A Public Attack Just Days After His Departure
Kyle Samani left Multicoin Capital on February 5, 2026, after ten years at the firm.
Within seventy-two hours, he was back online calling Hyperliquid “everything wrong with crypto.”
His critique focused on three things: the platform runs closed-source code, uses hand-picked
validators instead of a public set, and its founder moved to a country known for being less
cooperative with U.S. authorities. According to Samani, this setup creates serious seizure
risk and makes it easier for bad actors to move money around undetected.
The timing was interesting. Right as Samani posted his criticism, Hyperliquid’s new prediction
market feature helped push the exchange past $2.5 trillion in weekly volume—briefly bigger
than Coinbase. It’s a perfect example of the disconnect in crypto right now: traders don’t
seem to care much about transparency if the product works well and feels fast.
Speed Versus Openness
Hyperliquid built its platform to feel like a centralized exchange—fast, smooth, low fees—
while still settling trades on its own blockchain rollup. Critics say the closed code and
private validators go against everything DeFi is supposed to stand for. Supporters argue
you can’t build a product that fast and reliable if you have to open-source everything and
let anyone run a validator. It’s a bigger question the whole industry is wrestling with:
do you prioritize censorship resistance from day one, or do you build something people
actually want to use and decentralize it later?
Right now, the market seems to prefer speed. Venture capital data shows over $250 million
went into high-performance crypto projects this quarter, even with regulators paying closer
attention and the market still recovering from last year’s losses. Hyperliquid’s HYPE token
is up more than thirty percent this year and sits in the top twenty by market cap. Users
are voting with their wallets, and they’re choosing utility over ideology.
The $40 Million Wallet
Things got awkward when blockchain analysts spotted a wallet tied to Multicoin buying
1.35 million HYPE tokens—worth over $40 million. So the firm Samani just left was piling
into the very asset he was publicly trashing. Was this a trade made before he quit? A hedge?
Internal disagreement? Samani’s only response was “I don’t work at Multicoin,” which didn’t
clear much up. But it does show how messy things get when personal beliefs clash with
institutional money. For traders watching all this, the lesson is simple: ignore the tweets,
watch the wallets.
What This Means for Crypto’s Next Chapter
The whole Hyperliquid drama captures the main tensions in crypto right now. Performance
versus permissionlessness. Pragmatism versus principle. And how public fights like this
might shape the regulatory conversation going forward. Whether Samani’s criticism pushes
Hyperliquid to open up or just gives them more attention, one thing is clear: “walled-garden
DeFi” is now part of the conversation. If trading volumes keep climbing despite the
transparency concerns, the market is telling us that the next wave of users cares more
about experience than ideology. The challenge for true believers will be figuring out
how to deliver decentralization at the speed and scale that mainstream audiences expect.
