Hyperliquid vs. Solana: Can a Dozen-Person Exchange Close the Gap?

Hyperliquid, a crypto exchange run by roughly a dozen people, keeps producing numbers that don’t look like typical crypto numbers. Its founder says markets on the platform have reached about 2% of global silver trading volume, and Grayscale has launched a fund on its token. That has led some people to ask whether Hyperliquid could overtake Solana in market value.

The video works through the question with arithmetic rather than opinion, and concludes the honest answer will annoy both sides. Here is how Hyperliquid works, why it gets compared with Solana, the case for and against, and what to watch.

What is Hyperliquid?

Hyperliquid is an exchange. It does the same job as Coinbase or Binance: you buy and sell, and it takes a small fee each time. The difference is that everything happens in public. Every order, every trade and every closed position is posted for anyone to see.

That transparency has a downside in headlines. A liquidation is when someone borrows to make a bigger bet, the trade goes against them and the exchange closes the position to repay the loan. On bad market days, Hyperliquid’s liquidation numbers look far worse than other exchanges’. The founder’s answer is that other exchanges don’t publish all of theirs, so people are comparing a complete list with a partial one.

How does an 11-person team run an exchange?

When the founder was asked about having 11 core staff, he didn’t dispute it, and two business magazines have reported the same figure, according to the video. Competing exchanges have thousands of employees.

His explanation is that the core team builds the tools, and outside companies build the products people use. Those companies aren’t on Hyperliquid’s payroll and are paid by their own customers. The markets that drew the most attention this year were built by a separate firm. In practice, the video says, the real workforce is hundreds of people across dozens of companies.

How does the HYPE buyback work?

Hyperliquid’s fees don’t go to a company. They are used to buy the HYPE token on the market and destroy it, so fewer tokens exist afterward. The video compares this to a company buying back and cancelling its own shares, which leaves each remaining holder with a slightly bigger slice.

Critics have said Hyperliquid should time its buybacks, buying more when the price is low. The founder’s reply is that nobody is there to make that call. In a clip, he says Hyperliquid “does not have a discretionary buyback program” and that it is a rules-based protocol that burns its fees in the same way Ethereum burns priority fees. The fees come in, get converted and get destroyed. The video’s point: if a person decides when to buy, you have to trust that person; if software decides, you can check.

Why is Hyperliquid being compared with Solana?

The video gives three reasons:

1. It has moved beyond crypto. A system called HIP-3 lets outside teams create markets without permission, and they have built markets for commodities and equities. The founder says HIP-3 markets, mainly from the first deployer, trade.xyz, reached about 2% of global silver volume within months of launch. The video notes he is not a neutral party, so it treats that as his figure.
2. It has set prices. The founder says that on some token launches last year, Hyperliquid was the main venue where price was set rather than followed, which he believes is a first for a decentralized exchange. This is also his claim.
3. Institutions have arrived. Grayscale launched a fund on the HYPE token, and Bitwise and 21Shares have filed for their own. A Grayscale representative says in the video that advisers who spent months or years getting comfortable with crypto now have an accessible way to put client money into these assets.

The video also highlights the token launch: roughly a third of the supply went straight to people who had used the platform, with no private sale and no allocation to funds.

What does Arthur Hayes say?

Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX, posted that Hyperliquid should overtake Solana before the bull run is over. When he posted, Solana was worth about $48 billion and Hyperliquid about $15 billion, so Hyperliquid would need to roughly triple to draw level. On his math, that would put HYPE around $215.

The video flags two cautions. Hayes holds more than 26,000 HYPE tokens himself, so he is talking his own book. And his own math assumes Solana stays where it is. If Solana rises too, the gap widens.

Who earns more: Solana or Hyperliquid?

Solana does, by a wide margin. According to the video, recent figures had Solana earning nearly double across all the apps running on it in a day. Yet over the previous couple of months, SOL fell about 15% while HYPE rose about 64%.

	Solana	Hyperliquid
Daily earnings	Nearly double Hyperliquid’s	About half of Solana’s
Where the money goes	Mostly stays with apps built on it	Used to buy back and destroy HYPE
Recent price move, per the video	Down about 15%	Up about 64%
Business scope	Payments, tokenized shares, lending, games	Mainly trading, especially derivatives

The video’s argument is that the question is not how busy a network is, but whether the money it makes reaches the token holder. The amount of money traders have committed to positions on each is now almost level, with Solana slightly ahead. The video also says the founder of the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange has said Hyperliquid is bigger than Nasdaq by volume.

What is the case against Hyperliquid?

The video considers it the stronger case:

• Narrower business. Solana has payments, tokenized shares, lending, games and millions of users who have never placed a leveraged trade. Hyperliquid does one thing very well, and that one thing is a smaller market.
• Fee dependence. Trading fees shrink when nobody wants to trade, so the money that supports the token dries up when holders would most want it steady.
• Competition. Wall Street has noticed. The same NYSE-owner founder is asking whether US exchanges should be allowed to offer the same products, and Hayes has warned about that competition.
• Regulation. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority warned that Hyperliquid is not authorized there and has no permission to offer or promote financial services in the UK. That means UK users are outside the protections they would normally get.

A policy expert in the video adds that the US market structure bill is a spot market bill, while Hyperliquid mainly trades perpetual futures, so the bill has little direct bearing on it. That keeps it out of the firing line, but also outside the rules if that is where large institutional money ends up.

The video’s verdict, and what to watch

The video’s view is that Hyperliquid can probably close some of the gap with Solana, but that overtaking it is a much bigger ask than “three times” suggests. It also argues the comparison may be the wrong one, since the two do different jobs.

The founder frames the project differently. In a clip, he says AI will soon supplant human intelligence, and that humans need a programmable, accessible financial system in which they have a stake, with Hyperliquid as “our best shot.” The video says that explains the design choices: a small team, buybacks written into the protocol, and building so that nobody has to trust anybody.

Three things the video suggests watching:

1. The silver number. If 2% of global silver volume becomes 5%, that becomes a commodities story, not a crypto one.
2. Institutional follow-through. One fund is a bet; three or four is a category.
3. Fees in a flat month. Anything looks good when everyone is trading. What it earns in a quiet market shows whether it is a business or a bull market.