Aave, Ethena and Hyperliquid founders name their biggest rivals at TOKEN2049

Ask three of DeFi’s most prominent builders who keeps them up at night, and you get three very different answers. At TOKEN2049 Singapore, Aave’s Stani Kulechov said banks. Ethena’s Guy Young said Circle. Hyperliquid’s Jeff Yan said nobody.

Three founders, three targets

The exchange took place at TOKEN2049 Singapore, held October 7-8, 2026. The panel was moderated by Robbie Petersen of a16z crypto and also featured Kain Warwick from Synthetix alongside the three founders.

Kulechov’s answer was the broadest. By naming banks as Aave’s main competition, he framed the lending protocol as a challenger to traditional finance rather than to other DeFi platforms. The protocol aims to expand its lending business using real world assets (RWAs) and tokenized assets. Aave is targeting a future in which crypto-native lending surpasses traditional borrowing by 2027. The protocol previously saw liquidity peaks of approximately $76B.

Young went narrower and more pointed. Ethena’s rival, he said, is Circle, putting the protocol squarely in competition with stablecoin issuers for market share. Ethena’s flagship product is USDe, a stablecoin that reached about $15B in recent growth analysis.

Hyperliquid’s CEO Jeff Yan said his project does not see itself as having a competitor at all. Yan also led a dedicated session at the conference titled “Hyperliquid: Rebuilding Finance from First Principles.”

What the market says about each bet

As of mid-October 2026, Hyperliquid’s HYPE token was trading at $80-$81, giving it a market cap of around $18B. Ethena’s ENA token was trading at approximately $0.21, with a market cap of about $2.8B. That puts it well below HYPE in valuation, even though USDe’s supply runs to roughly $15B.

Why the answers matter

Two of the three founders pointed outside crypto-native rivals entirely, either toward banks or toward the largest players in stablecoins. Competing with banks means dealing with regulation, institutional expectations and risk standards. Aave’s RWA push depends heavily on how those regulatory frameworks evolve.

For investors, these three tokens represent distinct theses: Aave on tokenized lending displacing traditional credit, Ethena on stablecoin market share, and Hyperliquid on purpose-built derivatives infrastructure. For Aave, the key metric is growth in RWA-backed lending and whether liquidity revisits its prior peaks. For Ethena, it is USDe supply relative to established stablecoins. For Hyperliquid, it is whether trading activity and HYPE’s valuation hold up as more teams attempt similar infrastructure.