‘Say Goodbye to memes’ as DeFi exchange Hyperliquid mints wave of new crypto millionaires

Goodbye memes, hello DeFi.

Hyperliquid, a decentralised perpetual exchange, just distributed more than $1 billion in HYPE tokens to the project’s early users.

Thanks to the airdrop, data collected from a project dashboard now counts dozens of crypto addresses with seven-figure sums.

The HYPE token distribution hasn’t just made punters rich overnight — it’s expected to reinvigorate a corner of the crypto market that has so far lagged: Decentralised finance.

“For now, it’s time to say goodbye to memes as we rotate back into fundamentals with DeFi at the core of this resurgence,” Edward Wilson, marketing lead at OneBalance, told DL News.

Joke coins head higher

The industry’s eye-watering run-up has, for the most part, been a party of two: Bitcoin and memecoins.

A week after Donald Trump won the US elections on lofty pro-crypto promises, Bitcoin soared more than 33%. The $1.9 trillion cryptocurrency has since been edging towards $100,000, blowing past its 2021 record high.

Likewise, joke coins soared 130% after Trump’s victory and are now worth a collective $127 billion, according to CoinGecko.

Meanwhile, Ethereum, a bedrock technology for the decentralised finance sector, has yet to reach its three-year-high of $4,878.

DeFi’s total value locked, which measures how much money is sloshing around across various protocols, is still roughly $50 billion from its peak in 2021. Ethereum hosts almost 60% of all DeFi activity.

With $1 billion in cash newly injected into DeFi via Hyperliquid, some say it could kick off a new DeFi summer.

DeFi resurgence

Hyperliquid is a unique beast.

It’s both a layer-1, like Ethereum and Solana, and a decentralised exchange, like Uniswap or Raydium. The objective is to create a decentralised trading experience that is on par with centralised heavyweights like Binance and Coinbase.

“Hyperliquid is an L1 blockchain like Ethereum, Bitcoin or Solana. It should be able to scale in the same way or better,” Xulian, a pseudonymous contributor to Hyperliquid, told DL News when asked how it would scale.

Its airdrop is also much different from the slew of free tokens issued this year.

Hyperliquid’s large allocation to users, while excluding allocations to venture capitalists, market makers and crypto exchanges, has drawn comparison to other heralded airdrops.

“Your biggest comparisons are Uniswap, dYdX, and Arbitrum airdrops that created much wealth,” Daryl Lau, a crypto investor, told DL News. He said that the common thread between each DeFi project is high valuations and the large distribution to their users.

Ashwath Balakrishnan, head of consulting at Delphi Creative, also pointed to the Uniswap airdrop. Uniswap distributed 150 million UNI tokens to over 250,000 users in 2020.

“It’s not an unsound prediction,” he told DL News when asked if the Hyperliquid airdrop could spark a DeFi resurgence.

“It’ll be a lot easier to see it coming because we’ll see profit taking on HYPE and bridge flows to other chains with DeFi.”

While more than $210 million in funds rushed to bridge onto Hyperliquid on Thursday, net flows now show money is slowly exiting the decentralised exchange, according to data compiled by user degenbrachio on Dune Analytics.

Watching where exactly that money flows will provide investors with a bit more insight into what’s next for DeFi.

Liam Kelly is a Berlin-based DL News correspondent. Got a tip? Email at liam@dlnews.com.