Arthur Hayes Challenges Multicoin’s Kyle Samani to $100K Bet Over HYPE Performance

• Arthur Hayes proposed a six-month Bet that HYPE will outperform any $1B+ market-cap token.
• The bet, followed by Multicoin Capital co-founder Kyle Samani, criticized Hyperliquid’s structure and principles.

Arthur Hayes publicly challenged Multicoin Capital co-founder Kyle Samani to a high-stakes $100,000 price bet on the future performance of Hyperliquid’s HYPE token, following Samani’s public criticism of Hyperliquid’s core fundamentals. 

BitMex co-founder Arthur Hayes, who reshared Kyle Samani’s criticism post and wrote, “Since $HYPE is bad, Kyle Samani, let’s make a bet,” on February 9

Hayes said the bet would track HYPE’s price performance in USD terms from 00:00 UTC on Feb. 10, 2026, to 00:00 UTC on July 31, 2026, against any cryptocurrency with a market capitalization above $1 billion listed on CoinGecko, with Samani free to choose the competing token and he mentioned that the loser of the bet would donate amount to a charity selected by the winner.

Hyperliquid Draws Both Scrutiny and Praise

This bet followed Kyle Samani’s X post on February 8, in which he claimed that the Hyperliquid project reflected many of the fundamental issues facing the crypto sector.

He said that the platform’s founder fled his native country to pursue the project, said the protocol openly supports criminal and terrorist activities, and its permissioned structure and closed-source codebase are characteristics that go against the principles of crypto.

Kamani’s criticism came under the post by Jon Charbonneau, co-founder of DBA crypto investment firm, who praised the Hyperliquid project’s trading execution, comparing it favorably with traditional venues such as CME/COMEX Micro Silver futures. 

The public debate coincides with Hyperliquid’s traction among institutions, as Ripple said its institutional prime brokerage platform, Ripple Prime, supports the decentralized derivatives protocol Hyperliquid, last week, which allows institutional clients to access on-chain derivatives liquidity while using Ripple Prime’s existing infrastructure.

HYPE Price Update

HYPE  surged over 4.1% in the past 24 hours and is trading at $32.6, with its market cap standing at $8.52 billion at the time of writing. While the trading volume is down over 15%, which reflects that despite the short-term HYPE gains, traders are cautious amid the ongoing debate surrounding Hyperliquid’s project.