There is an old lesson from African communities: when a road becomes successful, more people start using it. Eventually, the same road that once moved everyone easily becomes crowded.
That is a useful way to look at Hyperliquid today.
Hyperliquid has built one of crypto's strongest on-chain trading ecosystems, but growing activity also exposes infrastructure limitations. HyperEVM has faced periods of congestion and elevated transaction costs, creating a challenge for applications that need fast, inexpensive execution.
This is where Elysium, Kinetiq's proposed Layer 2 for Hyperliquid, becomes interesting.
Rather than creating another isolated blockchain, Elysium is designed around the existing Hyperliquid ecosystem. HYPE is intended to serve as gas, while Elysium is designed for tighter interaction with HyperCore and high-performance applications.
The objective is straightforward: create additional execution capacity without disconnecting applications from Hyperliquid's liquidity and trading infrastructure.
Why builders and traders should care
One of Elysium's more interesting ideas is its approach to market creation.
The proposed lifecycle is:
AMM → PropAMM → HyperCore Spot → HIP-3 Perps
In simple terms, a new asset could begin with automated liquidity, progress to professional market-making through PropAMMs, develop into a native HyperCore spot market and, if it gains sufficient demand, potentially reach perpetual markets.
That creates a clearer path from token launch to deeper liquidity and sophisticated trading.
For traders, the potential benefit is better execution and liquidity. For builders, it means an environment designed specifically for applications requiring high-frequency activity and closer access to Hyperliquid's financial infrastructure.
But these are design objectives, not results that should already be treated as proven. Elysium still has to demonstrate real-world throughput, liquidity and adoption.
The KNTQ connection
Kinetiq already occupies an important position in Hyperliquid DeFi. Current DefiLlama data places Kinetiq around $1.23B TVL, compared with roughly $1.44B in Hyperliquid L1 DeFi TVL. TVL methodologies can involve overlap, so the figure should not be interpreted literally as Kinetiq controlling that percentage of all network activity.
Its core product, kHYPE, allows users to stake HYPE while retaining a liquid asset that can be used across DeFi.
Elysium adds another potential value-accrual layer.
Its proposed sequencer-fee distribution is:
25% Builders | 25% Treasury | 50% KNTQ buy & burn
The important part is not simply the 50% headline.
If Elysium generates genuine transaction activity, half of those sequencer fees would be directed toward buying KNTQ from the open market and burning the purchased tokens.
That creates a potential feedback loop:
More usage → more fees → more KNTQ purchases → more tokens removed from supply.
The remaining 50% also matters. Builders receive an economic incentive to create useful applications, while the treasury receives resources to support the wider ecosystem.
My perspective
Calling Elysium “value-accretive” is reasonable as a description of its proposed economics, but it is not yet proof of success.
A burn mechanism only becomes meaningful when there is substantial fee generation. Likewise, better infrastructure matters only if developers and users actually choose to use it.
What makes Elysium worth watching is therefore not the hype around another L2. It is the attempt to connect scaling, trading liquidity, builders and token economics into one system.
The real test now is simple: can Elysium turn the architecture into sustainable activity?
That is what will determine whether this is genuinely a new era for Hyperliquid or simply another ambitious crypto infrastructure experiment.
@kinetiq_research
#Web3 #Hyperliquid #Kinetiq #Elysium #DeFi