Two empires are rising in DeFi. One is building the wells. The other is building the shelf. They’re fighting for liquidity — for it is a zero-sum game. The fight is to become unavoidable. The place every trader touches before a trade happens. Amazon built that position in retail. Google did it on the internet. They became the starting point, the shelf where every search or purchase begins. In markets, the shelf is the moment a trader decides to act. Own that, and you control the flow. Hyperliquid is betting the wells matter more than the roads. They’ve built some of the deepest liquidity pools in DeFi. The goal is to be the Saudi Aramco of DeFi. Own the source so completely that every wallet, every interface, every trader flows through you. Its own front-end is proof it can meet UX needs, but the real product is wholesale liquidity. @JupiterExchange is betting the shelf beats the source. They aggregate liquidity from everywhere on Solana, aiming to be the default tab, the first point of contact. Half of Solana’s computational power sometimes runs through Jupiter. It’s more than an app. It's infrastructure with a user interface. History is clear that what can’t be copied is where the market begins. You can fork Jupiter’s code. You can match Hyperliquid’s depth. But you can’t copy being the instinctive first click, or the trust built over millions of successful trades. Jeff Bezos' “your margin is my opportunity” was about embedding yourself so deeply into behavior that switching costs more than staying. If Hyperliquid wins, every front-end becomes dependent on its liquidity. They become the OPEC of DeFi, setting terms that everyone else follows. If Jupiter wins, liquidity providers become interchangeable. They become the Amazon of DeFi, the only shelf worth being on. In my latest piece, I look at how the web’s biggest winners were aggregators or companies that became the default starting point for billions of people and how the same dynamic is playing out in DeFi.

Read the whole thing here —