HYPE Sets 3rd Record High as Multicoin Calls It 'Binance 2.0'

Hyperliquid HYPE all-time high territory became a recurring address this week. The token hit fresh record peaks on Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday, climbing past $67 by the weekend and posting a gain of more than 73% over the trailing 30 days. The market cap cleared $15 billion. On the surface, it looks like a clean breakout story. Dig a little deeper and you find a genuine argument about what kind of exchange Hyperliquid actually is.

Kyle Samani Drops the 'Binance 2.0' Label

The sharpest pushback came from Kyle Samani, co-founder of Multicoin Capital and current chairman of Forward Industries, Inc. He called Hyperliquid "Binance 2.0 without a marketing team," and that framing is worth sitting with for a moment. It is simultaneously a compliment and an indictment.

Samani's argument is technical at its core. He said Hyperliquid has made thousands of architectural decisions that function well inside a centralized system but would buckle under the demands of a truly permissionless network. By his read, that design gap puts Hyperliquid "many steps behind" where it would need to be, and he suggested major American corporations would be reluctant to build on or integrate with the platform given those constraints.

The timing added an awkward subplot. Samani left Multicoin back in February, and shortly after his departure, large wallets connected to the firm were flagged by an X user as rotating out of Ethereum and into HYPE. Multicoin co-founder Tushar Jain has separately been vocal about a significant bet on Zcash. Whether any of that colors Samani's current read on Hyperliquid is a matter of speculation, but the context is there.

Despite the noise, HYPE kept climbing. Retail sentiment on Stocktwits stayed pinned in the 'extremely bullish' zone throughout the weekend, with conversation volume holding at 'extremely high' levels.

ICE CEO Puts Hyperliquid on Wall Street's Radar

The previous day's record came with a very different kind of validation. At the Bernstein Conference on Friday, Intercontinental Exchange CEO Jeff Sprecher described Hyperliquid as "bigger than Nasdaq", pointing to the platform's 11-person engineering team as "very, very smart people." That quote from the CEO of the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange carries weight in rooms where crypto usually gets dismissed as a sideshow.

Sprecher also singled out Hyperliquid's SpaceX perpetual futures market as evidence of how far the platform's ambition stretches. He suggested the market surrounding those contracts could rival, or possibly exceed, the attention a conventional SpaceX IPO would generate. That is not a casual comparison.

Institutional capital followed the headline. The two spot HYPE exchange-traded funds, Bitwise's BHYP and 21Shares' THYP, crossed $100 million in combined cumulative inflows since their respective launches, according to SoSoValue data. For a token that did not exist two years ago, that number represents a meaningful vote of confidence from allocators who move slowly.

Can the Rally Hold? Analysts Are Split

The bull case goes beyond recent price action. Crypto commentator DeFi Monk pointed to the global contracts-for-difference market, which processes roughly $1 trillion in daily notional volume, as the real addressable opportunity for Hyperliquid even if US market access remains off the table due to regulatory friction. His logic: regulatory uncertainty is not a ceiling, it is a discount. The market is pricing in risk that may never fully materialize.

DeFi Monk also cited Hyperliquid's growing institutional connections, naming Coinbase, Circle, Paradigm, Grayscale, and Bitwise as relationships that lend the platform credibility it did not have a year ago. That institutional surface area matters when you are trying to move from crypto-native users toward broader adoption.

The skeptical view comes from technical analysis. Crypto analyst Rekt Capital noted on Friday that HYPE has entered price discovery after breaking through a major resistance zone, which by definition means there is no historical price reference to anchor expectations. He flagged that both price and the Relative Strength Index are operating in uncharted territory, and warned that a bearish RSI divergence could develop over time. He was careful to add that it is too early to confirm bearish intent, and that the setup could resolve higher just as easily.

The honest read is that nobody knows. Three all-time highs in five days, a $15 billion market cap, and a split between a Wall Street exchange CEO calling it bigger than Nasdaq and a crypto VC calling it structurally compromised. What that tension resolves into over the next few months is the actual question.