By Boaz Sobrado,Contributor,True Labs
Copyright forbes
Ben Bilski is the founder of NAGA. His latest venture True Labs is seeking to disrupt the increasingly competitive DEX market.
UAE-based investor Core Holding has announced a $10 million seed investment in True Labs, which is developing an AI-powered decentralized exchange platform. The capital will accelerate development of the company’s core offerings: TRUE AI’s specialized large language model and intelligent trading engine, designed to drive TRUE DEX and enable traders across experience levels to make more informed, conversation-based trading decisions through an advanced decentralized exchange.
This signals yet another challenge to Hyperliquid’s dominance. Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange that captured 70% of the perpetual futures market in just two years, now faces coordinated attacks from four radically different directions: traditional finance compliance, crypto-native accessibility, institutional privacy demands, and AI-powered trading assistance.
Each competitor targets a specific vulnerability in Hyperliquid’s otherwise dominant position, creating the first serious test of whether a leading decentralized exchange can maintain its crown.
The AI Coaching Angle: True AI Targets Trading Psychology
The platform is built by True Labs, co-founded by Ben Bilski who previously founded publicly traded German fintech Naga Group. True Labs develops two flagship products: True AI, which combines an LLM with a trading engine, and TRUE DEX, an exchange powered by the LLM. The AI platform targets the psychological barriers that cause 90% of traders to lose money.
Built on Solana Layer-2 infrastructure with dedicated NVIDIA GPU clusters, True AI promises a “24/7 trade companion” that monitors user behavior, position management, and emotional trading patterns. The platform uses proprietary language models trained specifically on trading data to identify when users exhibit revenge trading, overexposure, or other behavioral patterns that typically precede major losses.
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“Trading is psychology,” Bilski explains. “People mess up technical analysis because they lose mental discipline.” True AI’s approach differs from generic financial AI by focusing exclusively on leveraged crypto trading, indexing user behavior patterns across browser activity and on-chain trades to provide real-time coaching intervention.
The platform launches in 2026 with both conversational AI guidance and traditional DEX functionality, plus copy-trading features that pay successful traders one USDC per follower per transaction. By targeting the emotional and educational gaps that traditional exchanges ignore, True AI aims to reduce the industry’s notorious loss rates while building sustainable user retention.
The Regulatory Play: Coinbase Goes Compliant
Los Angeles, CA – March 04: Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, speaks at the Stand With Crypto rally, which was set up by the cryptocurrency company Coinbase, to get-out-the-vote on Monday, March 4, 2024 in Los Angeles, CA. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Coinbase fired the opening shot in July with CFTC-regulated perpetual futures on bitcoin and ether, finally offering American traders a compliant way to access leveraged crypto bets. The approach represents traditional finance striking back against offshore dominance.
Where Hyperliquid offers 40x leverage without know-your-customer requirements, Coinbase caps leverage at 10x and requires full identity verification. The trade-off seems obvious—lower leverage for regulatory safety—but Coinbase’s bet runs deeper than simple compliance theater.
The exchange’s massive user base, trusted brand recognition, and full-service product suite make it formidable competition despite regulatory constraints. American institutional investors locked out of offshore platforms now have a pathway to perpetual futures that won’t trigger compliance headaches.
Coinbase’s approach acknowledges a simple reality: as crypto matures, regulatory arbitrage becomes less sustainable. The question is whether institutional demand for compliance outweighs retail appetite for maximum leverage and privacy.
The Accessibility Gambit: CZ Backs User Experience
ROME, ITALY – MAY 10: Founder and CEO of Binance Changpeng Zhao, commonly known as “CZ”, attends the “CZ meets Italy” at Palazzo Brancaccio on May 10, 2022 in Rome, Italy. Changpeng Zhao is the founder and CEO of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume as of April 2018. (Photo by Antonio Masiello/Getty Images)
Getty Images
Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao took a different approach entirely with his backing of Aster, which hit a $300 million market cap within six hours of launch. Rather than competing on regulation or privacy, Aster targets user experience and multi-chain accessibility.
The platform offers two distinct trading modes: Pro Mode for sophisticated traders seeking deep liquidity and advanced tools, plus 1001x for one-click, MEV-resistant perpetual trading. The dual approach acknowledges that Hyperliquid’s technical sophistication can overwhelm casual traders.
Aster’s multi-chain strategy represents another fundamental challenge to Hyperliquid’s single-blockchain approach. While Hyperliquid optimized for performance on its own chain, Aster bets that traders want seamless access across BNB Chain, Ethereum, Solana, and Arbitrum without managing multiple accounts.
Zhao’s public complaints about position hunting on Hyperliquid—where sophisticated traders target visible liquidation levels—led Aster to implement hidden order features. The criticism suggests that Hyperliquid’s radical transparency, while innovative, creates manipulation opportunities that traditional markets solved through opacity.
The Privacy Solution: Zero-Knowledge Competition
Grvt co-founders from left to right: Matthew Quek (COO), Hong Yea (CEO), Aaron Ong (CTO)
Grvt’s $19 million Series A, co-led by ZKsync amongst others, represents yet another competitive vector: institutional privacy concerns. The exchange uses zero-knowledge technology to validate transactions without publishing position sizes, liquidation levels, or trading patterns that make large traders vulnerable to hunting.
For retail traders moving modest sums, Hyperliquid’s transparency feels like a minor inconvenience. For institutional traders moving tens of millions, it creates predatory dynamics that traditional finance eliminated decades ago through dark pools and position privacy.
“Many of those folks who take high leverage on very large positions—let’s say $50 million—they don’t want to be hunted,” explains Grvt CEO Hong Yea. The hunting works precisely because Hyperliquid’s transparent order books reveal when large positions approach liquidation levels, enabling coordinated manipulation.
ZKsync CEO Alex Gluchowski frames this as crypto’s “HTTPS moment”—the privacy layer needed to bring institutional adoption. The technology promises Ethereum-level security with improved scalability and reduced transaction costs, targeting the segment of the market that values privacy over transparency.
Market Segmentation Strategy
The four-pronged assault reflects sophisticated market segmentation rather than direct competition. Coinbase targets American institutions requiring regulatory compliance. Aster pursues retail traders seeking simplified multi-chain access. Grvt courts institutional clients demanding position privacy. True AI focuses on reducing the psychological barriers that cause most traders to fail.
Each strategy addresses real limitations in Hyperliquid’s model. Regulatory restrictions lock out American traders. Single-chain architecture creates friction for multi-chain users. Radical transparency enables manipulation that sophisticated traders want to avoid. High loss rates create unsustainable churn that damages long-term platform growth.
The segmentation approach makes strategic sense because perpetual futures encompass multiple user types with conflicting preferences. Retail speculators might prefer maximum leverage and transparency for better price discovery. Institutional traders want privacy and regulatory compliance even at the cost of lower leverage or fees. New traders need educational support and behavioral guidance that technical platforms typically ignore.
The Network Effects Challenge
Despite coordinated competition, Hyperliquid maintains significant structural advantages. Derivatives markets exhibit strong network effects where liquidity attracts more liquidity, creating winner-take-most dynamics that challengers struggle to overcome.
Hyperliquid’s transparent order books, while creating manipulation risks, also enable sophisticated trading strategies and market analysis that many users value. The platform’s recent expansion into native stablecoins and spot trading suggests awareness of competitive threats and efforts to deepen ecosystem lock-in.
The exchange’s community-oriented tokenomics—directing 99% of fees into HYPE buybacks—creates sticky user incentives that pure feature competition struggles to overcome. When users earn token appreciation from trading activity, switching platforms means abandoning that upside.
Trading volume tends to concentrate on platforms with the deepest liquidity, regardless of features or fees. Each competitor must solve the chicken-and-egg problem of attracting enough initial users to generate the trading volumes that attract more users.
Testing Dominance in Decentralized Finance
The coordinated challenge to Hyperliquid represents the first serious test of whether dominant positions in decentralized finance can withstand targeted competition. Unlike traditional markets where regulatory moats protect incumbents, DeFi’s permissionless nature enables rapid competitive responses to perceived weaknesses.
Hyperliquid disrupted centralized perpetual futures trading by offering decentralized alternatives with competitive performance. Now it faces disruption from platforms identifying specific user segments it serves imperfectly: compliance-focused Americans, simplicity-seeking retail traders, privacy-demanding institutions, and behaviorally-challenged new traders.
The outcome may determine whether first-mover advantages in DeFi create lasting competitive moats or merely temporary head starts. With $29 million in combined funding behind privacy-focused and AI-powered competition, CZ’s backing of user-experience innovation, and traditional finance’s regulatory compliance play, Hyperliquid’s dominance faces its most comprehensive challenge yet.
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