‘Everything wrong with crypto:’ Forward Industries CEO fires shot at Hyperliquid

Kyle Samani, the Chairman of Forward Industries, a Nasdaq-listed company that currently operates as a treasury company focused on holding Solana, just threw shade at Hyperliquid and its founder, Jeff Yan. 

As far as Samani is concerned, Hyperliquid represents “everything wrong with crypto.” It was shocking commentary, but Samani was kind enough to explain what he meant, albeit vaguely. 

The comments have left many wondering if this is the typical ecosystem rivalry or something more. 

Samani made some serious allegations 

According to Samani, Hyperliquid’s founder Jeff Yan, who is known for keeping a low profile, had to run from his home country in pursuit of freedom to build. 

Yan succeeded in building Hyperliquid, but Samani claims the platform now brazenly facilitates crime and terror; is closed source and permissioned.

The post is clearly opinionated, and the sentiment directly clashes with many of the factors that users say help Hyperliquid stand out. 

Samani regularly operates on Solana, so the rivalry between the chain and Hyperliquid could have spurred him on to make the post. 

However, not all he said is verifiable or true. For example, there is no legal proof that Hyperliquid facilitates terrorism, and its founder chose to leave his home country because he wanted to build in the best environment. 

Meanwhile, Hyperliquid continues to grow 

While the likes of Samani continue to criticize Hyperliquid and its founder, the platform has continued to grow with nonstop iteration and innovation. 

At the start of the month, Hyperliquid, looking to build on its strong price performance, announced the upcoming launch of HIP-4 markets, which would enable prediction-market-like outcome trading.

“Outcomes are fully collateralized contracts that settle within a fixed range. They are a general-purpose primitive that are useful for applications such as prediction markets and bounded options-like instruments,” the official X post read.

Hyperliquid’s HYPE token has indeed been seeing strong performance this year, and analysts have linked the price action to the success of its HIP-3 upgrade, which enabled permissionless perpetual markets, allowing providers to tokenize traditional real-world assets such as Nasdaq Futures, Gold, and Forex.

HIP-3 trading via the leading market provider, TradeXYZ, has since been explosive, with the exchange processing over $12 billion in volume, about 4 times what it was processing before.

Sam Ruskin, a research analyst at Messari, has speculated on the upcoming HIP-4 launch, claiming it could be very bullish for pre-IPO trading on Hyperliquid. 

“We’re about to see the most news-driven IPO cycle ever (OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic). There will undoubtedly be demand to bet on those markets, but the fundamental flaw for pre-IPO perps is that they rely on sketchy, unverified, private data. It’s too risky for both makers and takers to get involved at scale,” Ruskin wrote. 

Ruskin claims that prediction markets eliminate the oracle problem entirely, and without oracles, there is no liquidation risk and less incentive for toxic flow. 

“I could even see a world where pre-IPO perps become self-referential to prediction markets, an entirely end-to-end system. Very exciting catalysts on the horizon for Hyperliquid,” Ruskin concluded.