No financing, no buying houses, no acknowledgment of being an exchange: The restraint and expansion of Hyperliquid's founder

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 traveled to Washington, D.C. to speak with Jeff Yan and learn about the follow-up strategic planning for his rapidly developing crypto platform, Hyperliquid. We settled in the café on the first floor of the formal Riggs Hotel, with his security personnel on alert nearby. During our conversation, I found that this 31-year-old founder might not provide straightforward, definitive answers.

This programmer, valued at a billion dollars, is well-versed in the narrative logic of the crypto industry. While the outside world generally defines Hyperliquid as a digital asset exchange, he consistently emphasizes that Hyperliquid itself is not an exchange but rather "the underlying infrastructure layer that supports exchanges." He likens it to the internet: developers building applications on Hyperliquid need to design their own risk control and checks and balances mechanisms. Jeff Yan is reluctant to discuss industry prospects in vague terms and focuses more on code development. "I spend almost all my time working," he says, "for me, work occupies all my energy."

This dedication has yielded significant results: Hyperliquid initially started as a niche offshore platform focused on perpetual contracts (Perps), which are contracts that allow for continuous trading without an expiration date. It has now grown into a core trading market, supporting agency contract trading for various assets including stocks and gold, with the platform generating $713 million in revenue over the past 12 months.

Launched in 2023, Hyperliquid has not opened to the U.S. market, yet its growth momentum has shaken industry leaders, including the world's largest derivatives exchange, CME Group, and has drawn the attention of the White House. Donald Trump is a supporter of the crypto industry, having earned over $1.4 billion through his own crypto project last year, and he has stated that regulators are fully researching the regulatory framework for perpetual contracts. Jeff Yan resides in Singapore and visited Washington to support the Hyperliquid Policy Center, an independent lobbying entity that continuously submits documents to U.S. regulators to explain the platform's value.

Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan, photographed in Washington. Photographer: Greg Kahn, Bloomberg Businessweek

The café where we conducted our interview is a niche communication hub in the crypto industry. On our way to our seats, we saw two women deeply discussing stablecoins. Jeff Yan described this trip as a meeting with policymakers but declined to disclose their identities. He was dressed in a dark suit and tie, fitting the style of Washington's political scene, rather than the T-shirts and hoodies he typically wears while coding. He has a lean physique and speaks cautiously, showing sincerity and wit when discussing the project that has placed him in the billion-dollar valuation club.

It is not easy to accurately assess his assets. Public information shows that Hyperliquid's current and future "core contributors" (which almost certainly includes Jeff Yan) hold at least 238 million native platform tokens, HYPE, corresponding to a value of about $20 billion. When I asked about his net worth, Jeff Yan did not respond directly: "That's not my goal." He has no interest in the material pleasures that immense wealth can bring. He does not own a car or property and admits he has no time to engage in purchases.

Jeff Yan grew up in Redwood Shores, California, raised by his mother, an accountant who immigrated from China to the United States. He studied mathematics and computer science at Harvard University and, after graduating, joined the quantitative trading firm Hudson River Trading in New York, where he chose to start his own venture less than a year later. He was initially attracted to Ethereum—Ethereum is the underlying blockchain on which many mainstream crypto applications operate. However, he ultimately judged that Ethereum was not suitable for the product he wanted to build.

In 2024, Jeff Yan established the platform development entity in Singapore, where the regulatory environment is more friendly compared to the U.S. By then, perpetual contracts had already become mainstream in crypto trading, but most trading was concentrated in exchanges operating in a manner similar to traditional companies. Decentralized finance, which hands control over to automatically executed smart contracts, represents another development path, but at that time it was limited in scale and prone to vulnerabilities. Jeff Yan aimed to change this situation. In the early stages of the project, he abandoned the venture capital funding that his peers typically relied on. The path of self-funding is more challenging, but he believes it is crucial: this neutral technology layer should not have privileged internal investors. "If Satoshi Nakamoto had completed a Series A funding round with institutions, Bitcoin would not be what it is today; that's the reasoning."

He co-founded the company with a co-founder using the pseudonym Iliensinc. Many Hyperliquid developers and practitioners from ecological third-party partners also choose to remain anonymous. On one hand, this is for security reasons: blockchain security firm CertiK reported that in the first half of 2026, crypto asset holders faced a total of 52 violent attacks, which is also why Jeff Yan was equipped with discreet security during the interview. On the other hand, it stems from ideological alignment; many crypto practitioners believe that privacy is inviolable. Jeff Yan stated that, in principle, anonymity "makes a lot of sense to me." However, to promote the development of Hyperliquid, he ultimately chose to reveal his identity. He recalled his thoughts at the time: "If no one continuously promotes the project from the start, it will be hard for it to succeed."

The core of Hyperliquid is a blockchain + decentralized exchange, with perpetual contracts supporting up to 50 times leverage, amplifying both gains and losses. For traders, this business carries high risks: during periods of severe price fluctuations, positions can be automatically liquidated. In a downturn in October 2025, approximately $19 billion in assets were liquidated across the market. Data from Event Horizon Labs shows that less 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 hacking attack, further weakening the crypto market and exposing the inherent risks of such assets.) However, what truly brought Hyperliquid into the sights of traditional finance is its recent foray into stocks and commodities.

The shift began with the launch of the HIP-3 upgrade last year: anyone who invests 500,000 HYPE (currently valued at about $43 million) can establish a new trading market based on Hyperliquid's trading infrastructure. The platform is responsible for underlying processes such as trade matching and clearing. After the upgrade, the ecosystem experienced rapid expansion. Trade.xyz became the core operator of the HIP-3 market, launching perpetual contracts for indices, precious metals, crude oil, and stocks, with trading volume reaching hundreds of billions of dollars to date.

Theoretically, this trading growth does not include U.S. traders. Jeff Yan stated that the feasible path to enter the U.S., the world's largest financial market, is for HIP-3 partners rather than Hyperliquid itself to accept U.S. regulation and implement compliance requirements such as KYC and market monitoring. (This is also the core logic behind his argument that "we only provide a technology platform, not an exchange.") In September, Hyperliquid began testing the revised HIP-3 framework, adding identity verification features to fill in the previously missing basic due diligence steps. In the same month, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken initiated discussions to integrate this system, aiming to offer Hyperliquid perpetual contracts to U.S. users.

Yan traveled from Singapore to Washington for the interview. Photographer: Greg Kahn, Bloomberg Businessweek

Notably, the trading volume of real-world assets (RWA) on Hyperliquid has now matched that of native crypto assets: in July alone, the trading volume of real-world assets exceeded $115 billion. These transactions stand out in scenarios of geopolitical conflict, as they are not constrained by traditional trading hours. When the conflict in Iran erupted in February of this year, traditional crude oil markets were closed, but Hyperliquid continued trading, with the platform's crude oil perpetual contract trading volume rapidly soaring to billions of dollars in a single day.

Following this event, CME Group and ICE, which operate major global commodity exchanges, pressured U.S. regulators to control Hyperliquid, citing risks of false orders and price manipulation within the platform's transactions. However, leading institutions are also laying the groundwork for collaboration: ICE recently announced that it plans to launch Trade.xyz's perpetual contract products in the U.S. market pending regulatory approval and will invest in this startup project. Jeff Yan stated, "I believe that in the coming years, those institutions that view Hyperliquid as a competitor may gradually accept that this technology can also be used by them."

Of course, some U.S. traders have accessed Hyperliquid via VPN. Jeff Yan explained that the platform and the applications built on it have terms of service that explicitly prohibit U.S. users from using them, along with corresponding interception mechanisms. However, he reiterated that Hyperliquid is a neutral protocol. The underlying internet technology itself does not block users from specific countries from accessing content prohibited by their national laws; "the responsibility for such control should lie with the upper-level applications."

Jeff Yan has been answering my questions for over an hour, but I still find it difficult to get a clear and definitive conclusion from him. As the project's founder, he prefers that this continuously expanding ecosystem proves its value on its own. However, he did reveal the next phase of Hyperliquid's development direction.

"If I could launch a product from scratch, I think high-quality tokenized real assets would be very attractive." What he means is that, in the long term, Hyperliquid could introduce large enterprise stock tokenization trading products to users. Supporters believe this model can create a market with liquidity superior to traditional stocks. Of course, the ultimate direction is "hard to predict," as the products the platform can launch are 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 current or former presidential portraits appear in the background. After all, Hyperliquid is a neutral protocol.