Why I think a realistic price prediction for Hyperliquid is zero
In my opinion, a realistic crypto price prediction for Hyperliquid is zero. To me this is an extremely high risk, extremely low reward, dangerous project, and I'm going to give you an honest crypto review because I care about your success. As a crypto investor, I don't want you to get ripped off and waste your time on a coin that, from my experience being in crypto since 2014 and researching thousands of altcoins, looks absolutely horrible. You can verify everything I'm saying in five or ten minutes by doing your own research. I don't enjoy being the one to tell you this, because I'd get paid much better if I just hyped cryptos up and told you how great they are. But I care about you, so here is how I see it.
When you start with the supply on CoinMarketCap, this is a fully diluted market cap of roughly $26 billion. To me that means insiders hold a massive amount of tokens they can dump on you. In my experience, they do this not just to make huge amounts of money, but to get themselves listed higher in the rankings, up toward number 20. Yet I see almost no substance, nothing of value in this project at all. It launched just a couple of months ago, and I hate investing in new projects, which is exactly why I would never invest in this. Just on what I've already told you, I would never put money here, and there's so much more.
My rule: only invest in what you use every day
I've come to believe you never want to invest in new projects unless you are using them every single day yourself. I apply this rule across all of crypto. Unless I'm using a blockchain every day, and an app on that blockchain every day, I have no interest in it. Out of the thousands of blockchains out there, there's only one I use every day, and that's Internet Computer Protocol. I use OpenChat on it, which is fully on chain, and that's where you can actually talk to me. So I only personally invest in things I use every day. To me, if you're not using Hyperliquid every day, it would be insane to invest in it. And even if you were using it every day, it still looks like a terrible investment to me because the market cap is just too big.
For comparison, in my view Internet Computer has the best tech in crypto by far, and nobody else is even years close to catching up. Yet the fully diluted valuation of Internet Computer Protocol is less than a fifth of what Hyperliquid is right now, maybe even a sixth or a seventh, and it's less than the circulating supply. So just based on what I've told you, this looks horrible to me, and from there it only gets worse.
The marketing copy that doesn't add up
If you scroll down and read more of "what is Hyperliquid," the very first sentence, in my opinion, is a lie. It claims Hyperliquid represents a cutting-edge blockchain platform. I don't believe it does. To me the only truly cutting-edge blockchain platform is Internet Computer. It's the only blockchain I know of that can do huge amounts of computation fully on chain, which matters for security and verifiability, and it's the only blockchain you can run AI on. It's a real-world computer, and it's millions of times more energy efficient than Bitcoin. That, to me, is a cutting-edge blockchain. Hyperliquid just came out. ICP came out three and a half years ago, and Hyperliquid can't do a fraction of what ICP does. So I see a blatant, in-your-face misrepresentation in the first half of the first sentence. In the opinion of anyone who understands what I consider the truly most advanced tech in crypto, no one would call this a cutting-edge blockchain platform. To me it's a copy and paste. I believe they made some small changes to what everybody else was already doing, then exaggerated about it, set up the tokenomics in their favor, and convinced people to buy something I see as worthless. That's how I see it.
I could be more moderate, but being moderate online means letting all these people who say something is going to 100x set the tone. So I feel I need to be as negative as I honestly can. Watch one of their videos and one of mine, and you'll have a balanced look at things. So in my view Hyperliquid is not at all a cutting-edge blockchain platform. ICP does enhance the efficiency and performance of DeFi applications. Hyperliquid, in my opinion, is the same old crap as the rest of crypto. I don't see it as a novel layer one engineered from the ground up. It looks very similar to what's already out there.
An "impressive background" tells me nothing
Here's the next question you should ask after you read that the development team is composed of individuals with impressive backgrounds. Did you know I've got an impressive background too? I can freestyle rap, I've been a professional gamer, and I've been a top 10 Udemy instructor. See how vague that is? The copy goes on, including alumni from prestigious institutions such as Harvard, Caltech, and MIT, and professionals with experience at notable companies. To me this sounds completely fake. There are blockchains that genuinely have that. If you go to dfinity.org, the major contributor to the Internet Computer, you'll find the faces of people with really impressive backgrounds. But when you go to the Hyper Foundation website, which is the official website linked right there, where are these people?
To me this feels blatantly fraudulent. I picture a couple of guys laughing as they write this, generating it with AI. Like asking ChatGPT to write a description for Hyperliquid, and when it asks what to say about the development team, the answer is just "I don't know, say they have impressive backgrounds from top schools." That's how it reads to me, and I think you shouldn't accept it. You should demand better than this from your crypto investments. The website looks sloppy, with a 2024 copyright on it, and not one person is listed on the Hyper Foundation website. Not one person's name. And I believe I know why people don't put their names on something like this: because they know what they're doing. From getting deep enough in crypto to be somewhat on the inside, my belief is that the people on the inside know the masses are being misled, and many of them laugh at how little the public knows. To me this looks like a team that's comfortable launching something with not a single team member named anywhere on the website.
More warning signs I can't ignore
Another warning sign: I'm in the US and I can't use it in the US. For something marketed as a great decentralized exchange, that stopped me from using it. How does it do that? Because, in my view, the website is hosted on centralized tech and can easily detect exactly what location I'm in, since I'm not using a VPN, just connecting raw. To me that's another signal among many.
Some of you will say, "Jerry, what about the trading volume?" It claims it can do 200,000 transactions per second. But is there anywhere that actually shows you the transactions being executed? Do you realize how easy it is for exchanges to fake volume? They put up a sell order, they put up a buy order, and they sit there trading with themselves, posting fake volume. In my experience, 99 times out of 100 that's what's happening. I believe they crank out a ton of fake volume and fake transactions with their own money and their own tokens, and pay people to add more tokens and swap all of it, so it looks like something is happening. Yet I've never seen anyone, anywhere in crypto, say they've actually used this.
What's telling, too, is the risk page. The documentation here is pretty sparse, and I don't even see a developer forum. The risk page admits it runs its own layer one which has not undergone extensive testing and scrutiny. To me that reads like, "we just barely built this over the weekend and hardly know what we're doing." On top of that you have to use Arbitrum to bridge assets over, so if something goes wrong on Ethereum or Arbitrum, that could hurt you even if Hyperliquid itself doesn't. Then there's market liquidity, with a potential risk of low liquidity because, in my view, no one's really using it. And oracles: ICP can run its own oracles, but this so-called decentralized exchange has to rely on oracles from other services to pull data, which is one more thing that could go wrong.
So to me this absolutely fails the test. If you want more of how I think through coins like this, you can dig into my Money playlist. None of this is financial advice; it's simply how I see the project and how I make my own decisions. My honest take is to be extremely skeptical of Hyperliquid and to focus instead on the tech and the apps you actually use every day.