Dear all,
This is a new artcile on Hyperliquid from Bloomberg.
The founder of Hyperliquid who used to work as a quant at Hudson River has no cars and no house (and now worth more than US 20 bln counting just the amount of HYPE token he holds without adding on the value Hyperliquid DeFi platform). He is already richer than Alex Gerko - the founder of XTX.
Regards
James
The Crypto Mogul Behind Trading Powerhouse Hyperliquid
Even though the once-niche crypto platform isn’t officially accessible in the US, its rise has rattled industry titans and caught the White House’s attention.
Jeff Yan of Hyperliquid at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.
Photographer: Greg Kahn for Bloomberg Businessweek
By Ryan Weeks
November 3, 2026 at 1:01 PM GMT+8
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Takeaways
- Jeff Yan, founder of the crypto platform Hyperliquid, insists that Hyperliquid isn't an exchange but "a layer on which exchanges can be deployed".
- Hyperliquid has grown to become an influential venue for trading proxies for everything from stocks to gold, with revenue of $713 million over the last 12 months.
- Yan suggests that Hyperliquid could offer a consumer product built around shares in big companies, traded as tokens, which could create a more liquid market than conventional equities.
I’d flown to Washington, DC, to ask Jeff Yan what Hyperliquid, the wildly successful crypto platform he founded, is planning next. But as we sit in the ground-floor cafe of the imposing Riggs Hotel, his security detail keeping a discreet distance, it feels as if the 31-year-old might be the wrong person to ask.
The billionaire programmer has mastered a kind of doublespeak often employed by crypto insiders. He insists that Hyperliquid, widely described as an exchange for digital assets, isn’t an exchange at all but “a layer on which exchanges can be deployed.” He likens it to the internet; it falls to those building things on top of Hyperliquid to figure out the checks and balances. Rather than opining on the future, Yan wants to focus on the code. “I just work all the time,” he explains. “For me, work is all-consuming.”
The fruit of his labor is that Hyperliquid has grown from a fringe offshore platform dealing in perpetual futures, or “perps” — open-ended contracts that trade around the clock — to become an influential venue for trading proxies for everything from stocks to gold. Its revenue over the last 12 months was $713 million.
Even though Hyperliquid, which first went live in 2023, isn’t officially accessible in the US, its rise has rattled industry titans, including the world’s largest derivatives exchange, CME Group Inc. The White House has taken notice too. President Donald Trump, an industry advocate who earned more than $1.4 billion through his own crypto ventures last year, has said that regulators are “working very hard” to allow Hyperliquid to serve American traders. So Yan, usually in Singapore, is here in Washington, where he supports the Hyperliquid Policy Center, an arm’s-length lobbying group that’s peppered US agencies with letters about the merits of the platform.
Yan of Hyperliquid in Washington. Photographer: Greg Kahn for Bloomberg Businessweek
The venue for our conversation turns out to be something of a crypto hot spot: En route to our table at the Riggs, we pass two women deep in conversation about stablecoins. Yan, who says he’s in the city to meet policymakers he declines to identify, is wearing a dark suit and tie, reflective of the folkways of the capital, rather than the T-shirt and hoodie coder uniform he generally prefers. Trim and earnest, he speaks thoughtfully, and not without humor, about the business that has made him a billionaire several times over — probably.
Knowing for sure is tricky. Officially, current and future “core contributors” to Hyperliquid — a bracket that almost certainly includes Yan — own at least 238 million tokens of HYPE, an in-house cryptocurrency, worth about $20 billion. When I ask about his net worth, Yan demurs. “It’s really not a number I’m optimizing for,” he says. Nor is he interested in the material perks such wealth makes possible. He doesn’t own a car or house and says he doesn’t have the time to start collecting anything.
Yan grew up in Redwood Shores, California, where he was raised by his mother, an accountant who’d immigrated to the US from China. After studying math and computer science at Harvard University, he joined the quantitative trading firm Hudson River Trading in New York City. He lasted less than a year before striking out on his own. He was originally intrigued by Ethereum, the blockchain that underpins many of the crypto market’s most popular apps. But he eventually concluded that Ethereum was ill-suited to the kind of company he wanted to build.
Yan set up Hyperliquid Labs, the developer of the platform, in Singapore in 2024, seeking a friendlier regulatory environment than was available in the US. Measured by volume, perps already dominated the crypto trading scene, but with activity concentrated on exchanges that functioned more or less like traditional companies. Decentralized finance, in which control is delegated to self-executing software, offered an alternative, but was tiny and buggy by comparison. Yan wanted to change that. From the outset, he would eschew the venture capital dollars that rivals relied on. Self-funding would be harder, but it was important that there were “no insiders to the neutral technology layer,” he says. “Bitcoin would not be Bitcoin if Satoshi” — its pseudonymous creator — “had raised a Series A from whoever, right?”
Yan established the company with a co-founder who also operates under a pseudonym, Iliensinc. Many of the people working on Hyperliquid or at third parties dedicated to its ecosystem do the same. This stems partly from fear: Blockchain security firm CertiK verified 52 violent attacks against crypto holders in the first half of 2026. (Thus Yan’s security detail, who keep themselves well concealed as we chat.) It’s also ideological, with some crypto advocates regarding privacy as sacrosanct. Yan says that in principle, going by a pseudonym “makes a lot of sense to me.” Still, he decided he had to out himself to make Hyperliquid viable. He recalls thinking that “this thing would not succeed if it didn’t have someone from Day 1 really shouting it from the rooftops.”
At its core, the result is a blockchain and decentralized exchange that offers up to 50 times leverage on perps, magnifying potential gains as well as losses. For traders, this is a risky business. Positions can be liquidated automatically in the event of sudden price swings: Across the market, some $19 billion was wiped out in an October 2025 selloff. According to a recent study by hedge fund Event Horizon Labs, fewer than a quarter of Hyperliquid accounts are profitable.
Nonetheless, Hyperliquid has a loyal following among crypto traders, many of them holders of HYPE. The token has more than doubled in price over the past year while most others declined. (The wider crypto market’s slump worsened last week after a $6.3 billion hack of crypto exchange Binance highlighted the vulnerabilities of the asset class.) But it’s Hyperliquid’s more recent lurch into stocks and commodities that’s putting the platform on the map of the broader financial sector.
It began last year, when an upgrade known as HIP-3 made it possible for anyone willing to stump up 500,000 HYPE tokens, worth about $43 million today, to create markets on top of Hyperliquid’s exchange infrastructure. It would handle the plumbing of executing and settling trades. A Cambrian explosion of sorts followed. A firm called Trade.xyz came to dominate the HIP-3 market, listing perps for indexes, precious metals, oil and equities. So far, it’s generated more than half a trillion dollars in volume.
This growth has occurred without US traders, at least on paper. Yan says the way to break into the world’s largest financial market is for HIP-3 partners, rather than Hyperliquid itself, to submit to US regulation on matters such as know-your-customer checks and market surveillance. (This is where his argument that he merely provides a tech platform, not an exchange, becomes crucial.) In September, Hyperliquid began testing a modified version of the HIP-3 framework that allows for customer identity verification, a basic due diligence step that the platform doesn’t currently offer. The same month, the parent of the crypto exchange Kraken announced a plan to start using that system to offer Hyperliquid perps to Americans.
Yan visiting Washington from Singapore. Photographer: Greg Kahn for Bloomberg Businessweek
Remarkably, the trading volumes for so-called real-world assets on Hyperliquid now rival those for crypto-linked activity: The former accounted for more than $115 billion in July alone. Such trading can shine at moments of geopolitical tension, which don’t follow the standard trading day. When the Iran war began in February, traditional oil markets were closed, but Hyperliquid wasn’t. Daily trading of some of its oil perps soon shot into the billions of dollars.
After that, CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (ICE), which operate the major global commodity exchanges, pressed the US to rein in Hyperliquid, arguing that trading there could be exploited to manipulate prices. But they’re also hedging their bets. ICE recently announced an agreement to bring Trade.xyz’s perps to the US, pending regulatory approvals, while also investing in the startup. “I think in the coming years,” Yan says, “those who view Hyperliquid as some sort of enemy will maybe come to terms with the fact that it could be technology that they can adopt themselves.”
There’s no question that some American traders are using Hyperliquid already, via virtual private networks. Yan notes that the platform and apps built atop it “explicitly prohibit US usage” in their terms of service and have mechanisms to exclude users who ignore those strictures. But he comes back to his insistence that Hyperliquid is a neutral platform. After all, there’s nothing in the underlying technology of the internet to block users in a particular country from doing things that their governments forbid. “That kind of falls to the applications built on top of the internet,” he says.
Yan has been answering my questions for more than an hour, but I worry that I’ve struggled to pin him down. Creator he may be, but I get the impression that he’d prefer his creation — with its growing network of contributors — to speak for itself. He does, at least, let slip a hint about where Hyperliquid might be headed next.
“If you could wave a wand and something would exist, I think high-quality tokenized assets, real-world assets, would be quite interesting,” he says. What he seems to be suggesting is that Hyperliquid could, in time, offer a consumer product built around shares in big companies, traded as tokens. (Advocates argue that this could create a more liquid market than conventional equities.) Though it is, of course, a “bit hard to predict” what will happen, because of the role that third parties play in shaping what’s available on Hyperliquid.
As our conversation winds down, it’s time for him to head across the street to the National Portrait Gallery, where Yan is set to be photographed — but not, his team specifies, with any paintings of presidents past or present in the background. After all, Hyperliquid is a neutral protocol.