Highlight Clip: Aave, Ethena and Hyperliquid Founders on Their Biggest Competitors (Archive Video)

Aave, Ethena and Hyperliquid Founders on Their Biggest Competitors (Archive Video)

At a TOKEN2049 Singapore roundtable on October 14, 2025, Aave founder Stani Kulechov, Ethena founder Guy Young, and Hyperliquid co-founder Jeff Yan were asked who they saw as their biggest competitors. Their answers were "the banks," "Circle," and "nobody," respectively.

When asked what DeFi founders most often get wrong, they pointed to focusing on infrastructure too early, looking too narrowly at DeFi's existing small user base, and not putting enough emphasis on composability. The three also showed clear differences in how they viewed tokenized stocks, liquidity mining, and intents. — link