Exclusive Interview with Hyperlend Co-founder: HYPE is Significantly Undervalued Compared to BNB, Year-End Price Will Be Astonishing

Author: BlockBeats

More than two months ago, when the $JELLYJELLY incident occurred, the market's view on Hyperliquid's future became polarized. Some said Hyperliquid would be FTX 2.0; others said Hyperliquid's future remained bright.

Yesterday, $HYPE broke through $44, setting a new all-time high. Since the crazy operations of James Wynn, Hyperliquid and the continuously rising $HYPE have actually shed the gloom and entered a new chapter.

With the strong price performance of $HYPE, the HyperEVM ecosystem is also quietly growing. How do the builders of the HyperEVM ecosystem view this ecosystem? What are the differences between Hyperliquid + HyperEVM and Binance + BNB? Is $HYPE overvalued or undervalued in terms of market capitalization?

With these questions in mind, Rhythm BlockBeats interviewed Hyperlend co-founder @0xNessus.

The Journey of Building Hyperlend

BlockBeats: Can you briefly introduce Hyperlend to us?

Ness: Hyperlend is like AAVE for the Hyperliquid ecosystem; it is the only project on HyperEVM that has official permission to run the latest code. We provide lending services, allowing users to borrow against $HYPE as collateral. Of course, we also offer flash loans, enabling users to execute any strategies they desire based on this.

In addition to these core functionalities, based on our positioning as "Hyperliquid financial infrastructure," we provide basic liquidity channels, on-chain risk management mechanisms, and credit limits for asset collateral that other dApps can access. By simplifying complexity and providing deep, composable liquidity, we aim to become the preferred yield layer on Hyperliquid—where users can earn returns on idle assets and obtain leverage for any strategy.

Currently, we are focused on introducing new features for the Hyperliquid ecosystem, such as tokenizing the HLP vault. Users can deposit into the HLP vault through Hyperlend, and this deposit will be given to users in the form of tokens, serving as a "receipt" for the HLP vault deposit. This token can be used as collateral on Hyperlend to borrow stablecoins, meaning users can leverage more funds to deposit more into the HLP vault for higher returns.

We are also exploring using perpetual collaboration positions as collateral, hoping to change the limitations of long-term holdings that cannot play a greater role on CEX. Users will be able to open positions on Hyperlend, and this position will be genuinely created on Hyperliquid through our code, while receiving a tokenized receipt representing the position. This way, if someone wants to open a long or short position on Bitcoin, they can keep the position open while using it as collateral to borrow stablecoins for more activities. We are very excited about this innovation.

BlockBeats: Did your confidence in Hyperliquid waver when the $JELLYJELLY incident occurred over two months ago? How did you view this incident, and how do you see Hyperliquid's handling of it afterward?

Ness: I think they may not have considered, or perhaps overlooked, those meme coins that had low liquidity when Hyperliquid launched. So, some clever users or entities exploited this loophole, but overall, the team handled it very quickly and responsibly.

This also strengthened my confidence in the HLP vault. Since its launch, the vault has made a lot of money—I remember the total earnings have exceeded $60 million, which is unmatched by any other market-making vault. Moreover, they have now set two different risk parameters for the vault, which I think makes it even more "impeccable" than before.

Overall, I believe this team is very professional, and their decisions are made from the perspective of user interests.

Comparison of Hyperliquid with Binance and Other On-Chain Contracts

BlockBeats: What are the similarities and differences between Hyperliquid + HyperEVM and Binance + BNB Chain?

Ness: On the surface, both are high-performance exchanges + supporting smart contract networks, but this superficial similarity conceals their fundamental architectural differences.

Hyperliquid chooses "transparency first": every transaction, fund movement, and liquidation is executed directly on-chain, leaving an immutable public audit trail. In contrast, Binance intentionally keeps its order book and risk control engine closed within its servers, making it impossible for outsiders to independently verify its order depth or solvency. BNB Chain inherits this opacity—because the deepest liquidity of the exchange has never truly entered its on-chain ecosystem.

The real watershed is HyperEVM—this is Hyperliquid's unique execution layer, built with pre-compiled contracts and interactive code interfaces. These pre-compiled features allow any developer to access Hyperliquid's complete order book with just one call. Liquidity is no longer a "walled garden," but a "public asset"; on-chain strategies do not need to access centralized-level depth through wrapped assets or fragmented AMMs.

This architectural choice brings composability that BNB Chain lacks. For example, a BTC-USDC perpetual contract can be opened directly from HyperEVM's smart contract and tokenized into an asset similar to ERC-721. This position itself becomes a movable collateral—transferable off-chain, usable in lending protocols like Hyperlend, or packaged into structured products without needing to close the position. On Binance, perpetual contracts can only be locked within the exchange, with no ability to withdraw, transfer, or re-collateralize on-chain.

Since HyperEVM natively routes orders to Hyperliquid, capital efficiency is preserved. Whether it's vaults, bots, or regular user wallets, a single contract interaction can obtain the "maximum amount available from the order book," eliminating common basis risk and slippage in on-chain derivatives. In contrast, developers on BNB Chain must simulate liquidity through AMMs or rely on off-chain market makers, leading to increased latency and a more complex system.

In summary, these design decisions create two completely different development experiences:

• Hyperliquid narrows the gap between DeFi verifiability and top centralized exchange depth;

• Binance and BNB Chain continue to divide these two worlds—true liquidity only exists at the centralized core, with limited peripheral transparency on-chain.

BlockBeats: Why are whales like James Wynn keen on opening positions on Hyperliquid? What unique advantages does Hyperliquid have compared to platforms like GMX or dYdX that also enable on-chain perpetual contract trading?

Ness: For Wynn, what attracts him is not the spread or funding rates, but the "show effect." Hyperliquid's fully on-chain order book broadcasts every large position in real-time, turning whale trading into a public spectacle that the crypto community can watch second by second. Wynn fully utilizes this visibility—he deliberately opened an oversized long position, making his liquidation price visible to everyone, thereby generating continuous attention: memes, comments, millions of exposures, which are impossible to achieve on those semi-transparent platforms.

Some people believe this is a carefully orchestrated marketing operation. After amplifying the tension brought by his position, Wynn claimed that "market makers hunted his position on Hyperliquid" and called for traders to migrate to Binance; the timing was quite coincidental, and I think he was likely incentivized to make such statements.

Current Status and Future Prospects of HyperEVM, Benchmarking $BNB?

BlockBeats: There are already some native assets emerging on HyperEVM, such as the meme coin $BUDDY and the NFT series Hypio. Do you think HyperEVM can become as popular among degens as Solana or Base in the future?

Ness: To be honest, I don't play with meme coins, so I don't know… But I believe that as HyperEVM's performance improves and it can handle more transactions or raise the gas limit, more people will become interested in trading meme coins or other similar assets. Just like Solana's success, which was largely due to that wave of meme coin hype, and Solana's ability to process thousands of transactions per second on-chain at extremely low gas costs.

Without meme coins, user demand might not be as strong. I think the Hyperliquid community is very cohesive, and there will definitely be meme coins emerging for HyperEVM in the future.

BlockBeats: How do you view the current development of HyperEVM? What still needs improvement?

Ness: Recently, more and more people have started trading meme coins on HyperEVM, leading to a large number of transactions being sent to small blocks. However, these small blocks have a gas limit of only 2 million, which means the number of transactions each block can accommodate is very limited. Once filled, higher gas fees need to be paid.

At one point, gas costs soared to around $20 per transaction, which is very high. Jeff and the entire team noticed this issue and quickly made adjustments, reducing the block time for small blocks from 2 seconds to 1 second, allowing more transactions to pass through faster and helping to alleviate gas pressure.

As long as the community provides such feedback, HyperEVM will continue to improve and grow. The Hyperliquid team is always working hard to support the community as much as possible. Now, of course, they have their own development path, focusing on what they have at hand, and the community is operating on its own. But when the community's voice grows louder, the Hyperliquid team will still step up to listen and help everyone, which we all appreciate.

BlockBeats: If we compare $HYPE with $BNB, do you think $HYPE is currently undervalued, overvalued, or performing normally?

Ness: Undervalued.

Even if it's just a simple public chain coin vs. public chain coin comparison, $HYPE still has at least 5 times the upside potential. If we layer the value of Binance as an exchange onto $BNB while also layering the value of Hyperliquid as an exchange onto $HYPE, I believe the potential will be even greater. Hyperliquid is repurchasing about $3 million worth of HYPE daily, which amounts to approximately $1 billion in buying pressure annually.

If this momentum continues, the market capitalization of $HYPE could reach an astonishing level by the end of this year.