Hustle Hermit

I read the full letter, and this is big so I guess I will break my silence to share this before disappearing again. Today, @HyperliquidPC filed a 12-page letter with the SEC, and there's absolutely beautiful language in there that everyone, but especially S3 believers (or deniers), needs to see. 1. Recurring / programmatic airdrops. Please look at page 3. HPC explicitly asks the SEC to protect airdrops on functional networks where eligibility is based on users' own activity, even when the airdrop is announced in advance. And then comes this gorgeous line: “which may be recurring or programmatic.” Read that again. Recurring. Programmatic. Announced. Their argument is that using a network, providing liquidity, running a validator or participating in governance doesn't constitute an investment of money in the issuer. You're using a functioning network for your own purposes, not purchasing a financial interest in the project. This is incredibly relevant to rewarding historical Hyperliquid users, including those who generated substantial trading fees. The SEC already provided a favorable interpretation for certain retrospective airdrops in March. HPC wants to go further and explicitly protect recurring distributions, regardless of when they're announced. 2. Why airdrops matter in the first place. This passage from is just as good: “Airdrops let developers reward early users, spread ownership across a broad base of participants, and bootstrap the network effects a new system needs.” I love this because it's exactly how I've always thought about Hyperliquid's community distribution. If you recall my OG posts, I've had a theory for a while that Hyperliquid won't necessarily do one more airdrop and call it a day. What if community distributions eventually become a recurring, perhaps even enshrined, part of the protocol alongside staking? Bitcoin has its halving every four years. Maybe Hyperliquid develops its own distribution cycle every two years. Obviously speculation on my part, but the idea of recurring distributions to reward participation, expand ownership and grow the network has always made a lot of sense to me. And what are the new systems? hip-3, hip-4, hip-5, etc. 3. The actual mechanics of distributing tokens. HPC also asks the SEC to clarify that connecting a wallet, signing a claim transaction, paying gas or completing sanctions screening shouldn't count as consideration for receiving an airdrop. They also want clarity around immediate secondary-market trading and the ability for onchain protocols to facilitate those transactions. These are the practical legal questions that come up when you're actually trying to distribute tokens to users. Put it together: Recurring distributions. Historical network activity. Rewards for participation. Broadening ownership. Claim mechanics. Secondary liquidity. It's hard not to look at all of this through the lens of Hyperliquid. And remember, HPC was launched with 1 million HYPE contributed by the Hyper Foundation. In July, HPC and Hyperliquid Labs also jointly engaged with the SEC Crypto Task Force. Now, none of this tells us when it's coming. The SEC comment deadline is tomorrow, which explains today's filing. But isn't it pretty remarkable that the organization advocating for Hyperliquid in Washington is explicitly asking regulators to protect announced, recurring, programmatic airdrops? We've spent months looking for signals in tweets, artwork and random coincidences. But this one is written in black and white in an SEC filing. Hyperliquid.