This post is going to be spicy and having no affiliation with any other company or agenda I can give you my honest appraisal of the ASTER vs hyperliquid drama unfolding.
DEX warfare #
Hyperliquid is a state of the art DeX that has been organically building up a strong community with its custom L1 blockchain that enables high frequency treading and other advanced strategies in the Defi crypto space. It is not an entry level exchange like coinbase and won’t be fun to use for beginners getting into crypto. Hyperliquid’s success has caused fomo from CZ the creator of binance and infamous for the ftx scandal and being convicted for fraud.
CZ is a billionaire and has taken upon himself to compete with hyperliquid in the DeX space and try to edge in on the billion/trillion dollar perpetual futures market that hyperliquid is dominating.
Aster #
Aster frames itself as a decentralised crypto exchange or DeX, with more leverage available than hyperliquid and the ability to trade conventional stocks and shares as perpetual futures. It’s a no KYC exchange which means you just connect a web3 wallet and get access to trading immediately without an annoying verification step asking for personal information.
Hyperliquid is able to offer no-KYC due to its architecture and from what I can tell it has a legit and won’t fall foul of regulators or scandal. The same cannot be said for Aster. From my analysis of Aster it is not actually a DeX but a centralised exchange with a superficial EVM/BNB chain web3 wallet integration.
The Aster discord is full of people complaining about issues including waiting an incredibly long amount of time for core actions like adding, withdrawing money and endless bugs in the platform. X, discord and the socials are inundated with trolls and sentiment clearly bought and paid for claiming the Aster will be the number 1 DeX and no one else can compete.
Artificial price and Artificial sentiment #
There was an incredible price rise and Aster is listed on hyperliquid, it went up from 0.8 to over 2$ in a short space of time causing a frenzy of buyers. As of the time of writing 92% of the Aster token supply is held around 100 wallets. The price has not been holding around and under $2 since the initial bubble began. Some retail traders or those trying to catch this wave have gone all in with their life savings.
Interestingly when there was huge sentiment for buying the price dropped down to 1.7$ liquidating a huge chunk of retail traders.
My appraisal #
Fundamentally Aster is not a DeX that has the same offering as Hyperliquid. It offers “dumb mode”, “grid trading”, “airdrops”, silly leverage… appealing to easily influenced retail traders. Its price action was artificially inflated and controlled by a small number of whale wallets, its sentiment is driven by a huge online campaign that has to have been bought and paid for by someone.
The plan for CZ is either to do a rug pull and the platform is not a real genuine attempt to compete in the DeX space. Alternatively the plan is to break into the DeX space with an MVP and pivot to an iteratively better product over time. There is talk of the Aster “chain”, and innovation but from my assessment Aster is currently not innovative in any meaningful way within the DeX/Defi space.
The ability to trade perpetual futures on traditional stocks and shares with no KYC considering the lack of technical transparency about how their platform actually works under the hood raises alarm bells.
Predictions #
Potentially Aster might pivot and succeed, crumble under the weight of technical debt or get audited by regulators due to its behaviour. So far the price is stagnating after the initial hype cycle.