Author: Sanqing, Foresight News
Original Title: Hyperliquid Infringement Dispute: Technological Rights Protection or Opportunistic Marketing?
On February 2, Hyperliquid announced that the HIP-4 proposal had gone live on the testnet on February 2. This proposal aims to build prediction market infrastructure by introducing "Outcome Trading." Additionally, from late January to early February 2026, the cryptocurrency market trended weaker, with Bitcoin's price falling below the $75,000 mark, and the broader market experiencing a general pullback. However, Hyperliquid's native token HYPE bucked the trend, rising over 40% in the past week.
Image Source: Hyperliquid Tweet
However, as it expands its business footprint, Hyperliquid has faced allegations of technological infringement from a peer. On February 2, Sky Guo, the founder of the RWA public chain project Cypherium, publicly accused Hyperliquid on social media of infringing on its patented technology. Sky Guo claimed that Hyperliquid's underlying consensus engine, HyperCore, uses a patented optimized version of the PoS-based HotStuff algorithm and demanded that Hyperliquid cease the infringement.
Image Source: Sky Guo Tweet
Core Dispute: The Technical Boundaries of Patent US 11,411,721 B2
The core of this dispute revolves around a formal patent issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on August 9, 2022, with the number US 11,411,721 B2. The assignee of this patent is Cypherium Blockchain Inc., and its title is "Systems and methods for selecting and utilizing a committee of validator nodes in a distributed system."
The patent details a mechanism for dynamically selecting and reconfiguring a validator committee, supporting node election through PoW, PoS, or PoA, and emphasizes the use of Aggregate Signatures to enhance consensus efficiency and fault tolerance. The patent also proposes specific implementation paths such as Two-phase Reconfiguration and Tree-structured Hierarchy.
Cypherium believes that these technologies are key to the implementation of HotStuff in large-scale, high-performance networks (such as Hyperliquid's 200,000 TPS), and this constitutes the core barrier of the patent rights.
First page of Cypherium's patent US 11,411,721 B2 | Image Source: Google Patents
The technical controversy lies in the improvements and application of the consensus algorithm HotStuff by both parties. However, HotStuff itself is an open-source consensus protocol published in academia between 2018 and 2019.
Cypherium's CypherBFT combines HotStuff with PoW to achieve permissionless operation, while Hyperliquid's HyperBFT is a custom variant optimized for low-latency transactions.
But Cypherium claims that its patent covers specific enhancement logic of HotStuff in a PoS environment. Hyperliquid has not yet responded regarding whether HyperBFT uses the unique claims covered by the patent.
Escalation of Accusations: From Questioning Transparency to Denouncing Infringement
Prior to this infringement accusation, Sky Guo's criticism of Hyperliquid primarily focused on code transparency.
Image Source: Sky Guo Tweet
This lack of transparency, on one hand, protects Hyperliquid's commercial advantage in high-concurrency processing; on the other hand, it makes it difficult for the project to prove its innocence through public audits when facing external technical质疑 (questioning/doubts).
Sky Guo believes that it is precisely because HyperCore borrowed the dynamic committee selection logic described in its patent that it achieved its sub-second finality.
Sky Guo claimed to have sent a legal letter to the Hyperliquid team and relevant responsible persons, accusing them of using the patented technology without permission. He stated that the Hyperliquid side is currently avoiding the issue and has not responded to the legal correspondence.
Solid Evidence or Ambush Marketing?
From a superficial legal and technical logic perspective, the US patent US 11,411,721 B2 held by Cypherium is indeed a formally issued legal document. Its scope of protection确实 (indeed) covers key aspects of consensus mechanisms such as dynamic committee selection, signature aggregation, and two-phase reconfiguration.
According to Hyperliquid's publicly available technical documentation, the underlying HyperCore engine确实 runs on a custom variant of the HotStuff algorithm called HyperBFT. HotStuff is precisely the technology改良 (improvement/modification) that is a key subject of the patent claims.
Image Source: Hyperliquid Docs
Furthermore, since Hyperliquid's core codebase is currently closed-source, this black-box属性 (attribute) makes it difficult for the outside world to determine whether its specific implementation path avoids the relevant patent through public code audits.
However, in fact, HotStuff and its variants are早已不是新鲜事 (long been nothing new) in the high-performance Layer 1 track. From Meta's (formerly Facebook) aborted Libra/Diem, to the currently booming Aptos (AptosBFT), Monad (MonadBFT), and even early research iterations of Sui's core consensus, all are deeply influenced by HotStuff's linear communication complexity and responsive design.
Additionally, the timing and context of the accusation are thought-provoking. The time Sky Guo issued the infringement accusation (12:00 on February 3) coincided with the strong market performance of the HYPE token and the heat brought by the HIP-4 proposal for prediction markets.
On social platforms, some KOLs expressed support for this rights protection action, but the comment sections of related posts featured疑似 (suspected) promotional content about "G-Exchange". "G-Exchange" is an upcoming new project within the Cypherium ecosystem. The coincidence in the timeline between this technical accusation and the预热 (pre-launch warm-up) of the new project makes this series of维权动作 (rights protection actions)疑似 (suspected) ambush marketing to generate buzz for the new business.
Image Source: Tweets from Sky Guo and other X accounts
Whether the accusation is a "real hammer" (solid evidence) or "ambush marketing," Hyperliquid seems to have reached a crossroads. As its business expands, community calls for increased transparency are growing. Faced with infringement质疑 (doubts/questions), will Hyperliquid insist on its black-box advantage, or will it prove its innocence through partial open-sourcing or third-party audits? This concerns the trust foundation of its decentralization narrative.
Note: HYPE tokens will unlock 9.92 million tokens on February 6, accounting for 2.79% of the circulating supply, worth approximately $357 million (calculated at $36 per token).
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