Is Hyperliquid the new Solana?

In late 2025, Cathie Wood said something that got crypto Twitter moving. Hyperliquid, she told the Master Investor podcast, "reminds me of Solana in the earlier days." She called it "the new kid on the block." ARK Invest still doesn't hold HYPE — but pattern recognition from someone who backed Solana early is worth taking seriously.

The comparison has stuck. And on the surface, it looks right. But the numbers say it's more complicated than that.

The short version

Cathie Wood's Hyperliquid–Solana comparison is correct about the trajectory but wrong about the destination. These two platforms aren't competing for the same crown — they were built by different people, for different problems, at different moments in crypto's maturity.

• Solana is a general-purpose L1 blockchain built to host everything: DeFi, NFTs, gaming, memecoins, and payments — fast and cheap for all of it

• Hyperliquid is a purpose-built trading chain with a single application: on-chain perpetuals — derivative contracts that let traders speculate on asset prices without an expiry date — with order-book performance that rivals centralized exchanges

• Hyperliquid generated $844M in protocol revenue in 2025 from that one application; Solana generated $1.3B from hundreds

• The real frame: Solana democratized retail crypto. Hyperliquid is attempting to democratize institutional-grade trading. They're sequential, not competing.

How Solana got here

To understand the comparison, you need to know what Solana actually survived.

Solana was founded in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko, a former Qualcomm engineer who wanted to solve a specific problem: blockchains were too slow because nodes had to agree on the time of each transaction before processing it. His solution was Proof of History — a cryptographic clock that timestamps transactions before they reach consensus, allowing Solana to process them in parallel rather than one by one. The result was a chain that could handle tens of thousands of transactions per second at fractions of a cent.

The early growth was real but fragile. Solana attracted major backers, including a16z and Multicoin, and became deeply intertwined with FTX. When FTX collapsed in November 2022, SOL dropped from around $200 to $8. Most observers wrote it off.

Solana didn't die. It got rebuilt without a single dominant sponsor. The NFT ecosystem (Magic Eden, the Degenerate Ape Academy era) had already seeded a community. The memecoin wave of 2023–2024 brought retail back into the spotlight: BONK, WIF, and POPCAT launched on Solana and generated genuine cultural energy. Jupiter emerged as a DEX aggregator that made on-chain trading genuinely usable for non-experts.

By the time Solana reached its 2025 highs, it had done something harder than just recovering its price. It had been proven that the ecosystem was real.

How Hyperliquid got here

Hyperliquid's origin story runs on a different rail entirely.

Jeffrey Yan won gold at the International Physics Olympiad at 18. He picked up a physics textbook at 16, having never taken the subject formally. In 2019, he started trading with $10,000 from a living room in Puerto Rico — working off a television because he didn't own a monitor. Within three years, he was running one of the largest anonymous crypto trading firms.

Then he shut it down. And started Hyperliquid.

What he was trying to fix was a specific frustration that any serious trader who'd spent time in DeFi recognized: decentralized exchanges couldn't deliver what centralized ones could. Not because of regulation or custody — but because of architecture. Most DEXs use automated market makers (AMMs), which set prices algorithmically from a liquidity pool rather than matching buyers and sellers directly. 

AMMs are elegant and capital-efficient, but they create slippage, front-running risk — where bots exploit the gap between when you submit a trade and when it executes, effectively jumping the queue at your expense — and price discovery that lags centralized markets.

What professional trading actually requires is an order book — a live, ranked list of bids and asks where buyers and sellers are matched directly. Every major centralized exchange runs on one. Building a true order book on-chain, fast enough to be usable, was considered practically impossible.

Hyperliquid built it anyway. HyperCore, the chain's trading layer, processes over 200,000 orders per second with a median trade latency of 0.2 seconds. The order book is entirely on-chain — no off-chain matching engines, no market maker backroom deals.

Yan took no venture capital, ran no private sale, and gave no token allocation to early investors. When the HYPE token launched, 31% of the total supply went to users via one of the largest airdrops in crypto history. The team kept their share, but there were no hidden VC vestings waiting to dump.

That origin matters culturally. Hyperliquid's user base came in knowing exactly what the platform was and what it was not. Serious traders. DeFi natives. People who'd lost money to front-running on Uniswap and wanted something better.

Where the comparison holds

With that context, the surface-level data does look familiar to anyone who watched Solana's early numbers.

Hyperliquid quietly flipped Solana on daily protocol fees in early 2026 — $947,000 to Solana's $685,000 in a single 24-hour window, according to on-chain data tracked by MEXC and CryptoTimes. A single-application chain outearning a general-purpose ecosystem with thousands of projects is the kind of number that makes you stop scrolling.

The revenue story is sharper still. Hyperliquid generated $844M in 2025 from a single product, per BlockEden analysis. Solana's $1.3–1.4B came from hundreds of applications. Per application, it is not closed. And like Solana circa 2021, Hyperliquid was built by a small team no one was watching — 11 people generating $900M in annual profit before most of crypto had heard the name.

Where it breaks down

Solana's recovery was a culture story.

Memecoins gave retail users a reason to be on Solana that had nothing to do with yield or efficiency — it was entertainment, community, speculation for its own sake. NFTs built identity. Gaming built habit. Solana became the place people wanted to hang out, and that social layer is what protected it through FTX and everything that followed.

Hyperliquid has 100,000 weekly users trading $50 billion in weekly volume. Those users are almost entirely serious traders. No memecoins, no NFT drops, no games. The platform delivered on the most demanding promise in DeFi history — professional-grade on-chain perpetuals — and the community that gathered around it reflects that. Precise, demanding, and not particularly interested in culture for its own sake.

That is the gap the comparison glosses over. One sharp observer put it plainly: "Solana has culture; Hyperliquid needs its own beyond perps." Solana didn't win by being technically superior. It won by becoming the place people wanted to be. Hyperliquid has not yet answered that question about itself.

The frame that actually fits

Solana and Hyperliquid are not competing. They are sequential.

Solana democratized retail crypto. It made it fast enough and cheap enough that anyone could participate without losing their trade to gas fees. Hyperliquid is attempting something harder: democratizing institutional-grade trading. The leverage and order-book depth that once required a prime brokerage relationship are now delivered on-chain and non-custodially to anyone with a wallet.

Solana proved that a purpose-built high-performance chain could earn its seat at the table. Hyperliquid is making the same bet on a narrower, more demanding problem.

Whether that problem has as many people behind it as Solana's did — that is what nobody knows yet.

What this means if you're a trader

The practical question is not which chain wins. It is what kind of exposure makes sense at this stage.

Hyperliquid is non-custodial by design — meaning you hold your own private keys, with no third party controlling your funds. You manage your own bridge risk, your own liquidation thresholds. That is the point, and for DeFi-native traders, it is the appeal. 

For traders who want the same perpetuals exposure without managing self-custody infrastructure, Nexo Futures offers a CeFi alternative built on the same underlying demand: professional-grade leverage without the operational weight of running your own wallet. I

If you are new to how crypto futures work, that tradeoff is the right place to start thinking about it.

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