The current crypto market is in a bear market within a bear market, and I believe only Hyperliquid and Canton are worth watching right now.

Hyperliquid mainly focuses on moving all assets onto the blockchain for trading, including but not limited to cryptocurrencies, stocks, forex, commodities, and prediction markets. The value capture directly comes from protocol trading volume, with approximately 99% of transaction fees used for market buybacks, forming a strong value return mechanism and potential price support. Additionally, Hyperliquid has no VC investments and no low-cost private placement chips, making the interests of the community and the team more aligned.
Canton takes a completely different approach. Compared to serving native crypto users, Canton is more like on-chain financial infrastructure for Wall Street, aiming to facilitate the tokenization and settlement of traditional financial assets such as government bonds, money market funds, repurchase agreements, and securities. It is backed by heavyweight institutions like Goldman Sachs, Citadel, and DTCC, essentially betting on the future on-chain of hundreds of trillions of dollars in traditional financial assets.
If Hyperliquid is the on-chain CME of the crypto world, then Canton is more like an on-chain version of SWIFT + DTCC.
From an investment perspective, the two actually correspond to completely different asset types.
It is more akin to equity in a rapidly growing exchange. There is a strong positive feedback loop between protocol revenue, trading volume, user growth, and token value: the higher the trading volume, the higher the fee income; the higher the fee income, the stronger the buyback efforts; the stronger the buyback efforts, the fewer circulating tokens in the market. Coupled with fixed supply and continuous buyback mechanisms, hyperliquid:native naturally has some deflationary properties. Therefore, as long as Hyperliquid can continue to expand its market share, its value capture ability will keep strengthening.
$CC is more like a financial infrastructure certificate. Its core logic is not about short-term trading volume but about how many real-world assets choose to issue, circulate, and settle on the Canton network in the future. Due to the Mint-Burn model, network demand growth will drive token demand, but the overall price trend is often closer to that of production materials in stablecoin systems rather than high-elasticity growth assets. Currently, its annualized inflation rate is around 3%-5%, and the speed of value accumulation is significantly lower than hyperliquid:native.
This difference can also be seen in price performance: Hyperliquid’s market participants are mainly retail investors, traders, and native crypto funds, highly sensitive to growth and cash flow, thus showing obvious growth stock characteristics. Canton, on the other hand, targets banks, brokerages, clearing institutions, and asset management firms, with business development highly dependent on compliance, regulatory approval, and institutional cooperation. Its growth cycle is usually measured in years, and the network expansion speed is naturally slower than that of native crypto protocols.