Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan reveals: How a 10-person team built a trillion-volume encryption empire?

In the ever-changing and competitive market of Crypto Assets, the decentralized trading platform Hyperliquid is rising at an astonishing speed. Its founder, Jeff Yan, a Harvard genius, has managed to build Hyperliquid into one of the world's largest perpetual futures trading platforms in less than two years, with an annual volume reaching 1.8 trillion USD, all with just a streamlined team of 10 and zero venture capital funding. This not only disrupts the traditional notion that "only large teams and significant funds can succeed" but also leaves the industry curious: how did this founder achieve all this?

System Thinkers: From Physics Olympiad Gold Medals to High-Frequency Trading

Jeff Yan's journey in crypto assets began in Palo Alto, California, where he grew up in the heart of Silicon Valley. Unlike many of his peers who focused on building consumer internet companies, Jeff is deeply interested in the intersection of mathematics, physics, and complex systems.

In 2013, while most high school students were still busy worrying about prom, Jeff had already represented the United States in the International Physics Olympiad and won a gold medal. Such achievements were enough to get him into any top university, and he even received a pile of job offers before graduating. Consequently, he entered Harvard University to study Mathematics and Computer Science, and immediately joined Hudson River Trading after graduation. In this extremely mysterious high-frequency trading company, people could earn millions with just a few microseconds of speed advantage over others.

"I have learned a lot about the market and how to think rigorously about it," Jeff said. At HRT, Jeff is dedicated to solving complex problems that integrate engineering and mathematics. He has learned how to build low-latency systems that can execute thousands of trades per second. He understands how market makers provide liquidity and how different types of trading processes affect market efficiency.

After working at HRT for a few years, he noticed opportunities and turned to explore the encryption field. In 2018, he attempted to build a Layer 2 prediction market platform and even raised some funds, moving to San Francisco to form a team. However, that attempt ultimately failed, as regulatory uncertainty and low user acceptance led to its demise. This also provided Jeff with valuable experience, helping him understand what cryptocurrency users truly want.

Between 2018 and 2022, after the failure of Jeff Yan's prediction market platform, he refocused on trading. Initially, he treated Crypto Assets trading as a side job and soon discovered severe inefficiencies in the market. Realizing this opportunity, he scaled up the business and founded the Crypto Assets market-making company Chameleon Trading in early 2020. During the bull market, this company quickly grew to become one of the largest market makers among centralized crypto service providers, and Jeff's reputation in the field of quantitative trading was thus established.

Then, a large encryption service provider ran into trouble. In November 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried's empire collapsed, and the platform, once seen as a star of the future for Crypto Assets, came crashing down. Do you remember the $135 million naming deal with the stadium? They had celebrities like Tom Brady and Larry David endorsing them.

"We witnessed the problems of the platform firsthand," Jeff recalled, "people realized that Crypto Assets were supposed to be a fun game, but it no longer felt that way when some bad things happened." Jeff witnessed billions of dollars evaporate overnight simply because users entrusted their funds to a centralized platform. Most people would see this as a warning to stay away from Crypto Assets, but Jeff saw it as a challenge.

Building Rockets in the Garage: Self-Reliant Hyperliquid

The obvious solution is to create a decentralized exchange that can compete with large centralized service providers. The idea is simple, but nearly impossible to achieve. Every blockchain that Jeff has examined has issues. Ethereum is too slow; Layer 2 solutions add latency; Solana is relatively fast but still not sufficient for large-scale trading. All options require compromises, ultimately making the exchange worse than it is now.

As a result, Jeff made a reasonable decision: due to the hard requirement of user experience, he decided to build his own blockchain from scratch. The final result is Hyperliquid—a blockchain specifically designed for trading, capable of processing 200,000 transactions per second and achieving almost instant finality. Users can use up to 125 times leverage across more than 145 different markets while ensuring the security of their funds.

Most startup stories revolve around raising $50 million from top venture capital firms and then recruiting hundreds of engineers for expansion. However, Jeff's approach is different. He funds development with the profits from his trading company and keeps the team lean, with only 10 people.

"We started from scratch," he said, "there's no need for financing, so the decision is very simple." Jeff believes that venture capitalists holding a large stake in decentralized networks will become "scars on the web" and harm its long-term development.

This self-reliant approach allows Jeff to fully dedicate himself to creating products that users love, without having to cater to investors' expectations. This also resulted in one of Hyperliquid's most innovative features: when the platform launches the HYPE coin in November 2024, 31% of the token supply will be directly allocated to users based on their trading activity. This is one of the largest user-centered token allocations in the Crypto Assets space. The remaining tokens will be allocated for future community rewards (38.88%), core contributors (23.8%), the foundation (6%), community grants (0.3%), and a small amount for protocol upgrades (0.012%).

The reason this token distribution method is feasible is that Jeff did not sell equity to venture capitalists; otherwise, they would demand preferential allocation. By remaining independent, he can prioritize community ownership rather than investor returns.

When Hyperliquid launched in 2023, there was no press release, no collaboration with KOLs, and no billboards in Times Square. Jeff simply opened the doors and waited for the future. What followed was explosive growth that took everyone by surprise. Within 100 days, the daily volume reached 1 billion dollars. By mid-2025, the monthly volume is expected to reach 2.48 trillion dollars, putting Hyperliquid on par with other major trading platforms.

"We don't have a marketing department," Jeff admitted, "I think our community does an amazing job, better than all those centralized service providers' marketing departments." This isn't luck. The entire platform designed by Jeff revolves around how to align incentives with users, rather than extracting value from them. This approach is too radical; other exchanges may want to emulate it, but they may not be able to. After all, when you've already raised hundreds of millions from venture capitalists, you can't just give most of the tokens away to users.

Ecosystem and Technology Depth: Born for Professional Trading

Although Hyperliquid initially started as a perpetual futures exchange, Jeff's vision has always gone beyond simple trading. In early 2025, the platform launched HyperEVM, a virtual machine compatible with Ethereum that allows developers to build financial applications directly on Hyperliquid's blockchain.

The ecosystem is developing rapidly: the collateralized debt position protocol Felix currently manages over $400 million in assets, while the lending protocol HyperLend manages $380 million. Jeff stated that the ultimate vision is to centralize all financial operations on a single platform.

The problem discovered by Jeff is common across all crypto asset exchanges: experienced high-frequency traders quickly buy or sell using bots even before market makers update their quotes after releasing prices or during price fluctuations. As a result, market makers are forced to widen the spread to protect themselves, and ordinary traders ultimately end up paying higher fees.

Hyperliquid solves this problem by lowering the priority of fast "eating orders". Instead, the platform provides market makers with a fair opportunity to update prices, which means lower spreads and better prices will benefit all users. The platform's order matching engine adopts a price-time priority mechanism and includes rules that allow for smoother execution. Under specific conditions, the priority of special orders such as canceling orders or limit orders can be higher than that of regular orders, which means market makers can respond to new information, adjust quotes, and avoid being targeted by fast traders.

This subtle change encourages market makers to quote tighter spreads, as they are less likely to incur losses from delayed arbitrage. Ultimately, everyone on the platform can benefit from better prices and higher liquidity. All of this occurs on-chain, making the entire process transparent, allowing users to see fairer and more consistent outcomes. This depth of technology may explain why professional traders, who are the most sensitive to execution quality, still choose to use Hyperliquid despite having access to every centralized service provider in the world.

What Happens Next: Expansion and Future

However, Jeff faces an interesting question: how to scale a 10-person company that handles trillions of volume? His solution, as always, is counterintuitive: instead of hiring more people, he builds tools that allow others to create applications on Hyperliquid.

"If something can be done by someone else, it should be done by someone else," Jeff said. "We can hardly do anything. I think this is actually a blessing in disguise."

The platform recently launched a permissionless market creation feature, allowing anyone to establish new trading markets by staking HYPE coins. However, a threshold of 1 million HYPE coins (worth tens of millions of dollars) is required, meaning not everyone can enjoy this service. For users who meet the threshold, developers can retain 100% of the fees from the markets they create, which is something no traditional exchange can offer.

Jeff is still in talks with sovereign wealth funds to build financial infrastructure, but he is unwilling to disclose the specific countries. The goal is to demonstrate that decentralized systems can handle the scale and complexity of national financial systems.

In July 2025, Nasdaq-listed biotech company Sonnet BioTherapeutics announced its entry into the Crypto Assets sector by establishing a $888 million entity focused on holding HYPE coins. This deal will make the newly renamed Hyperliquid Strategies Inc. the company holding the most HYPE among publicly listed firms in the United States.

In this industry filled with grand promises to completely change everything, Jeff created something simple yet effective. No high-profile claims of "serving the unbanked," no grand vision of "Web3 changing the world," just a platform that traders genuinely enjoy using.

"We focus on creating products that users love," Jeff explained, "everything else is secondary."

This method seems to be very effective. Hyperliquid currently handles over 10% of the global Crypto Assets derivatives trading, and it operates with just a 10-person team, without a marketing budget. For Jeff, this is just another engineering problem that needs to be solved.

The story of Jeff Yan and Hyperliquid is a unique success case in the Web3 field. With a profound understanding of technology, an extreme pursuit of user experience, and a spirit of self-reliance, he stands out in the fiercely competitive decentralized trading market. The success of Hyperliquid proves that even without a large team and venture capital, as long as real pain points are addressed and incentive mechanisms are deeply tied to user interests, it is possible to build a crypto empire that handles trillions in volume.