Original Author: Sanqing, Foresight News
On February 2, Hyperliquid announced that the HIP-4 proposal has been launched on the testnet, aiming to build a prediction market infrastructure by introducing "Outcome Trading." Additionally, from late January to early February 2026, the cryptocurrency market showed signs of weakness, with Bitcoin's price briefly falling below the $75,000 mark, leading to a general market correction. However, Hyperliquid's native token HYPE rose against the trend, with a cumulative increase of over 40% in the past week.
Image source: Hyperliquid tweet
However, as Hyperliquid expands its business landscape, it has faced technical infringement allegations from peers. On February 2, Sky Guo, the founder of the RWA public chain project Cypherium, publicly accused Hyperliquid of infringing on its patented technology on social media. Sky Guo believes that Hyperliquid's underlying consensus engine, HyperCore, uses the patented PoS version of the HotStuff optimization algorithm and demands that it cease its infringing activities.
Image source: Sky Guo tweet
Core Controversy: The Technical Boundaries of Patent US 11,411,721 B2
The core of this dispute points to a formal patent issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on August 9, 2022, numbered US 11,411,721 B2. The assignee of this patent is Cypherium Blockchain Inc., titled "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 committee of validators, supporting node elections 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 deployment of HotStuff in large-scale high-performance networks (such as Hyperliquid's 200,000 TPS), which is also the core barrier of the patent rights.
_Cypherium Patent US 11,411,721 B2 Front Page | Image source: _Google Patent Database
The technical dispute lies in both parties' improvements and applications of the consensus algorithm HotStuff, but HotStuff itself is an open-source consensus protocol publicly available in academia between 2018 and 2019.
Cypherium's CypherBFT combines PoW with HotStuff to achieve permissionless operation, while Hyperliquid's HyperBFT is a customized variant optimized for low-latency transactions.
However, Cypherium claims that its patent covers specific enhancement logic of HotStuff in a PoS environment, and Hyperliquid has yet to respond to whether HyperBFT utilizes the unique claims involved in the patent.
Escalation of Allegations: From Questioning Transparency to Accusing Infringement
Before the infringement allegations, Sky Guo's criticisms of Hyperliquid mainly focused on the transparency of its code.
Image source: Sky Guo tweet
This lack of transparency protects Hyperliquid's commercial advantage in high-concurrency processing but also makes it difficult to prove its innocence through public audits when facing external technical doubts.
Sky Guo believes that it is precisely HyperCore's borrowing of the dynamic committee selection logic from his patent that has enabled its sub-second finality.
Sky Guo claims to have sent a legal letter to the Hyperliquid team and relevant personnel, accusing them of using patented technology without permission. He stated that Hyperliquid has currently adopted an evasive attitude and has not responded to the legal correspondence.
Concrete Evidence or Marketing Ploy?
From a superficial legal and technical perspective, the US patent US 11,411,721 B2 held by Cypherium is indeed a formally issued legal document, and its protection scope covers key aspects of consensus mechanisms such as dynamic committee selection, signature aggregation, and two-phase reconfiguration.
According to Hyperliquid's publicly available technical documents, the underlying HyperCore engine indeed operates on a customized variant HyperBFT based on the HotStuff algorithm, which is precisely the technical improvement object emphasized in the patent claims.
_Image source: _Hyperliquid Docs
Moreover, since Hyperliquid's core codebase is currently not open-source, this black-box nature makes it difficult for outsiders to determine whether its specific implementation path avoids the relevant patents through public code audits.
In fact, HotStuff and its variants are no longer new in the high-performance Layer 1 track. From Meta's (formerly Facebook) failed Libra/Diem to the currently popular Aptos (AptosBFT), Monad (MonadBFT), and the early research iterations of core consensus in Sui, all have been deeply influenced by HotStuff's linear communication complexity and responsiveness design.
Additionally, the timing and context of the allegations are thought-provoking. The timing of Sky Guo's infringement accusation (February 3 at 12 PM) coincided with a strong market performance of the HYPE token and the increased interest in the prediction market driven by the HIP-4 proposal.
On social media, some KOLs expressed support for this rights protection action, but the comments section of related posts featured suspected promotional content about "G Exchange." "G Exchange" is a new project set to launch within the Cypherium ecosystem, and the coincidence of this technical accusation with the preheating of the new project raises suspicions that this series of rights protection actions may be a marketing ploy to promote the new business.
Image source: Sky Guo and others' X account tweets
Whether the allegations are "concrete evidence" or "a marketing ploy," Hyperliquid seems to have reached a crossroads. As its business landscape expands, the community's calls for increased transparency are growing. In the face of infringement doubts, 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: The HYPE token will unlock 9.92 million tokens on February 6, accounting for 2.79% of the circulating supply, valued at approximately $357 million (based on a price of $36).
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