Hyperliquid infringes on Rome, is it technical or marketing

Photo by Sanqing, Foresight News

On February 2, Hyperliquid announced that the HIP-4 proposal had been put online for testing on February 2, with the aim of building a forecast market infrastructure by introducing the Outcome Trading. In addition, between the end of January and the beginning of February 2026, there was a weakening of the encrypted currency market, with the price of bitcoin falling at a time of US$ 75,000, and a general reversal of the large disk. Hyperliquid’s original currency, HYPE, has gone up in reverse, with a cumulative increase of over 40 per cent over the past week。

Source: Hyperliquid tweets

However, in the context of the expansion of the business landscape, Hyperliquid faced allegations of technical abuse from peers. On 2 February, Sky Guo, founder of the RWA public chain project Cypherim, publicly accused Hyperliquid of violating his patented technology in social media. Sky Guo argued that Hyperliquid ' s bottom consensus engine, HyperCore, used the patented PoS HotStuff Optimization algorithm and demanded that it cease to infringe。

Figure source: Sky Guo tweet

CORE DISPUTE: TECHNICAL BOUNDARY OF PATENT US 11,411,721 B2

At the heart of the dispute was an official patent issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on 9 August 2022, No. US 11,411,721 B2. The transferee of the patent is Cypherim Blockchain Inc., entitled “Systems and methods for self-selecting and utilizing a community of validator nodes in a distributed system”。

The patent describes in detail a mechanism for dynamically selecting and reconfiguring certifiers ' committees, supports nodal elections through PoW, PoS or PoA, and emphasizes the use of Aggregate Signatures to improve consensus efficiency and tolerance. The patent also proposes two-stage re-configuration and tree-level transmission (Tree-streamed Hierarchy)。

Cypherim argues that these technologies are key to HotStuff landing in large-scale high-performance networks such as Hyperliquid 200,000 TPS, which is also a central barrier to patent rights。

Cypherim Patent US 11,411,721 B2 Home Page Source:Google patented website

At the technical level, the dispute is about the improvement and application of the consensus algorithm HotStuff, but HotStuff itself is an open-source consensus agreement between 2018 and 2019。

CypherBFT of Cypherim combines POW on a HotStuff basis to be unlicensed, while HyperBFT of Hyperliquid is a custom variant for the optimization of low-delayed transactions。

However, Cypherim asserts that its patent covers the specific enhancement logic of HotStuff in the POS environment, and Hyperliquid has not yet responded to whether HyperBFT has used the unique statements involved in the patent。

Upgrade of allegations: from questioning transparency to criticizing violations

Prior to this allegation of violation, Sky Guo criticized Hyperliquid mainly on the level of code transparency。

Figure source: Sky Guo tweet

This lack of transparency protects the high commercial advantage of Hyperliquid and, on the other hand, makes it difficult for it to obtain a clean slate through a public audit in the face of external technical challenges。

Sky Guo believes that it was HyperCore that built on the logic chosen by the dynamic committee in its patent that achieved its subsecond finality。

Sky Guo claims to have sent a lawyer ' s letter to the Hyperliquid team and its related officials, alleging unauthorized use of patented technology. He indicated that Hyperliquid was currently reticent and had not responded to legal communications。

The evidence of the hammer or the porcelain marketing

The legal and technical logic suggests that the United States 11,411,721 B2 of the United States patent held by Cypherum is indeed an official legal document issued and that its scope of protection covers key elements of a consensus mechanism such as dynamic committee selection, convergence of signatures and two-stage reconfiguration。

According to Hyperliquid, the underlying HyperCore engine does operate on a definitional variant based on the HotStuff algorithm HyperBFT, which is the subject of technological improvement that is the focus of the patent claim。

Source:Hyperliquid Docs

Moreover, as the core code library of Hyperliquid is currently in a non-open source state, such black box properties make it difficult for the outside world to determine, through open code audits, whether its actual realization path circumvented the patent。

But in fact, HotStuff and its variants are no longer new at the high performance Layer 1 track. From Libra/Diem, aborted by Meta (formerly Facebook), to Aptos (AptosBFT), Monad (MonadBFT) and Sui’s early research, the trajectories of core consensus have been affected by HotStuff’s linear communication complexity and responsive design。

In addition, the timing and context in which the allegation was launched were thought-provoking. The timing of Sky Guo's allegations of abuse (on 3 February, 1200 hours) coincided with the strong performance of the HYPE currency market and the HIP-4 proposal leading to forecast market heat。

On the social platform, some KOL expressed solidarity with the campaign, but the comments section of the post showed a suspected promotion of G-Exchange. This technical allegation coincides with the timing of the new project, which makes this series of rights-based actions suspected of being a porcelain marketing for the new business。

Figure source: Sky Guo et al

It seems that Hyperliquid has reached the crossroads, regardless of whether the charges are "real hammer" or "paint marketing". As the business landscape expands, there is a growing community demand for greater transparency. In the face of abuse challenges, did Hyperliquid insist on the advantage of the black box, or did he prove himself innocent through partial open-source or tripartite audits? This is about the foundation of trust in the centralization of narratives。

HYPE TOKENS WILL BE UNLOCKED 9.92 MILLION TOKENS ON FEBRUARY 6, OR 2.79 PER CENT IN CIRCULATION, VALUED AT APPROXIMATELY $357 MILLION (AT $36 PRICES)。