Written by: Ryan Weeks, Bloomberg
Compiled by: Saoirse, Foresight News
Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan, photographed at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
I made a special trip to Washington, D.C., to speak with Jeff Yan and learn about the future strategic plans for Hyperliquid, the fast-growing crypto platform he built from the ground up. We sat down in the ground-floor cafe of the stately Riggs Hotel, with his security personnel keeping watch not far away. During our conversation, I found that this 31-year-old founder may not necessarily give straightforward, definitive answers.
This programmer, whose project is valued in the billions of dollars, understands the crypto industry's rhetorical logic well. The outside world generally defines Hyperliquid as a digital asset exchange, but he always emphasizes that Hyperliquid itself is not an exchange, but rather "the underlying infrastructure layer that hosts exchanges." He compares it to the internet: developers building applications on top of Hyperliquid need to design their own risk controls and checks and balances. Jeff Yan is unwilling to talk idly about the industry's grand vision and is more focused on code development. "I spend almost all my time working," he said. "For me, work takes up all my energy."
This dedication has produced notable results: Hyperliquid began as an offshore niche platform focused on perpetual contracts (Perps), that is, contracts that trade continuously around the clock with no expiration date. Today it has grown into a core trading market, supporting proxy contract trading for various assets such as stocks and gold, and the platform generated $713 million in revenue over the past 12 months.
Hyperliquid launched in 2023. Although it is not open to the U.S. market, its growth momentum has already shaken industry leaders including CME Group, the world's largest derivatives exchange, and has also drawn attention from the White House. Donald Trump is a supporter of the crypto industry and earned more than $1.4 billion last year through his own crypto projects. He has said that regulators are fully studying the regulatory framework for perpetual contracts. Jeff Yan is based in Singapore, and on this visit to Washington he came to support the Hyperliquid Policy Center. This institution is an independent lobbying entity that continuously submits documents to U.S. regulators explaining the platform's value.
Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan, photographed in Washington. Photographer: Greg Kahn, Bloomberg Businessweek
The cafe where we conducted the interview is a niche gathering spot for the crypto industry. On the way to our seats, we saw two women deep in discussion about stablecoins. Jeff Yan said the trip was for meetings with policymakers but declined to disclose their identities. He wore a dark suit and tie, in keeping with the style of Washington's political circles rather than the T-shirts and hoodies he usually wears when writing code. He is lean and speaks cautiously, and when discussing the project that has put him in the billion-dollar valuation ranks, his attitude is sincere and not without humor.
It is not easy to precisely calculate his assets. Public information shows that Hyperliquid's current and future "core contributors" (almost certainly including Jeff Yan) hold at least 238 million of the platform's native token HYPE, corresponding to a value of about $20 billion. When I asked about his net worth, Jeff Yan did not answer directly: "That is not the goal I am pursuing." He has no interest in the material pleasures that vast wealth can bring. He owns no car and no real estate, and admits he has no time to take part in purchasing them.
Jeff Yan grew up in Redwood Shores, California, raised by his mother. His mother is an accountant who immigrated to the United States from China. He studied mathematics and computer science at Harvard University, and after graduation joined the New York quantitative trading firm Hudson River Trading, choosing to start his own business less than a year after joining. He was initially drawn to Ethereum — the underlying blockchain on which many mainstream crypto applications run. But he ultimately concluded that Ethereum was not suited to the product he wanted to build.
In 2024, Jeff Yan established the platform's development entity in Singapore, where the regulatory environment is friendlier than in the United States. At that time, perpetual contracts had already become mainstream in crypto trading, but most trading was concentrated in exchanges whose operating models were close to those of traditional companies. Decentralized finance, which hands control to automatically executing smart contracts, was another development path, but at the time its scale was limited and vulnerabilities were frequent. Jeff Yan wanted to change this situation. In the project's early stages, he gave up the venture capital funding that peers generally relied on. The self-funded path was more difficult, but he considered it crucial: this neutral technology layer should not have privileged insider investors. "If Satoshi Nakamoto had completed a Series A financing with institutions back then, Bitcoin would not be the Bitcoin it is today. That is exactly the logic."
He co-founded the company with a co-founder who uses the pseudonym Iliensinc. Many Hyperliquid developers as well as workers at third-party ecosystem partners also choose to remain anonymous. On the one hand, this is for security reasons: according to the blockchain security firm CertiK, in the first half of 2026 crypto asset holders experienced 52 violent attacks in total, which is also why Jeff Yan had concealed security during the interview. On the other hand, it stems from ideological identification; many crypto practitioners believe privacy is inviolable. Jeff Yan said that in principle anonymity "makes a lot of sense to me." But in order to promote Hyperliquid's development, he ultimately chose to make his identity public. He recalled his thinking at the time: "If no one had continuously promoted the project externally when it first launched, it would have been very difficult for this project to succeed."
Hyperliquid's core is a blockchain plus a decentralized exchange, with perpetual contracts supporting up to 50x leverage, amplifying both gains and losses. For traders, this business is high-risk: when prices fluctuate sharply, positions are automatically liquidated. During a downturn in October 2025, about $19 billion in assets were liquidated across the entire market. Data from Event Horizon Labs shows that fewer than a quarter of accounts on Hyperliquid are profitable.
Even so, Hyperliquid has a stable user base among crypto traders, many of whom are HYPE token holders. In a year when most token prices declined, HYPE's price doubled. (Last week Binance suffered a hack, further weakening the crypto market and exposing the inherent risks of such assets.) But what truly brought Hyperliquid into the view of traditional finance was its recent entry into stocks and commodities.
The shift began with the launch of last year's HIP-3 upgrade: anyone who puts in 500,000 HYPE (currently worth about $43 million) can build a new trading market on Hyperliquid's trading infrastructure. The platform handles underlying processes such as trade matching and clearing. After the upgrade, the ecosystem experienced rapid expansion. Trade.xyz became the core operator of HIP-3 markets, launching perpetual contracts on indices, precious metals, crude oil, and stocks, with trading volume to date reaching the hundreds of billions of dollars level.
In theory, the above trading growth does not include U.S. traders. Jeff Yan said that the feasible path into the U.S., the world's largest financial market, is for HIP-3 partners, rather than the Hyperliquid entity, to accept U.S. regulation and implement compliance requirements such as KYC and market surveillance. (This is also the core logic of his argument that "we only provide a technology platform, not an exchange.") In September, Hyperliquid began testing a revised HIP-3 framework, adding identity verification features and filling in the previously missing basic due diligence steps. In the same month, the parent company of the crypto exchange Kraken began talks to connect to this system and provide Hyperliquid perpetual contracts to U.S. users.
Yan traveled from Singapore to Washington for the interview. Photographer: Greg Kahn, Bloomberg Businessweek
It is worth noting that the trading volume of real-world assets (RWA) on Hyperliquid has now rivaled the trading scale of native crypto assets: in July alone, real-world asset trading volume surpassed $115 billion. Such trading has prominent advantages in geopolitical conflict scenarios, as it is not constrained by traditional trading hours. When the Iran conflict broke out in February this year, the traditional crude oil market was closed, but Hyperliquid continued trading normally, and the platform's crude oil perpetual contract single-day trading volume quickly surged to several billion dollars.
After that event, CME Group and ICE, which operate the world's major commodity exchanges, pressured U.S. regulators to rein in Hyperliquid, arguing that trades on the platform carry risks of spoofing orders and price manipulation. But leading institutions are also pursuing partnerships at the same time: ICE recently announced that, pending regulatory approval, it will launch Trade.xyz's perpetual contract products for the U.S. market and invest in the startup. Jeff Yan said: "I think in the coming years, those institutions that view Hyperliquid as a rival may gradually come to accept that this technology can also be used by them."
Of course, some U.S. traders already access Hyperliquid via VPN. Jeff Yan explained that the platform and the applications built on it explicitly prohibit use by U.S. users in their terms of service, and corresponding blocking mechanisms are in place. But he reiterated once again that Hyperliquid is a neutral protocol. The underlying technologies of the internet themselves do not block users in a particular country from accessing content prohibited by that country's laws. "The responsibility for such controls should be borne by the applications at the upper layer."
Jeff Yan had been answering my questions for more than an hour, but I still found it hard to get a clear, definitive conclusion from him. As the project's founder, he would rather let this continuously expanding ecosystem prove its value on its own. Still, he did reveal the direction of Hyperliquid's next stage of development.
"If I could build one product from scratch, I think high-quality tokenized real-world assets would be very attractive." What he means is that, in the long run, Hyperliquid could offer users tokenized trading products for large corporate stocks. Supporters believe this model can create a market with better liquidity than traditional stocks. Of course, the ultimate direction is "very hard to predict," because which products the platform can list is largely determined by third-party developers.
As the interview drew to a close, he needed to cross the street to the National Portrait Gallery for a photo shoot. His team specifically requested that no portraits of any current or former president appear in the background. After all, Hyperliquid is a neutral protocol.
