rhao.eth

I’ve been a Hyperliquid maxi for a long time, and HL still remains my largest position in Web3. But a recent decision by the team has been extremely disappointing to see. Earlier this year, @monprotocol acquired the $MON ticker on HL for ~500k: teapaw.org/monprotocol/status/187… The rationale was that CEX interactions were frustrating, and the Pixelmon team wanted to align with a fully decentralized venue. The token ultimately didn’t gain much traction on HL (very low volume, practically a waste in hindsight), but at least the team had secured an immutable asset. Fast forward to Monad’s launch, and suddenly the MON ticker on Hypercore now refers to Monad, not Pixelmon. So I checked with the Pixelmon team assuming they must have sold the ticker. Turns out they didn’t. Hyperliquid simply changed the frontend names: Pixelmon is now shown as “Monpro” on UI (but still $MON on-chain). Monad is shown as “Mon” on UI (but is actually $UMON on-chain). So technically the ticker is immutable, but from a consumer perspective the actual UI identity has been reassigned. And realistically, no one cares what the ticker is on-chain when the UI shows something else. If this isn’t effectively a ticker grab, what is it? Pixelmon paid 500k for something that the frontend can override at will, while Monad (or rather @unitxyz, who is clearly closer to the HL team) gets the visible name without paying for it. To be clear, this doesn’t materially affect Pixelmon’s future. But on principle, it’s wildly disappointing. Is this the ethos Hyperliquid wants to stand for? Centrally aligned players first? What message does this send to smaller teams who choose HL because they believed “listings without fuss” meant UI consistency and fairness? Are we now saying: “You can buy the on-chain ticker, but we’ll decide the visible name depending on who we talk to”? Tagging @chameleon_jeff @iliensinc because this seems like a serious breach of HL’s own stated values, and I’m not sure whether this decision was fully acknowledged at the top. For clarity: Pixelmon ($MON): 0x622cf551933f19f9136303dcab56488c Monad ($UMON): 0x58dae745c8c5fed4012f35ef39829c2d Frontend: This requires an explanation imo and its not about this particular case but more problematic for the overall direction team wants to take. To me this is a clear slap on the face of smaller teams being allowed to be strong-armed by privileged partners. @sershokunin can you also pitch in as to what happened here?