic shift at its peak, only to be eaten away by followers smelling blood.

But this time, Hyperliquid’s story is a bit different. On the surface, it’s the "old story" in the derivatives track: incentive exhaustion, competitors vertically integrating faster, market share slipping away. The real key is— they’ve given up fighting for short-term B2C traffic and turned to build "liquidity AWS." This isn’t decline; it’s a change of track.

I saw a similar case in 2015. Back then, Ethereum’s advantage in smart contracts was also questioned, but they didn’t pursue faster speeds or lower fees—instead, they built infrastructure. Looking back now, that decision changed everything.

HIP-3 and Builder Codes are essentially shifting the market’s "innovation rights" from centralized teams to the developer ecosystem. Perpetual stocks on TradeXYZ, pre-IPO trading on Ventuals—these are hard for vertically integrated competitors to quickly copy. Because once developers realize that deploying markets on Hyperliquid can access broader liquidity pools, they have a natural incentive to build there.

Lighter currently leads with 25% market share, but I bet this advantage won’t last through their TGE. The points season is like a binge that overdrafts the future; the real test is ahead. Hyperliquid is using a year of silence to lay the infrastructure barriers for the next cycle.

This reminds me of an old investment rule: the best bottoms often appear when everyone is arguing, "Is this project going to die?" Now is exactly that moment.