Hyper DeFAI

In 2024, Hyperliquid 1) redefined the crypto meta to put community above all. With Hyperliquid, there are no investors, no market makers, and no fees paid to any company. Billions of dollars of value were created by a common vision and relentless hard work. This value went directly to hundreds of thousands of users, building a passionate community with real skin in the game. You all continue to inspire me every day. 2) became the first mature, permissionless financial hub where liquidity and UX matched the most liquid centralized venues. Recent highlights include $15B 24-hour volume, reaching 20% of Bybit futures and 8% of Binance futures volume. Unlike CEXs, Hyperliquid accomplished this as a user-owned protocol. 3) reinvented several of the most entrenched and predatory centralized practices to be crypto-aligned: fair, transparent, and accessible. Examples of the last point: 1) Listings have always been controlled by CEXs that extort projects through listing fees to maximize their own profits. This is absurd, as the community drives long term success. CEXs tempt projects with immediate liquidity but kill their ultimate vision. On Hyperliquid, listings are fair, permissionless, and transparent: anyone can bid in the auction to deploy a new spot asset. Projects that want to control their own fate increasingly see Hyperliquid as one-stop infrastructure for both the tech stack and liquidity. 2) Historically, CEXs capture the lion's share of revenue in crypto. On Hyperliquid, builders are already bootstrapping 9 figure businesses. Some are monetizing >$100k per day in revenue entirely onchain through builder codes, which are a primitive built into the L1 to allow customizable monetization for applications. Others carve out and own entire verticals in the budding ecosystem. Builders are tapping into Hyperliquid as their blockchain of choice, and I’m excited for more and more to join the ecosystem this year. -- In 2025, I expect the technology of Hyperliquid to close much of the gap towards housing all of finance. The maturing technology will include a growing and permissionless validator set while improving the world-class liquidity infrastructure that Hyperliquid provides. Some concrete predictions: 1) Multiple billion dollar applications/protocols will be built on Hyperliquid. They will own their full stack but tap into the ever-growing liquidity and community. 2) More than 50% of volume from new defi projects will happen natively on Hyperliquid. Hungry teams will value the integration of CEX-level liquidity with the permissionless accessibility of blockchains. 3) Millions of users will use Hyperliquid without knowing about the blockchain at all. Just like web2, users will experience the magic of their favorite products without thinking about the underlying technology. These predictions are ambitious, but as I look back and realize just how much we've accomplished in a year, I think they're quite reasonable. Back to work!