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Arthur Hayes Interview with NEAR Co-Founder: HYPE Target Price $150, Does NEAR Still Have 20x Upside Potential?

Arthur Hayes

Read this article in 47 Minutes

Privacy is a prerequisite for encryption to be adopted.

Original Video Title: Arthur Hayes & Illia Polosukhin: Privacy Is The Last 1000x (NEAR & ZEC)
Original Video Source: The Rollup

Original Article Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Key Points Summary

In this episode of The Rollup, Arthur Hayes and Illia Polosukhin were invited to discuss macro liquidity, privacy assets, NEAR Intents, AI and on-chain execution layer, as well as the investment thesis for HYPE, NEAR, and ZEC.

Arthur believes that war, an AI arms race, and supply chain restructuring are driving the U.S., China, and Europe to continue supporting their economies through debt and monetary expansion, with liquidity eventually spilling over into Bitcoin and a few crypto-assets with real narratives and income.

Illia emphasizes that for blockchain to enter daily payments, wages, invoices, and AI agent economies, privacy is not optional but a prerequisite for mass adoption. Both agree that the crypto market is transitioning from indiscriminate speculation to fundamental screening, where privacy, sovereignty, real income, and token value capture will be the most important themes in the next phase.

Hightlights Summary

Macro Liquidity and AI Arms Race

· "AI has become part of national defense. Drones, AI intelligence, and battlefield decisions are being integrated into the war system, and governments will print money to win wars."

· "Countries used to base their food and energy supply on a lot of assumptions, but when key waterways like the Strait of Hormuz become unstable, holding U.S. Treasury bonds does not help them feed their people."

· "Savings held in the form of U.S. Treasury bonds need to be eventually sold to purchase real goods, build redundant supply chains, and energy pathways."

· "The benefit of Bitcoin is that if tomorrow's fiat unit is more abundant than today's, its price will rise mathematically, which is pure mathematics, while everything else is highly dependent on narrative."

L1 Public Chain Integration and Crypto Market Fundamental Return

· "Blockchain space has become a very common commodity, and the supply far exceeds the demand. The only problem in the past was that this commodity was highly non-fungible. NEAR's bet on chain abstraction and intent is to make them fungible. In other words, every chain, every asset, every user can truly connect without worrying about which block of space they are using."

· "The old logic is disappearing: we used to buy an asset because a bunch of retail investors would come in behind us to continue buying. Now retail investor risk appetite has decreased significantly. People are more concerned about whether they can afford oil and food next year, rather than speculating on an asset."

· "The market is shifting its focus to assets that truly generate income, truly have products and users."

· "For a layer-one public chain, full dilution is very important. Many projects still face significant institutional unlock pressure overhead, while NEAR already has relatively clean headroom."

Zcash and the Undervalued Privacy Assets

· "There is nothing more normal than having private money on the internet. Zcash and Monero represent this demand."

· "As big tech, governments, and AI become increasingly able to track everything in our lives, cryptographically proven money privacy will become extremely important."

· "If you hold Zcash but don't use shielded holdings, why are you even holding it?"

· "Zcash and NEAR form the core of my privacy investment thesis: in a world where AI, big tech, and big government coexist, privacy will be revalued by the market, and Maelstrom will benefit from it."

· "I believe NEAR has 20x potential in the next year, while Zcash may be around 5x."

NEAR Intent, Privacy Transactions, and Mass Adoption

· "If we want blockchain to truly enter everyday life, it is impossible without privacy; privacy is actually a prerequisite for mass adoption of encryption."

· "If I'm paying at a coffee shop, I don't want the store to know how much money I have, nor do I want the whole world to know I just spent there."

· "Privacy intent aims to address not only holding a private asset but also ensuring that transfers, transactions, payments, earnings, and more can be kept confidential across all assets."

· "Many use cases that were once considered suitable for crypto, such as payroll, invoicing, are actually really hard to happen in a fully transparent on-chain environment."

AI Agents and On-Chain Execution Layer

· "In the future, we will be using AI for computations, and blockchain will be the way everything gets executed."

· "AI needs privacy too. You don't want the lab to harvest your data to train better models and then sell the service back to you through a subscription fee."

· "AI is a new computing interface, with the intent behind being the business layer."

· "Our core thesis back in 2017 was that AI would become the way we build software and interact with computation."

Hyperliquid and the Decentralized Finance Dream

· "What's one of the killer apps in the crypto space? Trading platforms. Who's the richest person in crypto? The exchange owner."

· "The most critical part of Hyperliquid isn't how novel the perpetual contract or the decentralized trading platform itself is, but it gets the tokenomics right."

· "With no VC pre-sale, only team allocation, and almost all revenue going back to token holders, this is very rare in a project of this scale."

AI Labor Displacement and Political Risks

· "The impact of AI on labor greatly depends on where you live. High-income white-collar workers on the U.S. coasts will be protected, while back-office workers overseas will immediately lose their jobs, with little concern for them."

· "I think the displacement has already started, it's just unevenly distributed. The only chance is to stay at the forefront; we've always said, you need to leverage these technologies to upskill yourself, learn faster, apply faster."

· "What could really stop the music isn't necessarily some big IPO, but politics. People will ask: AI companies are getting extremely wealthy off all of humanity's knowledge and interactions, what are we getting in return?"

· "If there's going to be a massive windfall profits tax on AI, it's not that these companies can't make money, it's just, are you willing to pay 100 times revenue for a company that may be subject to a 50% AI tax? Of course not."

Arthur's Macro Investment Thesis

Host Rob: Arthur, you were cautious for a while, warning everyone to pay attention to the risks, and then you became overwhelmingly bullish. What happened in between? What changed?

Arthur Hayes: At the beginning of the year, I wrote an article, suggesting that Bitcoin was front-running a credit event triggered by AI-driven deflation.

My assessment was that central banks wouldn't print enough money until they saw a financial crisis coming. My entire thesis was that after Bitcoin hit an all-time high, the Nasdaq was flat, but Bitcoin plummeted alongside the U.S. investment-grade bond ETF IGB, from $126,000 to just over $60,000. I believed it was a credit event at that time.

Then on February 28, the U.S. engaged in military action against Iran, igniting the war situation and making the market aware that this would become a liquidity-friendly event. First, AI is now part of national defense. Drones, AI-powered drones, AI intelligence systems are all part of the war efforts of all belligerent parties. Governments will print money to win the war, AI is part of the war, so both the U.S. and Chinese governments will backstop AI capital expenditures.

We've started to see bank loans and equity investments flowing into chip manufacturers. At least in the U.S., companies like Intel have received support, and similar announcements have been made in quantum computing, such as a $1 billion investment in an IBM-related project. It's all part of the same theme.

On the other side, many countries previously made a lot of assumptions about food and energy supplies, thinking they could obtain supplies through contentious waterways like the Strait of Hormuz. But now things have become challenging, so they will start to think: why do I still hold these U.S. Treasuries? If I need to feed my population, or if I'm on some island with no aviation fuel, holding U.S. Treasuries won't help me, especially if my ship can't even pass through the strait.

So they need to build redundant supplies of all critical goods, especially food and energy; they need to invest in new trade relationships; they need to construct new pipelines to bypass the Persian Gulf and flow oil out from places like the UAE. All this means that savings held in the form of U.S. Treasuries need to be sold off and exchanged for real goods.

And the United States will not allow this kind of sell-off to crash the market. It will print money to fill the hole, ensuring that the market does not spiral out of control. So I think February 28 is a market catalyst event. The United States, China, and Europe will all print money to fund wartime economies and AI capital expenditures, and this money will ultimately flow into Bitcoin, which is why Bitcoin is performing so well.

Heavy Bets on NEAR, ZEC, and HYPE

Arthur Hayes: Now we are also seeing a small group of coins start to rise, some of which I hold, such as NEAR, HYPE, and Zcash, all of which have performed very well since February 28. That's my rough thesis.

In the first quarter, I actually didn't do much trading. After the war started, I did some, but fundamentally, we have held these assets at a very good price for a long time. Now the market is starting to validate why we bought them 6 to 12 months ago.

Host Andy: The entire crypto Twitter is discussing whether this trade has already become consensus, but in fact, we have already heavily bet on it. We have been focusing on the macro, and have seen your show and articles on CoinDesk. At first, the market was still volatile, but then assets like NEAR, HYPE, and ZEC suddenly started to rise, so all of this is gradually coming together in the consolidation phase.

Layer One Public Chain Integration Has Begun

Host Andy: Illia, I would like to hear your thoughts on market consolidation. This is not your first so-called bear market experience; we have seen such phases before, but this time it feels especially real because the market itself is evolving.

Institutional allocators have entered the arena, the macro environment is very unstable, which has led people to start looking at the industry in a "adapt to the institutional era or be left behind" way. Besides, the industry as a whole is becoming more mature and complex. You need to have products, revenue, real users, and a genuinely sustainable, robust tokenomics path.

From a founder's perspective, what has happened in the market in the past 6 to 8 months? Why has the change been so rapid? And how has NEAR navigated through this phase?

Illia Polosukhin: I think several clues are converging, starting with the logic of layer one and layer two. I remember giving a speech in 2019 where I said we would first go through a large breakout, then enter a consolidation phase, and ultimately only a few projects would survive, and now we are approaching that stage.

Block space has become a very common commodity, with the supply far exceeding the demand. The only problem in the past was that this commodity was highly non-fungible. NEAR's bet on chain abstraction and Intents is to make them fungible. This means that every chain, every asset, and every user can truly connect without having to worry about which block space they are using.

The second thread is the return to fundamentals. This is a direction you have been talking about for over a year, maybe even a few years. Now it is indeed happening. Whether it is the market or those who truly analyze the market, I am not talking about institutions like BlackRock and Fidelity, but funds and professional investors, they are all shifting.

The old logic is disappearing: we buy an asset because there will be a bunch of retail investors coming in to continue buying. Now retail risk appetite has decreased significantly. As Arthur just mentioned, people are more concerned about whether they can afford oil and food next year, rather than whether to speculate on an asset.

So the market is starting to ask: Which assets actually generate income? Which assets provide the products we are using? If I stake it, can I gain new capabilities? For example, with HYPE, staking allows for lower fees and more market access. The logic of ZEC is different, but it also provides privacy capabilities. NEAR is similar in that it can provide cross-chain, intent, and computation-related capabilities.

These are the new capabilities that market participants desire. So these assets are starting to become the focus, rather than the kind that you can hold but it's hard to say what value the token represents until the fee switch is turned on. I believe these two threads are converging and forming a more widespread environment in the current crypto market.

Why Arthur Likes Zcash

Host Rob: This industry seems to be going through a reshuffling phase. Some of the Bankless folks seem to have gone their separate ways, with David Hoffman selling all his ETH, Merch no longer supporting Solana, and fully backing Zcash. Arthur, why is Zcash and privacy so important to you? Is this the core spirit of the crypto industry? What role does NEAR Intents play here?

Arthur Hayes: The current hype around Zcash is certainly new, but I remember back in 2016, before the Zcash mainnet launch, it was the hottest thing in the market. At that time, I was still at BitMEX, and we listed the first Zcash price derivative.

That market was very crazy back in the day, with prices on Poloniex skyrocketing to around $3000 at one point. If you remember that exchange, there was even a time when 7 Bitcoin could get you 1 Zcash.

It was a truly wild day. Subsequently, due to block rewards causing rapid inflation of the supply, the price plummeted. However, Zcash did have some issues back then. For example, there was the trusted setup where you had to trust Zooko, Eli, and other participants to have behaved well during the key generation ceremony. There was also the issue of the team's 20% block reward subsidy, which was controversial in the market at the time.

But those issues are now in the past. The protocol has undergone upgrades, the trusted setup has been removed, we know it is secure cryptographically, and the 20% subsidy has disappeared. Now it has a clean slate, with enough supply to form a real market, rather than the extreme volatility seen at its inception.

Naval Changed Arthur's Mind

Arthur Hayes: During last year's Token 2049, I attended a dinner where Naval was also present. He started talking to me about Zcash. By then, Zcash had risen from around $30 to near $120, and I asked him why he was bullish, knowing I held a lot of Monero at the time.

He told me that Monero's ring signatures were not as strong as people believed. The Japanese law enforcement had successfully de-anonymized transactions in a criminal case. After hearing this, I thought this person was obviously credible, so I went back and bought millions of dollars worth of Zcash.

I also noticed something: I have many brokers, but only two were willing to quote me prices for Zcash, as many institutions would say, "We don't deal with privacy coins." My reaction at the time was, "If I find it hard to buy, then I want it more."

Afterward, I did more research to validate some of Naval's claims. Then I continued to buy and kept adding to my position. Zcash took off in 2016 essentially because everyone knew Bitcoin was a pseudonymous system, not fully private. Many people indeed value privacy in certain scenarios. Having private money on the internet is a no-brainer, which is what Zcash represents, as does Monero.

As we see more clearly that Big Tech, Big Government, and AI have the ability to know everything about us, track everything happening in our lives, money privacy proved cryptographically is going to become extremely valuable, which is why I made Zcash my second-largest holding. Even though I bought in after it bounced from $30 and had already quadrupled, the performance has been excellent.

The next question then became user experience. The premier app used to have a different name, now it's called Zashi, where users can shield Zcash. In 2016, one of Zcash's biggest issues was that it functioned as intended but almost no one could shield it. Everyone was transacting with transparent Zcash, essentially just a subpar version of Bitcoin. If you can't privately hold, what was the point?

Now the situation has changed. Apps like Zashi allow you to shield Zcash on a user-friendly mobile interface, and when paired with cold wallets like Keystone, you can shield Zcash in cold storage. I highly recommend that everyone holding Zcash shield their holdings; otherwise, what's the point of holding it at all?

NEAR Intent and Anonymous Swaps

Arthur Hayes: The user experience is already good, and now we move on to the more interesting part. We invested in a funding round of Zashi. Then, within the Zashi app, I can anonymously send any encrypted asset to anyone on the internet through shielded Zcash and NEAR Intent. For example, starting from shielded Zcash, converting to USDT on Tron, and then anonymously sending it to the recipient.

This is crucial. Looking at NEAR's price, it, like other assets in the crypto industry, has fallen significantly from its all-time high and been through a cycle. I thought at the time, if the privacy narrative becomes a major theme, Zcash will be the first stop; the second stop is whoever can enable people to anonymously send value across any chain. This capability is equally enormous.

NEAR's economic model will catch up; this is a highly asymmetric opportunity. Of course, I haven't allocated as much to NEAR as I have to Zcash, but I believe NEAR has 20x potential in the next year, while Zcash might be around 5x. You allocate capital in varying sizes based on risk.

That's why these two assets form the core of my privacy investment thesis: in a world of AI, big tech, and big government, privacy will be revalued by the market, and Maelstrom will profit from it.

Privacy is a Prerequisite for Mass Adoption

Host Rob: Illia, when you look at NEAR from the perspective of a capital allocator like Arthur, it's clear that AI narrative is a key theme, including supporting identity management, the payment network, and the various infrastructure needed for AI agents. However, the core of unlocking the value of the Zcash ecosystem lies in Intents, as it makes privacy coins more efficient and practical.

Here are some data points: The historical total transaction volume of NEAR Intents is close to $20 billion, currently around $18.9 billion. NEAR Intents have generated $33 million in fees from these transaction volumes, with a significant portion coming from Zcash, as it is almost the only place capable of executing such operations. Arthur also mentioned that privacy Intents will create a positive cash flow for the protocol.

Can you talk about how you plan to monetize Intents? What is NEAR's current cash flow situation? And how do you plan to expand NEAR Intents to better serve the entire NEAR ecosystem?

Illia Polosukhin: The core of what Arthur just said is that we need on-chain privacy. I would even go further: If we want blockchain to truly enter daily life, it is impossible without privacy; in fact, privacy is a prerequisite for widespread adoption of encryption.

If I buy coffee at a café, I don't want the café to know how much money I have, nor do I want the world to know that I just made a payment at that café. I also don't want someone to be waiting there for me the next time I go there to make a purchase. Recently, there has been a discussion on Twitter about someone's on-chain credit card transaction, visible to everyone, which is absurd in itself.

Therefore, if we want cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and other assets to become everyday currencies in real transactions, privacy is a prerequisite. Even just for investing, I now have to prepare many addresses for each investment, one for sending and one for receiving, each address must be isolated, and managed with spreadsheets. This is unacceptable in the normal world.

The privacy Intents are meant to bring not only sovereign, censorship-resistant, and private assets like Zcash. Zcash itself is very important, and we do need it. But we also want to address another issue: how to confidentially carry out transfers, trades, payments, earnings, and other operations among the 150+ assets we support.

The essence of Privacy Intent is essentially to build a private shard on NEAR. Users can access this private shard, conduct transactions internally, and external parties cannot see what is happening inside. It does not require users to perform complex cryptographic operations on the client side; all cryptography is done internally. Therefore, it is lightweight and programmable. You can write smart contracts inside it and deploy them.

This means that we can already support transactions, transfers, and private payments. There will be more features in the future, released gradually through partnerships and integration with the entire ecosystem. I am excited because I believe this is the implementation layer of the privacy investment thesis, making privacy truly widespread, accessible, and easy to use.

For example, payroll. No one uses crypto to pay salaries because everyone would see how much each person is getting paid; also, invoices, and many other use cases that we have always said crypto should do, but actually cannot happen when everything is completely transparent. So, this is very exciting as it can help us increase transaction volume and throughput.

We will take a fee from each transaction and use these fees to buy back NEAR. This economic model is very straightforward. Our goal is to continue doing this. At the same time, across the entire ecosystem, we have already decreased inflation. Last November, we effectively halved inflation. NEAR is already fully diluted, and I will continue to drive further inflation reduction within the community. With increasing ecosystem revenues, we can gradually balance the ledger, start making NEAR deflationary, and truly achieve economic sustainability and profitability.

Arthur Hayes: I will add to Illia's point. The fact that NEAR is fully diluted is very important, especially when you want to discuss whether a layer-one public chain can perform well in a bull market. Many layer-one public chains do all sorts of fancy things, but they have a bunch of venture capital chips unlocking above their heads, ready to be dumped at any time.

What you want is clean overhead space. NEAR has this because it has been around long enough and has gone through this cleansing process. This is a great asset because there is open sky ahead of me, and no one is waiting to dump chips on my head.

The AI Blockchain Vision Since 2017

Host Rob: NEAR is one of the few fully diluted tokens, especially in the L1 blockchain space, with over $30 million in cash flow since it has been one of the main revenue drivers.

Interviewer: Illia, could you elaborate more on NEAR's other AI features, such as NEAR AI, IronClaw, and your current suite of products? What excites you the most about the product suite? How does it tie into privacy by design? If possible, also touch on the revenue potential of these products and how they will ultimately impact NEAR's overall economic condition.

Illia Polosukhin: The high-level logic is: in the future, we will use AI to drive computation, and blockchain will be the way everything is enforced. So we are doing these two parts simultaneously and truly connecting them together.

AI also needs privacy. You do not want a lab to harvest your data, train better models with it, and then sell you the service through a subscription fee. You want to give the model more context, more access, but if it runs on some third party's hands and you don't know how they are using that access, it's dangerous. For example, if you give out permission to your crypto account or bank account, they might collect that data, even make transactions on your behalf, and you wouldn't even know.

What we are doing on the AI side is creating an intelligent agent experience that is centered around privacy and security. It's essentially an execution arm, where today you manually do payments yourself, and in the future lots of things, nearly everything, will be done by your intelligent agent. As long as you trust it enough, give it enough context, it can help you with anything from everyday shopping to building a hedged spot position on Hyperliquid, to overlaying a series of predictions markets.

For example, you could say, I want to build a position, I think something will happen tomorrow, please help me construct the right strategy. It will go and find the right assets, the right combinations, and help you build that position. It would be very cumbersome to do this manually today.

IronClaw is an example now. You can input your crypto address, it will analyze all your assets and positions, suggest better yield opportunities, tell you how to reallocate across different protocols, and this can be greatly expanded in the future.

So these two parts work together. AI is the new compute interface, intent is the business layer behind. It is used not only for regular payments but also for supply chains, goods, and broader transactions. All of this will flow through intent, which is much better at finding transactions, negotiating them, and settling them compared to traditional email, invoicing, and billing systems.

We have a very specific example, called the Intelligent Agent Market. Intelligent agents can hire other intelligent agents to perform work or deliver goods. This is a glimpse of the future, although still early, but real-world companies are already using it. For example, you can hire an intelligent agent to help you procure parts for the supply chain, or you can hire an intelligent agent to help you build a marketing website, develop an application, or write investment copy.

These intelligent agents run on our verifiable computing. You know what it is doing, and you can check what happened. It runs on our secure infrastructure, so you can grant it permission to access some contacts or internal information. In the past, when we hired people into the company, one reason was to give them access permissions.

But historically, granting permission to a third party has been difficult. Now, if the intelligent agent runs in a verifiable, secure computing environment, you can allow it to access information within the company.

What I am describing is actually changing the way labor and the supply chain work. So the market we are targeting here is the total market for all labor and supply chain services, making them all operate on intent.

Host Andy: We can see the intersection between AI and intent: intelligent agents use intent to transfer value, and users also want to use privacy intent with Zcash or transfer value. Some people may say NEAR's direction is very diverse, but from the beginning, it seems like you had this main thread.

Illia Polosukhin: Yes. When we started in 2017, the core insight was that AI would become the way we build software and interact with computation. That was in 2017. Later, we realized that to truly achieve this, we needed blockchain. So in 2018, we began to focus on the NEAR Protocol. These pieces have been part of NEAR's DNA from the beginning.

Hyperliquid Realized the Dream of DeFi

Host Andy: Arthur, I think everyone would like to hear you talk about Hyperliquid. Now that the HYPE price has reached around $61, Zcash and NEAR represent privacy transactions, which are different from Hyperliquid's logic, but they seem to be part of the same puzzle.

Privacy is very important, it is a core part of this industry, it can give people freedom, but in today's world, especially in the financial field, privacy is severely underestimated. On the other hand, Hyperliquid is a DeFi and decentralized trading platform that has the potential to surpass centralized finance. Many people have already forgotten that we entered this industry to some extent to replace traditional finance, at least to become a truly alternative system.

The dream has been diluted in the past by sky-high valuations, low circulation, scammy projects, infrastructure narratives, and other distractions. However, Hyperliquid seems to be an excellent project that is bringing this dream back to life. Although these two investment theses are very different, they have attracted many of the same people. What is your take on Hyperliquid? Where do you see it headed? Why are you so bullish on it?

Arthur Hayes: What is one of the killer applications in the crypto industry? The exchange platform. Who are the richest people in the crypto industry? Exchange platform owners. BNB is still the fourth or fifth largest cryptocurrency by market cap, but it is not a true cryptocurrency in the strictest sense; it is CZ's servers and his launched chain.

We know how to make money in the crypto industry. It's just that many people like to complicate things, such as infrastructure, real-world assets, and so on. Exchange platforms make money, that's crystal clear. The ultimate goal of exchange platforms is: we have the internet, we have blockchain, so let anyone anywhere trade anything, add some leverage to make things more interesting.

I have always been in the centralized exchange platform industry and have always known that the industry would move towards decentralized exchange platforms. The earliest representative was dYdX, which was the first star project in the decentralized exchange platform space, with a very strong price performance from 2020 to 2021. However, it later deviated from its path. What dYdX wanted to do is actually the same as what Hyperliquid is doing, except Hyperliquid executes better, and dYdX's tokenomics have issues.

Then during the slump of 2023, GMX emerged. Its model is good, but there are areas for improvement in tokenomics, asset listing, and more, and then came Jeff and his team. Coming from a high-frequency trading background, they are excellent engineers who have indeed delivered very good code.

But the most important thing about them is that they fixed the tokenomics. Perpetual contracts are not a new thing; we created them in 2016. Decentralized exchange platforms are not new; they have been around since around 2018, 2020. The key is getting the tokenomics right.

Hyperliquid did not have a venture capital sale, only team allocation, and almost all revenue flows back to token holders. In terms of the revenue scale generated by HYPE, no other project can match this. This is why it has been so successful and why people are deeply involved in this ecosystem.

When they launched HIP-3, allowing users to list assets without permission, everyone was able to trade assets such as NASDAQ, S&P, oil, and more. These were still small markets in December last year and January this year. However, because politicians like to cause trouble on weekends, the traditional markets lacked price discovery, so they could have a three-day window of public opinion. Now, with Hyperliquid, it has become the only price discovery venue on weekends, with sufficient liquidity, and everyone can trade.

This is not just an important price signal only for those who have a U.S. brokerage account.

Now even the traditional financial media is starting to cover Hyperliquid because they have nowhere else to go. If they could talk about oil futures at CME on a Saturday, they would definitely go and completely ignore Hyperliquid. But they can't. So they cannot ignore Hyperliquid because it is the only place to trade. Everyone can access the data, everyone can trade.

This has created a flywheel effect. More and more people are learning about Hyperliquid, understanding that income will flow back to you as a token holder; if you stake enough HYPE, you can get a fee discount; you can also participate in listing your own market on Hyperliquid, so it is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I believe it has already broken its all-time high and will go much higher. Because the easiest market for it to penetrate is the trading volume of centralized exchanges. Hyperliquid may now only account for 7% to 8% of that, but it will only continue to increase in the future as it lists more assets, offers higher leverage, and is easier to use.

Even if Hyperliquid only captures 10% to 15% of Binance's perpetual contract trading volume, its price will be much higher than it is now. It does not need to reinvent anything; it just needs to capture existing traders. These people already hold stablecoins or other crypto assets, are trading on centralized exchanges, and paying hefty fees. They want a different experience and actually own a part of the trading platform.

AI Labor Replacement Investment Thesis

Host Rob: Illia, you mentioned the total addressable market of all human labor. To help the audience more intuitively grasp this concept, the total global wage and salary bill is approximately $11.7 trillion annually. At the same time, we see AI Agents gradually becoming a significant part of the labor market.

Arthur, in your AI vs. Labor Investment Thesis, you also mentioned that this would lead to a collapse in consumer credit. There may be a bumpy road ahead, but it will eventually bring about large-scale monet