One of the most persistent attacks on $ASTER I read is that it is "less decentralized" than Hyperliquid It's worth addressing, because it's a lie. In this post I'll go through it quickly and say why $ASTER is far more decentralized Hyperliquid is one of the most centralized projects in crypto The only people pushing the idea that it lines up with cypherpunk ideals are desperately trying to stop their bags from dying even more. Let's look: 1) The code base is closed source, preventing community audits, contributions or verifications. Completely antithetical to decentralized systems. It's much closer to a black box CEX that has been marketed as a DEX 2) Centralized multisig control. User funds are held in a 3 of 4 multisig on Arbitrum and controlled by the team. All funds can be stolen via minimal collusion or a wrench attack 3) Foundation/team has high control of validators, and control of delegations to external validators (control by proxy) 4) Repeatedly interventionist. E.g. manipulating the price of Jelly on HL markets. Doing the same again with XPL. Pausing pools with Hyperdrive. Many trading pauses during high volatility. Many oracle overrides, adjustments of user positions, and calibration of mark prices in order to prevent the insolvency that would have otherwise happened. "God mode" If you scroll the timeline, you will see people citing Hyperliquid as "safer", "decentralized", etc. None of this is true, and it has never been true ——— In the same breath, they accuse $ASTER of being exactly what Hyperliquid -- actually -- is The greatest irony is that it aligns much more closely to cypherpunk values 1) Open source and verifiable code. All smart contracts and core logic is verifiable on BNB chain 2) No central validators. It leverages BNB chains distributed network 3) Privacy and dark pools (the cypherpunk ethos, and what large traders want) 4) Community driven tokenomics and token distribution Sure, $ASTER has some centralized control while in the development phase. This is normal when going 0 to 1 The difference is that CZ and the team never lied about it, while Hyperliquid does 24/7 with it's rhetoric around cypherpunk alignment If you're a Hyperliquid investor spreading these lies, I encourage you to look into your own project and research all the ways it is centralized. You're staking your own social reputation on lies you were fed. You were used by others, while they've spent the past month dumping on your head It's time to join the strong horse