Samani declares Web3 dead as $15B Hyperliquid fuels DeFi debate

Kyle Samani, chairman of Solana Treasury and Multicoin Capital co-founder, declared the Web3 era over, arguing that only decentralized finance and decentralized physical infrastructure networks remain viable.

Kyle Samani said Web3 is dead, narrowing the crypto industry's viable sectors to decentralized finance and decentralized physical infrastructure networks, or DePIN.

"Web3 is dead. All we have is DeFi and DePIN," Samani, co-founder of Multicoin Capital and chairman of Solana Treasury, said in response to StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson's remarks about the industry's identity crisis.

The statement comes as venture capital funding for Web3 startups has declined sharply from its 2021-2022 peak, while DeFi protocols on Ethereum and Solana continue handling billions in trading volume and yield generation. Hyperliquid, a decentralized perpetual exchange, pushed its native HYPE token past a $15 billion market capitalization and generated more than $800 million in organic revenue in 2025 with an 11-person engineering team, according to on-chain data.

The narrowing of focus to DeFi and DePIN signals a maturation of the crypto market, with capital and talent concentrating on applications with clear revenue models rather than speculative narratives. The debate over Web3's relevance is unlikely to fade as the industry weighs whether new use cases can emerge beyond these two sectors.

Hyperliquid Draws Samani's Criticism

Samani also targeted Hyperliquid, calling it "Binance 2.0 without a marketing team" and arguing that its closed-source base layer and offshore operating structure create barriers to institutional adoption. The platform's architecture, he said, relies on thousands of centralized design choices that are incompatible with a genuinely permissionless network.

The critique drew immediate pushback from DeFi researcher DeFi Monk and other community members, who pointed to Hyperliquid's on-chain transparency and token-buyback mechanism fueled by hundreds of millions in native fees. The platform's HYPE token continued logging consecutive all-time highs during the exchange.

What the Debate Means for Crypto Markets

The exchange between Samani and Ben-Sasson reflects a broader reckoning for an industry that originally positioned itself as an alternative to traditional finance. Banks, asset managers and large institutions are now becoming major participants, creating tension between crypto's founding principles and the realities of mainstream adoption.

For investors, the shift means differentiating between projects building sustainable, utility-driven products and those relying on ideological narratives. Tokenized real-world assets and prediction markets have emerged as additional sectors gaining traction, with institutions seeking blockchain-based settlement and transparency for bonds, Treasury bills and other conventional financial instruments.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.