KNTQ surged more than 30% in a single day after Hyperliquid ecosystem’s biggest lending protocol Kinetiq announced its own L2—Elysium.

According to the announcement, Elysium will use HYPE as gas, with 50% of the sequencer’s revenue used for public market buybacks and the burning of KNTQ.

HyperEVM has previously been criticized for having gas fees that are too high—during congestion, a single swap cost more than $10. Elysium’s key selling point is faster and cheaper transactions, and it also designed a token deployment pipeline that covers everything from AMMs to perpetual contracts.

The market has started repricing KNTQ using “infrastructure” rather than the original yield-bearing token narrative.

But there’s a problem: Elysium says it wants to route new activities back to HyperCore, yet it also uses its own 50% revenue to buy back KNTQ—so is this really scaling, or just another “vampire” L2?