Hyperliquid vs Binance drama unfolds in real-time
Tensions between Hyperliquid and Binance reached an emotional climax on Friday night as crypto traders lost a collective $600 billion within half an hour of Donald Trump’s threat to renew a tariff war with China.
As the relatively small Hyperliquid continues to market itself as a Binance competitor, it’s drawn Binance founder Changpeng Zhao into a social media spat over the market crash.
Hyperliquid co-founder Jeffrey Yan and Zhao are arguing about their respective reporting systems for liquidations, reimbursements for users, prevention of market manipulation, the resilience of their respective proprietary tokens, and which exchange is sufficiently capitalized to weather the tumultuous storms of crypto.
From over $3.9 trillion, the combined market cap of crypto assets fell to under $3.3 trillion within 30 minutes of Trump’s Friday afternoon threat.
Stablecoins de-pegged, and even billion-dollar coins like Cosmos flash-crashed 99.9% on Binance. Although prices tanked on Hyperliquid, Binance had idiosyncratic problems and some of Friday’s worst flash-crash lows.
Since 2017, Binance has offered leverage to customers through perpetually-rolling futures contracts or “perps.”
Hyperliquid offers similar perps, in addition to copy-trading and leaderboard contests, with easier registration and know your customer requirements.
As Hyperliquid has grown in prominence, Zhao has begun to promote a similar service called Aster. While Hyperliquid claimed to be a decentralized exchange or “DEX” on its own blockchain, Aster is a DEX on the blockchain that Zhao co-founded, BNB Chain.
CZ says Binance handled Friday’s panic better than Hyperliquid
Without naming Binance specifically, Yan criticized centralized exchanges for bundling thousands of liquidations into single reports, understating the true scale of liquidations and distorting market data.
Zhao defended Binance’s consolidated reporting system, which has operated for over eight years as a transparently centralized system.
He then took the opportunity to dunk on his smaller competitor, retweeting the claim that Hyperliquid liquidated 90% of its users’ longs versus Binance’s more resilient 60% long liquidation rate.
Zhao also emphasized his far more generous payout to users affected by Friday’s sell-off. HyperLiquid’s vault profited $40 million during the crash, whereas Binance reimbursed $283 million to compensate its customers.
He also retweeted Venus Protocol’s reimbursement of its users, appreciating Venus’ loyalty to the BNB ecosystem.
Read more: Binance Wallet glitch shows $0 balances after weekend chaos
Zhao definitely has more money than Yan
Many of Zhao’s responses to Hyperliquid emphasized his extraordinary wealth. Bloomberg estimates his personal net worth at $60 billion.
Poking fun at the price of Hyperliquid’s HYPE sitting 30% below its all-time high, Zhao retweeted a 100 million-ASTER token buyback.
In contrast to Hyperliquid’s languishing proprietary token, Zhao highlighted that his BNB token regained its own peak today. As of publication time, BNB is within 7% of its all-time high.
Zhao also boasted of a new, $600 million commitment from China Renaissance Bank into his family office, YZI Labs. He also bragged about a $45 million rebate to BNB memecoin investors.
Finally, he amplified a claim that a bitcoin (BTC) investor who allegedly owned over 100,000 BTC used Hyperliquid to benefit from Friday’s crypto sell-off.
The insinuation from his retweet is that Hyperliquid, unlike Binance, might have failed to prevent disadvantageous or manipulative trading activity for its users.
Someone contested that the alleged investor, Garret Jin, was working alone.
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