Su Zhu: Hyperliquid is still in its early stages and may pose a challenge to CEX

Su Zhu posted on X platform stating: "Unless there is a Black Swan event, I believe that in the early stages of the Hyperliquid story, the team has done a great job designing a profitable product around the community. There have been other successful Perp trading platforms in the past, but these platforms often bring relatively little value accumulation to token holders. In some cases, tokens are directly used for emissions to generate dollar fees, which are collected by shareholders. This is equivalent to invisible dumping. In other cases, even if the token successfully generates a community, the usage of the underlying product itself is very low. This defines most of the DeFi summer. The combination of both is extremely rare. Although centralized exchanges (CEX) have always had extractive and opaque characteristics, and are usually operated by founders from mainland China, high liquidity spot listings are simple auctions, where the value accumulation goes directly to the tokens themselves. I think it is meaningless to discuss its idea as L1 before Hyperliquid really goes online, but I think if the team continues to execute, it will pose the first huge challenge to recent first-level CEX. Overall, I think the services and workflows will be simplified and purified, which will greatly benefit new comers without legacy structures.

I think Solana/pumpfun has a large moat, because all new attention is first attracted here. It will be extremely difficult to compete with this, because what you need is tens of thousands of permissionless launches every day, as well as shared knowledge and beliefs, some of which even reach billions of dollars. You cannot replicate this by a few pumps here or there or even community wealth effects - what you need is a culture and toolkit that gradually builds around it. Pumpfun is the worst in native crypto (no points, no tokens) and the most profitable product throughout the cycle, which is no coincidence, because it summons the energy of the outside world into cryptocurrency."