Jeff Yan

By 2022 Jeff Yan's trading operation was among the largest high-frequency market makers on many crypto venues, and it had run out of edge left to extract. He tried retiring and found it stressful and output-less; that November, FTX collapsed and gave him something to build.¹

Yan is the co-founder and public face of Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange for trading derivatives like perpetual futures, built on its own purpose-built blockchain rather than on top of Ethereum. A small team built it without venture capital, and it grew within a few years into one of the largest DeFi platforms by volume and revenue. Yan describes it not as a company he runs but as neutral financial infrastructure he maintains.

Background

Yan grew up in Palo Alto, California, the child of Chinese immigrant parents, and showed early aptitude in math and physics, competing for the United States at the International Physics Olympiad in high school. He studied mathematics and computer science at Harvard College, where he met the pseudonymous developer who would later become his Hyperliquid co-founder, known publicly only as "iliensinc." Yan never formally studied economics; his feel for markets and incentives came from watching live trading systems, not a classroom.

Getting started

After Harvard, Yan joined Hudson River Trading, a high-frequency trading firm known for ultra-low-latency systems executing trades across global equity markets. He later left to build his own automated crypto trading operation, Chameleon Trading, named after a childhood video-game handle, running it out of Puerto Rico. By around 2022, Chameleon was, by his own account, among the largest high-frequency market makers on many crypto venues. Having capped out on extractable edge, he tried stepping back, but found retirement stressful and unproductive.

Around that time Yan and his collaborators were examining decentralized finance and concluded the products available were poor even by the standards of professional automated traders who did not need a polished interface: order execution, margining, and market structure all had structural inefficiencies. They leaned toward building in DeFi but had not committed. The collapse of the exchange FTX in November 2022 changed that: an abstract concern about counterparty risk, captured by the slogan "not your keys, not your coins," became lived and immediate. Yan describes the moment as the activation energy that pushed him to build Hyperliquid from scratch, even though most users returned to centralized exchanges within a month.² It was not his first attempt: in 2018 he had tried and failed to build decentralized prediction markets, concluding the idea was sound but neither the tech nor demand was ready.³

What he built

Hyperliquid launched its exchange and its own layer-1 blockchain in 2023, built from scratch rather than composed from existing DeFi components. Its core design choice was to natively implement infrastructure, such as an on-chain order book and margining system, that most blockchains only approximate through smart contracts, matching centralized-exchange speed on a transparent public ledger, secured by roughly two dozen proof-of-stake validators ranked by stake.

Hyperliquid took no outside venture capital; Yan has said he turned down a funding offer valuing the company at around a billion dollars, arguing early VC ownership would leave a permanent mark of insider advantage on a network whose value depends on being credibly neutral.¹ It funded itself from trading profits and distributed most of its native HYPE token to platform users. When HYPE launched in late November 2024, the airdrop to early users was worth roughly a billion dollars, and the token's fully diluted valuation at launch, in the tens of billions, was the highest of any token launched that year. Hyperliquid also forgoes certain trading fees, having returned more than $25 million in revenue to its community, a choice Yan frames as a statement against crypto's extractive norm of insider pre-loading and retail exit liquidity.

The core protocol runs on roughly eleven engineers; ecosystem partners built the surrounding layers, including a separate team that built and secures the primary spot assets, and others building wallet integrations, lending markets, and further derivatives markets via HIP-3, which lets any qualified deployer launch a new market. The exchange became, by Yan's description, the primary venue for on-chain price discovery in crypto derivatives.⁴

How he operates

Yan frames his role not as chief executive but as custodian of a protocol, modeling Hyperliquid on Bitcoin's pseudonymous launch by Satoshi Nakamoto and on Amazon Web Services' choice to build infrastructure once and expose it as an API any outside builder can use. He wants the line between "protocol developer" and "application developer" as blurry as possible, counting independent teams building on Hyperliquid as part of the effective team.² The defining act is a refusal of the industry's default path, here venture funding and vertical integration, in favor of a structurally different bet.

Yan describes his building process as closer to intuition than data: the team skips structured A/B tests, updating only on clearly bad outcomes, because he believes building financial infrastructure resembles physics under noisy signals more than a data-driven product process: "We're actually not very data driven at all. It's basically all intuition."² He treats fairness as non-negotiable rather than a cost-benefit tradeoff, saying cutting corners can grow a company faster, as he believes FTX did, but that the cost is unbounded. He recruits in person only, with a high bar on competence and integrity. Yan believes finance is "one of the greatest inventions of humanity" and DeFi its best chance at reinventing it before AI raises the stakes.¹

Where things stand

As of the mid-2020s, Yan continues to lead Hyperliquid from Singapore, and the platform remains one of the largest decentralized derivatives exchanges by volume and revenue. Its valuation and volumes grew substantially through 2025, and the ecosystem of independent builders on its infrastructure, spanning spot assets, stablecoins, lending, and new derivatives markets, expanded with it. Yan has said the HYPE launch changed little operationally but decentralized the network's ownership. He describes Hyperliquid's goal in sweeping terms: infrastructure meant to house a meaningful share of global finance.

Key facts

• Grew up in Palo Alto to Chinese immigrant parents; competed for the United States at the International Physics Olympiad before studying math and computer science at Harvard.
• Worked at Hudson River Trading before starting his own crypto market-making operation, Chameleon Trading, out of Puerto Rico.
• The November 2022 collapse of FTX was the specific catalyst for building Hyperliquid from scratch.
• Took no venture capital; declined an offer valuing the company at roughly a billion dollars.
• HYPE's late-November 2024 launch airdropped roughly a billion dollars to early users, at the highest fully diluted valuation of any token launched that year.
• Runs the core protocol with roughly eleven engineers, counting independent teams building on Hyperliquid's infrastructure as part of the effective team.