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

Su Zhu posted on X Platform: "Barring a black swan event, I believe that in the early stages of the Hyperliquid story, the team has done an excellent job of designing a community around a profitable product. 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 used directly as emissions to generate US dollar fees, which are pocketed by shareholders. This is equivalent to invisible dumping. In other cases, even if the token successfully generates a community, the underlying product itself has little usage. This defines the situation of most DeFi summers. It is extremely rare to have both. While centralized exchanges (CEX) have historically been extractive and opaque, often operated by mainland Chinese founders, high-liquidity spot listings are simple auctions where value accumulation is directly attributed to the token itself. I think it is meaningless to discuss the idea of ​​Hyperliquid as L1 before it actually goes live, but I think if the team continues to execute, it will pose the first huge challenge to the near-term first-level CEX. Overall, I think services and workflows will be simplified and purified, which will greatly benefit newcomers without legacy structures. I think Solana/pumpfun There’s a big moat because all new attention is attracted there first. It’s going to be extremely difficult to compete with that because what you need is tens of thousands of permissionless startups every day, some of which will even reach billions of dollars, and shared knowledge and belief. You can’t replicate that with a few pumps here or there or even a community wealth effect — what you need is a culture and toolkit that is gradually built around it. It’s no coincidence that pumpfun is the least crypto-native (no points, no tokens) and most profitable product of the entire cycle because it summons the energy of the outside world into crypto.”