Jeff Yan, Hyper Life

From:Colossos; Original author: Dom Cooke@domcookeI'm not sure

Compile Odaily Daily Planet@OdailyChina); Translator Azuma()@azuma ethI'm not sure

One Friday in January, before dawn, a 43-year-old man was taken from his home in Saint-Léger-sous-Cholet in western France. He was driven to the town of Basse-Goulaine, some 30 miles away, where he was severely beaten, tied up and abandoned. Twelve hours later, when the night came on the outskirts of Paris, three men with a single pistol broke into a house in Verneuil-sur-Seine, beat a couple in front of their children, tied all four of them with tape, turned over the whole house and left for the train station。

This is the 70th similar attack worldwide in less than a year. Two days later, I boarded a flight to Singapore。

I was going to visit a team of 11 people, but in their office, the first person I saw didn't belong to this team. He was a strong American, with short hair and bushes, sitting at a small table in the corner of the rest zone, with an apple notebook in front of him. His condition shows that he didn't come here to write code, but he was a bodyguard。

One of the co-founders of this company, Aliens Incorporated, followed me from my hotel to my office. As we crossed the streets covered by rain trees, she told me that they were not always in this part of Singapore. The company originally had a shared office space in the financial sector, but her other co-founder, the only person on the team who didn't use an alias, started to attract outside attention. Initially, it was only a few observations, and efforts were made to identify his face; then it began to be said that strangers had come forward; and later, he was followed into the elevator of his apartment. As a result, the company moved to a quieter place, where no one thought to look for their building。

Even the cleaning of companies is not known about their real business. In her view, it was a neighbourhood commodity company that produced furcat dolls。There are 34 fuzzy toys in the office, so this misunderstanding is not hard to understand. The company's mascot is a cat called Hypurr, of which 12 are on cabinets, but in addition there are sharks, lizards, koala, penguins and dragons, some of which are on display like ghosts. Most of the dolls came from an engineer -- his wife didn't allow him to take them home again, so he took them to his office. The team did not correct this misunderstanding by the cleaners。

This is because Hyperliquid -- a platform for trading in encrypted money chains -- is one of the most profitable businesses in the world。Last year, the company's only 11 employees made over $900 million in profits. The company had been in existence for only three years, had reached $10 billion in market value and had never received a dollar investment。The core figure behind it, Jeffrey Yan, 31 years old, has become an increasingly visible face in an industry — an industry where success often implies a higher risk of abduction。

Before the establishment of Hyperliquid, Jeff lived in Puerto Rico and operated almost alone one of the largest anonymous trading teams in the encrypted currency industry. This team is called Chameleon Trading, "Chameleon" is his middle school nickname for playing games. He started with his $10,000 savings and achieved thousands of percentage points of annual growth in two and a half years. When he mentioned his gain to me, he immediately tried to convince me not to think it was something. I took note of his objections, as well as Chameleon had made him extremely rich。He was 27 years old, economically free。In the eyes of surfers, barmaids and waitresses in San Juan, he was simply an ordinary young man wearing surf shorts。

And now, in a heavily guarded office in Singapore, Jeff sits barefoot in a grey armchair, wearing black shorts and dark blue T-shirts, explaining to me why the entire financial system needs to be rebuilt from scratch. The question I really want to know isWhy would he use his first life for his second life

"It's not about money," Jeff said. Jeff is not from a wealthy family, and he does not see any interest in the “living of the rich” in his life today. He wears the same Lulemon shorts and T-shirts every day -- 15 shorts, 10 T-shirts, each with three colors. Looking at his office, there was hardly any trace of wealth. The furniture was left behind by the previous tenant and the only addition to the team was two sets of tables in the rest area, the NFT on the wall and the dolls。

This was confirmed again when I saw four books on the shelf, one of which was Frank Slootman's "Amp It Up," a management book whose core view was that most people were not working hard enough. I mentioned the book to iliensinc, and she just shrugged -- the idea of "working hard" was theirs, not from the book. The same is true of the three bottles of Grey Goose and Macallan in the kitchen, which have remained intact since a community event that did not reach the minimum level of consumption two years ago. This team is more used to tea。

This is not out of love for the encryption money industry. Bitcoin, an industry windward, has fallen significantly after its height in early October; while gold, which should have been “replaced” by it, rose by 7 per cent over the same period; most other coins performed worse. When I asked Jeff how he looked at the negative sentiment surrounding the entire industry, he did not defend it. “There are indeed a lot of impure behaviors in this field,” he said, “the growing realization that these things are not something that they claim may be good in some way.”

And Jeff didn't think that Hyperliquid was a "encrypted money company." "No one now calls it an "Internet company," he said, "We use encryption, but that doesn't define us."

Before joining Hyperliquid, only two people in the team (including Jeff) had professional experience in the encryption industry. This is partly deliberate. According to him, the earlier encrypted money industry was mostly more concerned with making money quickly; he had built a long-term project and was therefore better suited to those who thought closer to technicians rather than traders. But this is equally a supply issue。Hyperliquid ' s recruitment targets are often from the International Mathematical Olympic Contest。Jeff had obtained a physical gold medal at the age of 18, some of his engineers had received a silver tag in informatics and others had received training from the United States National Team. Jeff hopes to get more of these people -- in fact, since I visited earlier this year, he has already added two members -- but the pool of talent that is willing to engage in the encrypted money industry, with this level of talent, has been shrinking for years because of fraud, bad faith, and, more recently, the attraction of artificial intelligence。

So why would Jeff, who already earns enough money to do what he wants, stay here

At least from outside, the answer is becoming clearer。

Hyperliquid is essentially a block chain on which a proprietary exchange is built. In traditional exchanges, companies control your finances and infrastructure; on Hyperliquid, users control their own assets, and the platform is open. Jeff's vision of it -- that's not ironic when he says it -- isCarrying the entire financial systemI don't know. You can think of this as ambition, or ludicrous, depending on whether you're looking at those fur cats or at the data on the platform. Because, in the months following my visit, a number of trading markets that have been going on for hundreds of years began to deflect in a small but quantifiable way。

Hyperliquid, which began in 2023 with a permanent contract, is a derivative and the largest market in the encryption industry. The so-called “renewal contract” is a pledge to the price of an asset that the dealer does not really hold and, unlike traditional futures, has no maturity date. The market size of such transactions is six to eight times the spot market, with a monthly turnover of approximately $7 trillion, and until recently almost entirely carried by the centralized exchange, the largest of which is ahead of Binance. Previously, no decentrized platform had had a real impact on it, and Hyperliquid was the first platform to do so, with its market share increasing to about 14 per cent of Binance。

Then, in October 2025, Hyperliquid did something that the Centralized Exchange could not do:It allows anyone on the platform to create a new permanent market for any data asset with a price predictor。An independent team called Trade.xyz became one of the most active builders. It was first on lineSilver marketBy January of the following year, its 24-hour trading volume had reached about 2 per cent of the corresponding market of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (Chicago Commodity Exchange, established in 1898 as the largest derivative exchange in the world). Then Trade.xyz went online againCrude oil marketCrude oil trading has long relied on traditional markets on weekends, but in late February, a Saturday, the United States and Israel began air strikes against Iran. CME was closed at that time, and Hyperliquid did not stop. The daily volume of crude oil traded jumped from $21 million to $3.7 billion. A month later, Trade.xyz launched a permanent contract for the 500 index, which obtained S& Pow Jones Industries was officially authorized and made a 7x24-hour deal, including weekends。

Today, the most influential product on Hyperliquid is being built by developers who neither work for Jeff nor ever work for him。

The founder of Trade.xyz, who requested anonymity, purchased his first Bitcoin in 2013 at $66, and has since been active as an investor rather than a builder. He had no intention of starting a business. He told me that if it wasn't for Jeff, he might have left the encryption industry."Hyperliquid has a chance to save the encryption industryHe said。

However, all of this still fails to fully explain why Hyperliquid could really become what Jeff envisaged - especially in an industry full of “appears to be successful and to be lost” - and why he would abandon his life in Puerto Rico to pursue all of this. With these questions in mind, in the first afternoon of my arrival in the office, I was sitting in the rest area with iliensinc, with a fluffy cat on the table and the smell of ginger and sesame left over from lunch in the air. She told me three years ago, when Jeff declared Chameleon closed, the team asked him the same question. And her answer, not from the encrypted money industry, but from Jeff himself。

"You should ask his mother," she said。

Jeff prefers to schedule the meeting outside. We were sitting on a balcony with a roof, with four grey seats and a coffee table. Downstairs on the street, vehicles pass from time to time. Every few minutes, the gardener starts the lawn mower. The sound of the crosswalk is running。

Jeff put his feet under him. When I asked his mother, he was silent for a while. And he said, "She used to say one thing -- one word in Chinese: "There are people out there, there are people out there." To the effect that no matter how good you think you are, there's always a stronger person out there, more unknown world. She was not the kind of mother who promoted the child, but she wanted him to understand that what he saw was only a fraction of the world。

He and his sister were raised by their mothers alone and lived in the centre of the most valuable geographical area in the history of American business -- Redwood Shores, between San Francisco and Palo Alto. Oracle's headquarters building outside the mirror glass stands above the community, surrounded by mostly engineers and product managers, whose children have been raised from an early age to the kind of life that Jeff has followed. Jeff's parents were Chinese immigrants and divorced in his third grade. The father left the family home, the mother was an accountant and was required to work overtime every tax season. And Jeff looked at everything, and he said, "I can feel other people being richer than us," and he said, "But I've never been angry about it. Going out doesn't cost much."

His school did not have a strong academic competition. Despite the mother ' s frequent words, she did not put pressure on Jeff. No one really forced him to do anything before he reached puberty. He goes out every day, goes to school, goes home and continues. He's an extremely rare presence, according to the standards of his mailing area -- a child who's "released."。

In the eighth grade, a friend who had just transferred from a private school took him to a math contest -- a friend who was just looking for a companion. Jeff's never seen anything like it in school. There is no formula that needs to be hard to remember, and there is no cumbersome computation, and you get to get to the same thing, sometimes with just one sentence, and then you have to find the path to the problem. The answer is not a number, but a piece of proof -- a complete argument as to why something is necessary. Finally, they would rank the contestants like a sprinting competition. For JeffThis is an experience of perfect integration of “fun of sport” and “fun of understanding the world”。

That summer, he got up at 5 a.m. every morning, downloaded the year-long competition from the Internet and studied it alone in his room. He had no mentor and could not afford any summer training programme, and no one had asked him to do so. “And then I realized that I was really winning,” he said, “Just like there was a race I didn't know existed before, and the other kids were ready for life, and I was left behind.”

A year after the competition began, in his ninth grade, he was elected to the American Mathematical Olympic Training Camp, which brings together the top 50 high school students in the country, one of the youngest members. He didn't enter the national team -- he said he didn't care. During those three weeks, he sat with a group of teenagers who could stare at three words for five hours and excavate from them the truth that was invisible to most people. Jeff told me that there is no "superstar" like Roger Federer in mathematics, but at the highest level, there is something like Federer stands for: a style, a grace, a form of proof. And for the first time in the camp, he saw it at close range." It's like playing ball with Tom Brady," he said, "just a more nerdy version of experience. Most people don't feel that way."

The following year, he lost in a mid-level selection wheel for the mathematics competition. He was 16 years old and needed another year to try again. I asked him if it was his first failure. “Faith is a common experience,” he says, “Most people are losers. There's usually only one winner."

The problem is not the failure itself, but the sense of emptiness. "Just like there was a hole," he said, "I should study something." As a result, he sought physical teaching materials for senior students. Although his school had to be in third grade, he had just learned calculus and for the first time understood its usefulness。He found Feynman's instructions。“..I took them out like a TV showHe said. In less than a year, he became one of the top five young physicalists in the country, with complete self-study。

He was elected to the American Physical Olympics National Team to Estonia -- his first trip to Europe -- and received a silver medal. The next summer in Copenhagen, he won the gold medal, ranked 24th in the world. When he was 18, back in the Bay, he understood the true meaning of his mother's words: There are still people above him, and at least 23。

Harvard paid all his tuition。In the first spring semester, Jeff chose computer science - data structure and algorithms. This course is usually chosen by junior and senior students and is known as “suffering”. In the Harvard course evaluation, students referred to it as “necessary evil”. One comment even says, "You will not be in love without a social life." As a freshman, Jeff won first place with a clear advantage。

At Harvard, students are assigned to senior dormitories after the end of their first year. Jeff was assigned to Pforzheimer House, where he became a friend with Scott Wu, two years younger than himself. They first met in a summer camp for Osei. Wu, representing the United States, won gold medals for the third consecutive year at the International Olympics of Informatics, and for the last time a full score, co-founded Cognition AI. When Wu was assigned to Pforzheimer in his second year, he texted Jeff: "Yo, I'm at Pfoho." Jeff replied: "Go!"

Wu often found Jeff in front of the Triangular Piano in the public lounge, where he learned his own jazz, practiced a little bit until he was fully mastered. They played chess together, played chess, played poker and spent a lot of time discussing itWhat does it mean to be “extremely” in a certain fieldI don't know. Jeff talks about the greatest player in the history of Heroes Alliance, Faker, and also talks about top chess players and the best high-frequency traders. "He's always thinking about what makes a person special," Wu said, "What's the essence of this field?" And what does it mean to be really top of the line?"

Wu remembers that Jeff's thinking is abnormally “reverse”. At Harvard, most students tend to draw similar conclusions with similar information and environmental impacts, but Jeff never does. Besides, Wu mentioned that he was very funny. "that faceless humor. He'll say absolutely unexpected things, but the tone is extremely flat.”

Jeff's been working for the summer. He worked in Google X to develop tools for the autopilot project, which later developed into Waymo. He also worked in the trading company Tower Research Capital. During the fourth year, he worked part-time in another autopilot company, Nuro, largely because he felt that four years of college were at least one more year。

In the third year of winter, he joined Wu in the first internship of Hudson River Trading. A total of 10 interns were selected. Hudson River Trading is one of the most successful quantitative trading companies in the world. Among the 10 were Alexandr Wang, who later founded Scale AI, and Jesse Zhang, who founded Decagon. The internship took the form of a three-week competition, and in each round, Wu and Jeff had the first and second names。

Jeff graduated with a master's degree in mathematics and computer science and joined Hudson River Trading full-time at the end of 2017. He's been assigned to the U.S. stock algorithm team. Every week, he held one-on-one meetings with his own manager. The manager had brought a number of new people, and such meetings usually had a fixed rhythm: the new guy encountered a bottleneck in the code, the two of them solved it together, and then the new guy returned to meet the next bottleneck. But Jeff didn't hit the wall, and his manager recalled that he often brought new ideas. The meeting was efficient and smooth, but the manager had always felt something wrong. It took him some time to realize the problem: Jeff did everything well, but it didn't seem important to him. When Jeff filed for separation eight months after his appointment, the manager was not surprised. The letter he sent out was a particularly warm one within the company。

Jeff likes Hudson River Trading. He thinks that trade is the purest game in the real world -- you're either right or wrong, and the market will tell you the answer. A group of the world ' s brightest people competed with each other, and in this cruel game they created an extremely important product for the world: a fully mobile and efficient market. He realized, however, that it had taken him eight months to optimize a system that was already very good and that it would still work well even without him. It kept him from answering a lingering question..What value have you created for this world

In December 2017, the question seemed to have found its own answer. Bitcoin was close to $20,000, Coinbase became the most downloaded app in the United States, and billions of dollars went into various ICO projects, such as Jesus Coin -- that was the peak of "encrypted Christmas." Jeff first heard of Bitcoin during the Hudson River Trading internship, when two former partners introduced the concept to the interns, but it did not resonate. However, during Hudson River Trading, he read the Yellow Book of the Ether Workshop, which describes a computer that is “commonly recognized throughout the world and cannot be shut down by anyone”. He's exposed to the financial system every day, and he knows the basis for its operation, and this paper describes a way to replace trust with a code. “I feel like I can build something and completely reshape finance.”

He left Hudson River Trading in April 2018 and started building a forecast marketIt allows users to bet on any event that results, such as weather, elections or sporting events. The system will operate on a block chain, with no single entity controlling the funds. Its structure is based on the idea that he thought he had pioneered with the co-founders: to set up the chain, to settle it on the chain -- because the speed of the Taifeng is far from enough to support a real exchange. The funds will be stored in a code-controlled smart contract, but the user experience will remain fast and smooth - both preserving the encryption commitment to decentrize and avoiding its friction costs. He and his college roommate Brian Wong (who also left from Hudson River Trading) built the product and named it Deaux in San Francisco ' s Binance Labs first hatching project。

Kalshi was founded on a similar concept in 2019, and Polymarket followed by 2020. Today, the combined valuation of the two companies exceeds $40 billion. And Deaux has only 100 users。

When Jeff talked here, the sky in Singapore suddenly rained. The heavy, dense drops fill the drains in a few minutes. From the balcony, we can hear rain pounding on the streets, and the wheels slide in the water, making even more loud hissing。

“This project will never succeed”, he continued. By the time Deaux went online, bitcoin had dropped by more than 80 per cent from its height; Jesus Coin had been silenced and had not been "restored." No one wants to bet the weather. More importantly, Jeff and Wong gave little serious consideration to regulatory issues. Kalshi fought for three years to obtain regulatory clearance before the product went online。

When Deaux closed, Scott Wu was one of the few people in the world who really regretted itHe's one of only five stable usersI don't know. Jeff refunded more than half of the $450,000 in investments. He was still constrained by the competition of Hudson River Trading, so he went skiing with a friend who was in the same race period to Lake Tahoe in California until the end of the snow season. He then travelled to China, Japan and Peru with a limited budget. He tried to convince me that being a tourist actually requires considerable “teaching” — a capability that he does not possess。

In late 2019, when the competitive restrictions expired, Jeff moved to Puerto Rico, where people could legally reduce the tax on capital gains to near zero. He's only got $10,000 in his hand, but he's about to feel some huge opportunity approaching。

His partner moved with him to Puerto Rico. They shared a one-bedroom apartment on the beach at less than $2,000 a month. But the so-called “shared rent” means a state of living together, and Jeff didn't spare time for it. He did not even have a monitor, so he directly occupied the living room ' s television and placed his work environment there. In the first about a yearHe only gives his partner about 30 minutes a day, the rest of which is a rolling trade algorithm。

Jeff works at least 14 hours a day, easy up to 100 hours a week. Starting with the Python script, he prepares codes to connect major encrypted currency exchanges and allows the program to trade automatically around the clock. He constantly monitors these systems, optimizes logic, tracks data and reverses them once the results do not meet expectations。

He was able to do it because..The openness of encrypted money markets is something that traditional finance never hasI don't know. In the stock market (such as his Hudson River Trading-like market), an order is placed in a single exchange, requiring 13 “lightboard exchanges” connected to the three co-location rooms in New Jersey, as well as complex US SEC Rules (Reg NMS), access to Chicago Chicago Mercantile Exchange futures data via microwave links and investment in tens of millions of dollars in infrastructure costs. And in the encrypted money market, whether it's a Hudson River Trading employee or an individual working on television, it's the same poor HTTP infrastructure -- it was originally designed for web development. You just need to rent a server on Amazon Web Services。

For almost two years, his partner had no idea what was going on on the other side of the TVI don't know. Their lives look the same: the same rent, the same diet. She knew that he was committed, motivated and believed that he “should have done well”, but there was no evidence of his success at any level of reality. Until a Friday night in the summer of 2021, she tried to pull him out of the house and went to a dinner appointment that was booked a week earlier -- he refused to leave。

"you don't understand," he said to her, "if i don't fix this bug now, i'll lose $100,000."

After that night, Jeff decided to make this a real business. He needs someone who can do anything but write codes. At Harvard, he met a man in the Pforzheimer dormitory -- she seemed to be able to manage everything in life at the same time, which was almost a "wilder ability." But he finally heard that Liliensinc was in Asia, serving as chief of staff at a VC, between Tokyo, Seoul and Hong Kong。

When he contacted her, he found out she had returned to San Francisco. The epidemic has halted cross-border movements, a job that was supposed to travel across Asia and turned into her late-night phone in her apartment. Jeff described her needs. He did not provide a clear job description, title or even an indication of what she was going to do. But she has been assessing entrepreneurs for the past three years, regardless of what Jeff is saying, and intuitively she believes that this is a man worth “reverse down”。

The company's official name — Chameleon Trading, iliensinc — began a Zoom meeting of delegations with business outreach teams from major exchanges, adding a professional shell to an organization that in reality is nothing but “a man living on the San Juan coast”. There is also an anonymous trading agency that cannot be accurately measured by outsiders -- for example, Jump Trading, Tower Research Capital, Hudson River Trading and Jane Street -- and Chameleon is a very large one。

By 2022, Jeff was starting to get upset. He's been in the encryption industry for four years, and he's been involved in a variety of markets — both central and decentralised — and he's started to focus on the field itself, not just his own. Bitcoin has provided the world with a way to hold and transfer funds without trusting intermediaries; and a “global computer” that no individual can shut down in the form of a Taipei. Almost all the foundations needed to rebuild the financial system as a whole have been laid between the two. But there is little substantive construction in this industry. The two largest exchanges -- Binance and Coinbase -- remain central. The encryption industry is constantly reintroducing what it was trying to eliminate。

That summer, iliensinc organized a team event at a hotel in the village of England. At that time, she had expanded Chameleon into a six-person team. Jeff gave her a budget... a bitcoin. The team flew to London, visited the British Museum and stayed for a few days at the country estate。And for the first time since their memory, their “leaders” do not seem entirely comfortable。

After returning to Puerto Rico, the deal continued, but Jeff told the team that they would start building something completely new. He was not sure what it was. He had some ideas, but none really convinced him. His only certainty is that the vision originally envisaged for Bitcoin by China is being buried by the industry. He was disturbed by this, even beyond what a “man who has already made millions of dollars” would have been。

From the team's point of view, Jeff seems to have taken too much fresh air。

In November 2022, the world ' s third largest encrypted currency exchange, valued at $32 billion, collapsed in just nine days. It loaned funds deposited by users to Alameda Research, a trading company operated by the founder's girlfriend. When the user asked to withdraw the deposit, the funds ceased to exist. Less than six months ago, the $50 billion encrypted monetary ecosystem, Terra, was also zero in three days. It tried to build a stable dollar-linked currency, but the system was supported only by its own algorithmic logic, which would have been used to maintain anchoring, but rather accelerated its collapse. The two largest projects in the history of the industry have collapsed in less than a year。

Jeff's seen enough。He told the six people that they would not make a deal, that maybe there would be a disagreement, but Chameleon was done。If he is wrong, he can still go back to the trade. There were indeed oppositions on the team and others chose to leave, but this did not change Jeff's decision. No investors need to ask, no board needs to convince -- it's his own money, he owns it, and now a new goal。

"I was so confident that the FTX would be the end of the central exchange," Jeff said to me, "But it helped because it made me determined to challenge this huge market."

What he called the market was a lasting contract. This product stems from an insight that the economist Robert Sheller put forward in the 1990s. The traditional futures contracts have maturity dates, and once they have expired, the traders either accept delivery of the subject-matter assets - such as oil, wheat or pork - or settle and re-open, each with payment. Sheller asks the obvious question: If the vast majority of those trading in pork futures do not want pork at all, then why must the contract expire

Traditional markets already have viable solutions and therefore have no incentive to change. However, in 2016, an encrypted currency exchange called BitMEX was the first to try this model, from which time the contract will be the dominant trade in the encrypted market. Such contracts have no expiry date and traders can use high leverage, usually 10 or 20 times the principal amount. The resulting fees and silo mechanisms make the centralized encryption exchange one of the most profitable businesses in the industry。

By the end of 2022, no one had built a truly “available” decentrized version. This is because of the technology at the bottom. In most modern markets, transactions are made through order books: the buyer gives the price that the buyer is willing to pay, the seller gives the price that the seller is willing to accept, and the transaction occurs when the two are matched. The greater the number of market participants, the smaller the difference. From New York Stock Exchange to Binance, this mechanism is largely followed, but the order book is not just a blending transaction, but it must also deal with an ongoing updating stream - traders adjust offers repeatedly, often several times before a real deal is made. The existing block chains are not very good at handling these operations, are too slow, too costly and too heavy in structure. Each update requires payment and is awaiting confirmation. The order book is run on such a system as an attempt to use dial-up online to run the New Haven。

At the end of 2022Jeff and his team looked at the chain on which all the other projects were based, none of which met their needs, and they decided to build them。Within three months, Hyperliquid already has a custom block chain that supports the operation of the exchange. In the following year, Jeff was active on Twitter, repeatedly describing the advantages of Hyperliquid and why it was better than the established industry。

But the difficulty of an exchange is that it is completely “no use” until it is “useful”. A buyer who enters a blank market cannot find its counterparty. The traditional solution is to pay the marketer, so anyone who enters the market can find their counterparty -- in the form of cash, equity, or token shares. It is true that a number of businesses approached Hyperliquid, and one of them even told iliensinc: "We are the founders of the king."。If you don't pay, it won't work。It's not the same

They didn't pay him -- they didn't pay him, they didn't pay anyone. Hyperliquid came online at the end of February 2023, and in the following March and April, its users were mainly some NFT collectors who had never been in contact with a lasting contract, who tried out a $10 small deal and learned to leverage mechanisms through simulations. There are virtually no real “professional users”。

And then, in May, Jeff used to make Chameleon one of the most successful anonymous trading teams in the encryption industry to deploy into a chained pool - HLP. Users can deposit $10 million or $10 million. There is no fee and no split of performance. The pool operates an automated trading strategy and all profits are attributable to the financier. The entire account is completely open on the chain. If you deposit $10, you can see this $10 growth in real time. If the FTX were constructed in this way, Alameda’s financial loophole would be a complete glimpse of the world。

HLP ADDRESSED TWO PROBLEMS SIMULTANEOUSLY: THE EXCHANGE GAINED LIQUIDITY, WHILE THE USERS WHO PROVIDED LIQUIDITY WERE EXPOSED FOR THE FIRST TIME TO OPPORTUNITIES NEVER PROVIDED BY TRADITIONAL FINANCE。This is how an early Hyperliquid user described it -- for the first time in history, ordinary people can participate in high-frequency trading strategy investments at zero cost。

"If I get into a product like this, I'd even pay Jeff 2% management fee and 50% performance split," he told me, "but now, a common person who has no background, no resources, is in any corner of the world, has access to one of the top marketing strategies in the encryption market. People have yet to realize how special this is.”

At that time, very few really understood that. By the fall, the price of encrypted assets was rising daily, while users of HLPs watched the account balances decline, in sharp contrast to the increase in bitcoin. The algorithm itself functioned well and continued to make a profit in transactions, but it was not able to hedge against the overall market opening because everything was running on the chain. Traditional traders usually hedge risks at other trading locations, which HLP cannot do for design reasons. As a result, although it is profitable in a single transaction, it is essentially empty of a growing market. Users are angry. Other projects attacked Hyperliquid, Jeff, on Twitter and Discord, as well as counter-attacked -- he would still look at them personally。

BUT HLP WAS NEVER THE FINAL ANSWER。Jeff built it to “start” mobility before the entry of independent traders, and he is aware that this is a clear opportunity for doing business. Demand far exceeded supply, and a wide margin of sales and sales meant that money could be made easily whenever someone was willing to offer. He wrote a detailed file, posted a long text on Twitter explaining it as a mechanism and personally led the access process. But most institutions still wait -- because almost all other exchanges pay for them, and Jeff strongly refuses to do so, and HLP itself cannot expand indefinitely to fill this gap. "Alameda is a key component of the FTX operation," he said, "and we don't want HLP to be the key to the Hyperliquid operation."

Data indicators are rising, but complaints are increasing. It is logical that the market should be accessible at any time. But if they do not appear in time and the users lose first, it will all be over。

"YOU CAN ALWAYS COUNT ON A CLASS OF PEOPLE TO SHOW UP," A VC INVESTOR。

Their analysts actually used the exchange in private -- quietly testing it in their own time -- and they told their partners one by one, "This is really good." As a result, the partners began to contact themselves. Jeff and iliensinc did not do any outreach, nor did they prepare the finance road show. The agreement itself already generates fees revenue, but Jeff insisted from the outset that it would not flow to the team. When the wind is on the phone asking if there is a road show, Jeff and iliensinc are just talking, and eventually the other side will understand: No。

By January 2024, the financial party had begun to visit online. iliensinc is familiar with this set of processes - she was an investor. She began to explain to Jeff various financing provisions, rights arrangements that required attention. And in about two weeks, Jeff also went along with it. “It felt almost natural,” he said to me, “The wind begins to connect, and that is probably the time to finance.”

The only conditions he proposed were:Only investment clauses valued at $1 billion were considered。Less than a year from Hyperliquid, the team spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a month from Jeff's personal savings. When investors accepted this valuation, Jeff spent a weekend thinking seriously。

He asked entrepreneurs, and those investments themselves, what was the meaning of financing. But no one could convince him that the money was “higher than it was”. At some point, he felt that rejection was the right choice. Once that feeling is established, it's over。

Monday morninghe said to iliensinc, "we won't accept the investment."

"What the hell?" She couldn't believe it。

She's the one who manages the money and watch it run out. Now that a fund was willing to provide approximately $100 million in investment, he had chosen to refuse after two weeks of preparation for financing. Other members of the team are equally difficult to accept。

He called the fund and expressly refused. The other party was equally unconvinced that he had simply accepted the terms of another institution. But that is not the case. Hyperliquid was not a company, but an agreement, whose “neutrality” had been at the core from the outset. “If Bitcoin had ventured into venture capital financing that year”, he said, “I don't think it will be bitcoin today, and its entire value proposition will be destroyed”Besides, he doesn't need money. So far, Jeff has spent a lot of his own money on the team。

On January 28, 2024, he sent a tweet in four rows:

No investors。

No paid market makers

No fees to the dev team。

No insideers。

Hyperliquid has only one meeting a day -- morning meeting。I watched the process the next day in Singapore. The team was surrounded by an engineer's screen with a dragon-shaped fur doll on it. They are testing a new feature called Portfolio margin, which mostly revolves around potential risks, but which for a long time is not even a “discussion”. Jeff crosses his arms, looks down at his bare feet and falls into meditation; engineers around him do the same thing. This silence is neither awkward nor brief, and no one in the room finds it unusual。

This atmosphere is partly rooted in character. Team members, aged between 24 and 31, are almost all extremely intelligent introverts, but when I asked Jeff whether he was reading often, his answer showed that it was not just a question of character。

"I read much fewer books than conventionally thought it was the "best of the best," he said, and he said, "It's really time-consuming to read a book in a way that can shape you in the long term." It is not cost-effective in terms of time return.”

And when he talks, he moves his chin gently -- and I get used to it, like someone on a plane with an open mouth to depress his ear. One of the risks for young technologists is that sooner or later they will tell you that they “do not read much”. So when Jeff added that he was reading about every two months and looked forward to the future day when he would systematically complete those unread books, I felt a little relief. He then explained why it was not the time。

"If you're not the first person to do something," he said, "That's probably not worth it. I really think so. If you follow that logic, reading does not really help. Because once something already has experience and context, it is likely that it has already been done. And now that you've done it, why are you doing it?"

By the end of 2023, Hyperliquid had another problem -- and the encryption money industry had a well-established "set." As always, Jeff doesn't intend to copy。

In encryption projects, tokens usually represent the holder ' s interest in the success of the project. The distribution of the initial tokens is usually done through the “center plan” - the project announces that the user's behaviour on the platform will receive points, and the user defaults that these credits will be converted into tokens in the future. As a result, there was an influx of users trying to obtain as many points as possible before exchange。

The problem is that most of these “inflows of users” are not true users, but professional teams. They analyse the rules backwards, maximize the benefits through automation strategies, and then leave quickly. The true user -- the person that the project was supposed to reward -- can only be divided into the rest。

The version of Hyperliquid came online on November 1, 2023. Users receive points on the basis of transaction behaviour on a weekly basis, but the exact formula has never been made public and nobody knows the mechanism by which it operates. Every Friday, iliensinc announces the results of the points, which gradually forms a regular ritual: The user looked at her account in Discord and appeared "in the process" and then gathered together to compare points, share intercepts and speculate about the rules. “Incentives for real users are essential,” Jeff says, “Although difficult to define, Hyperliquid's score plan may have reduced the “brush” ratio from 99% to 20%.”

At the same time, those who had previously refused to pay directly to attract marketers began to enter the market. One of them, one of the biggest traders on the Binance market, was cautious about the new platform after the FTX incident. But through the co-facilitators, they heard a lot of positive comments about Jeff. In September 2023, at a meeting in Singapore, the businessman first met Jeff and iliensinc. “Jeff is ambitious, but not arrogant”, he says, “he describes himself with great restraint and meets expectations in all respects.” After the meeting, he texted the team, "We should get in." Two weeks later, they officially went online。

When the marketer is connected, the discovery is consistent with the user experience: the infrastructure reflects in many detail “designs that only traders notice”. Hyperliquid incorporated a mechanism similar to the “speedbelt”, making it more difficult for the most radical quantitative agencies to “harvest” other marketers by looting. This design was later widely replicated by industry. The effect is that market vendors can provide deeper mobility without pursuing extremely low delays. Jeff actually chose to sacrifice a portion of the exchange's turnover (e.g., quantifying the high-frequency transactions that agencies bring to each other) in exchange for a better price for ordinary users - a trade-off that would reduce the platform's own revenue。

It was at the same meeting (Token2049) that Jeff and iliensinc decided to move the team. Jeff told meThe United States has an uncertain regulatory environment for encrypted currency derivatives, where continued construction is an unnecessary risk。a lawyer even described that period as a period in which united states regulators “exploited all means to try to exclude the technology from national borders”. the iliensinc visited hong kong, switzerland and singapore and eventually chose singapore — modern, safe and without much interference。

By spring 2024, the team had been relocated. This city is a perfect place for Jeff, because it's boring。There are only two models of his life: work and exercise。He swims, runs, does any physical exercise without increasing the risk of injury — a principle that stems from a motorcycle accident in Puerto Rico that left him with a scar on his face and prevented him from working for a week. For himThe point of exercise is simply to clear the brain so that it can continue to build。His only “recreational” time is Sunday morning, the rest of which belongs to Hyperliquid. He even cut his own hair because going to the barber shop was a waste of time。

He didn't think it was anything unusual -- or he thought that most people were too loose at work. "I think people are generally too soft," he said, "The brain is also an organ. If you need to work longer, you can train."

However, he also learned not to impose that rhythm on teams. The team eats lunch together every day and sits around a black wooden table like a family dinner. They eat Chipotle every Thursday -- Singapore doesn't have the restaurant, so they give the formula to the cook, who cuts it. The lunch chat usually revolves around what you have seen or heard recently. And Jeff tends to be quiet at these moments, and looks like he's thinking about something else -- and he's probably thinking about something else。

Also in the spring, Hyperliquid's perpetuity contract turnover exceeded $1 billion, and the infrastructure began to press. One afternoon, the alarm system was triggered and the platform was unable to carry the sudden influx of users -- the first crash of Hyperliquid. But outside the office, the only concern is the forthcoming Hyperliquid token。

In MayJeff posted on Twitter a road map for the next six months, full of technical plans without mentioning a token。

Prior to this, Hyperliquid had expanded from derivatives to spot transactions. The first online token is Purr -- named after the cat. The spot deal is a necessary step: if Hyperliquid’s tokens are to be issued, the team needs a trading market, but it also raises a problem that has not been faced before - no one needs to hold the subject-matter assets in the contract of renewal, but only to hold the price; and in the spot deal, there must be an asset custodian. And that's exactly what Jeff didn't want to do -- the core of the whole design is that the user owns the asset。

In order to solve this problem and not be a trustee, he realized that it was necessary to change the way he thought: not to treat Hyperliquid as an “exchange running on a block chain”, but rather as a “block chain of a built-in exchange”. This block chain, built by a team and capable of processing hundreds of thousands of orders per second, can be further programmed -- an open system that allows anyone to write codes and build financial applications on it, just as developers do on the Ether. The difference is that it is too slow to support a truly high performance exchange, which is why Jeff initially chose to build his own chain。

Once the chain has been opened, the assets can be connected to Hyperliquid through a de-centralized bridge guaranteed by the agreement itself, without any single-party hosting. At the same time, all applications built on this programmable layer have direct access to the exchange's order book and to the total liquidity deposited therein. Developers can build lending platforms, stabilize currency or mobile trading applications and connect directly to markets where specialized institutions offer billions of dollars a day。

Jeff doesn't like analogies。He'll tell you that Hyperliquid has no target in traditional finance, and it's a mistake that people tend to push new things into old frameworks and not to understand them by their own logic. But for us outsiders, it's more like Amazon, who built the cloud service initially to support the electrician business, then found that the cloud business itself was bigger than the electrician. In that Twitter post, Jeff used the expression for the first time that Hyperliquid would “carry the entire financial system”。

He's been resisting this transition. He told me that, subconsciously, he didn't want to take it all. The construction of a virtual machine in Hyperliquid is an extremely large project, and the team is not sure if it really works. They do not know how many lower-level components must start from scratch. But at some point, it became self-evident that, if they didn't do it, they would spend years putting together a system that was like Binance and Ether's, but ultimately neither -- and they would regret it。

The community is extremely angry. Users would have expected airdrops, but the result was a tweet on infrastructure. “We had a good thing” was quoted in a comment that received thousands of praises

Users don't want a block chain. They want money。Xulian -- a member of the team who joined the team through a user interview that was supposed to last 15 minutes up to an hour and a half, or even "not really finished" -- has been under a lot of negative stress. "Jeff was thinking about the best solution in the long run," he said, "We don't really care if it looks pretty in the short term."

As iliensinc says, the loudest people end up tired. Over the next six months, the team continued to move forward on spot transactions, refine programmable layers, test on independent networks and prepare pledge mechanisms. Then, on November 29th, a Friday, hype officially arrives。

Hyperliquid dropped 31 per cent of its total supply to approximately 94,000 early users. There were no conditions attached and no locking period. If you've used the platform, gained points, and you woke up that morning, you had more tokens in your wallet -- your wealth has grown before you went to sleep. The value of this air drop, based on opening prices, exceeded $1 billion; at a historical height, it reached a total value of $16 billion。This is the largest transfer of wealth in encryption history, and every dollar goes to the user。

The team ' s own share of 23.8 per cent is not only lower than the share of the community but also takes several years to gradually unlock. On the day of the drop, they found nothing. The venture capital also receives no allocation - if they want a token, they have to buy it on the open market at the same price as everyone, and only on Hyperliquid, because it is not listed on other platforms. This in itself is a “cost to pay”。

That morning, Jeff didn't have to explain anything on Twitter。

"Wake up and find yourself getting a six-digit drop," a user wrote。

"TODAY, HYPE CHANGED MY LIFE. IT'S ENOUGH TO MAKE ME COMFORTABLE FOR A FEW YEARS, TO HELP MY FAMILY AND INVEST HEAVILY IN THE CATTLE MARKET,” ANOTHER RESPONDED。

It was also said: “Seven digits dropped, thanks Jeff.”

"I was feeling good," Jeff said to me, "It's very rare for early participants to share the benefits of going up and actually own part of the network." I asked him how it felt after everything they built was publicly priced. And he said, "It's bad."

A Wednesday night in late March, 2025, the ilinesinc computer suddenly sounded the beep. She was on the phone and immediately hung up. On the screen, the balance of HLP - Hyperliquid - is declining。

A trader had been passing the Hyperliquid defensive mechanism for a small, coordinated silo test for the previous few days. Now, the test is over. They opened three warehouses on a small coin called Jelly Jelly -- a currency with a market value of about $15 million and a daily turnover of only $72,000. One is a large blank, the other two is a large one. The empty sheet is "intentionally designed to fail" and the dealer is emptying an asset that is about to be lifted by himself, and the risk is to be passed on to someone else when it explodes -- just like pulling the fuse from the grenade。

This "others" is the HLP. On Hyperliquid, when the order book is unable to take over the position, the community pool takes over the position and gradually calms down. Under normal circumstances, this is a conventional mechanism. But Jelly Jelly has almost no mobile order book, and when HLP is trapped in a warehouse that cannot be withdrawn, the dealer buys the coin in the spot market. Prices rose by more than 500 per cent in less than an hour. In each case, the loss of the pool is increasing。

iliensinc stares at the screen and looks at the loss from $5 million and $8 million all the way up to $12 million。There is no mechanism in the system that can automatically stop the process -- because no one had ever imagined that someone would use a $15 million market value as a "weapons."。

At this point, the certifiers, located in Asia and Europe, are on line. Hyperliquid’s block chain is maintained by about 20 certifiers who obtain voting rights by pledging large amounts of HYPE and are responsible for verifying all transactions. Many are already users before their tokens are issued. And they can see all of this in the same open book -- as anyone on the planet can see -- and they don't think it's a normal deal. Within a few minutes, all the certifiers voted unanimously to take Jelly Jelly off the shelf and settle it at the price that it had been before the manipulation began. All users holding legal slots were compensated and the only losses were to the attackers。

This incident raises the question that Hyperliquid critics have been waiting for: If more than 20 certifiers can overturn market prices and settle them at the price they decide, how much is the system “decentralized”? Jeff didn't avoid the problem. He indicated that the relatively small number of certifiers was intentional - a system that required upgrades every few weeks and could not coordinate thousands of participants at each upgrade. The number of certifiers will increase in the future, but not at the expense of system speed。

“It took a month to fix this problem. It's bad to learn from an attack, but it's better than nobody telling you, "Jeff says. Hyperliquid has never paid a fee to a marketer or a team, but they are willing to pay a reward of up to $1 million for a leak report. “It is clear, however, that these people are not here to report a loophole; they are here to exploit it.”

At the same time as the attack took place, Binance and OKX -- the two largest central exchanges in the world -- also came on line on their respective platforms to renew Jelly Jelly's contract. On Twitter, a user called Binance Co-Chair CEO who suggested she go online with the token。

"If you go online, Jelly Jelly, Hyperliquid, it's probably over."

That is the price of ambition. You leave a Puerto Rican beach where no one knows your name, build a system from zero with a TV and your savings, reject $100 million in investment and distribute billions to strangers -- what do you get? It's war

In 2023 and 2024, Hyperliquid was small enough not to attract much attention. But the airdrops changed everything. When its market value rose from $4.2 billion to $9 billion, to even higher, large businesses throughout the encryption industry saw a potential future -- Hyperliquid might take their jobs. Binance announced the launch of its de-centre exchange; Coinbase and Robinhod started providing futures products; and new agreements are emerging with Hyperliquid as a direct competitive target. And at the same time, someone followed Jeff into his elevator。

Such incidents may have been irrelevant, but in 2025, violent attacks against encrypted currency holders almost doubled. In France, the co-founder of a hardware wallet company was cut off by a finger and sent photos to its partners for extortion; in Canada, a family was forced to confess by water. Encrypted money transfers are instantaneous, irreversible and without bank approval -- a man with a wrench and a wallet can take a fortune。

Jeff has therefore moved to safer accommodations, hired bodyguards and, to some extent, confined his life to this “most secure island city in the world”. He will be accompanied by two private security personnel during his travels. iliensinc also began training members of the team: If strangers ask where they work, how do they answer? That is why, in this report, almost all interviewees use aliases。

When I asked JeffWhat was the hardest time in 2025When he did not mention the Jelly Jelly attack, nor the rival or the bodyguard. He's talking aboutAPI SERVERI don't know。

Throughout the summer, as Bitcoin broke $100,000, Hyperliquid traded more than $40 billion a month, and the servers connecting to the market and block chains began to have problems. An increasing number of institutions have access, each sending large orders, withdrawal orders and requests for updates, and the infrastructure for transmitting these data cannot keep pace. The order, which should have been closed in a moment, starts to delay to 3 seconds。

The block chain itself is not broken and user funds remain secure. But in a market where milliseconds decide to win, three seconds is already a serious warning. “If there is a congestion without extreme volatility, iliensinc says, “This is totally unacceptable when the real extreme comes”. Jeff hardly sleeps in weeks -- sleeping at 1:30 a.m., waking up at 3 a.m. because the system is having problems again. Eventually, the team rewrited the entire server system from the bottom。

On October 10, 2025, that incident happened. Trump threatened to impose a 100 per cent tariff on Chinese imports, and over $19 billion in encrypted currency leverage in 24 hours was forcibly levelled, making it the largest explosion in industry history. More than 1.6 million traders were caught up in a self-enhanced chain reaction: forced sales pushed down prices, triggered more explosions and further pushed down prices。

Hyperliquid did not fail throughout the process, nor did it suspend the roll-out, and the reconstructed servers were tested, as was the mechanism for the restoration of the Jelly Jelly incident. HLP, as the “final receiver”, disposed of billions of dollars in silos and earned $40 million in revenue from them. However, since all transactions on the Hyperliquid block chain are open, anyone can accurately measure their blast data. Other exchanges do not disclose data with the same precision, such as Binance, which publishes only one liquidation record per second. The data aggregation platform relied on by the mainstream media can only be based on these incomplete data, with the result naturally being a deviation - according to media reports, Hyperliquid has a bombhouse larger than all other exchanges。It appears to be the “most dangerous place of dealing”, but the only reason is that it is “most transparent”。

Three days later, while the entire encrypted market was still taking stock of the losses, Jeff’s team issued a proposal for an upgrade that would define the future direction of Hyperliquid: Hyperliquid Insurance 3 (HIP-3). The proposal allows any 500,000 HYPE subscribers to deploy a new market for sustainable contracts on the platform, set their own parameters, select price predictors and receive half the transaction fee。

By the end of the year -- the second full year of its operation -- Hyperliquid achieved some $900 million in profits. None of this income goes to the team. Ninety-nine per cent of the proceeds were automatically converted to HYPE and destroyed, permanently withdrawn from circulation and returned almost all of the Platform ' s value to the token holders. When I asked iliensinc how to evaluate 2025, she said, "It feels like we're growing up."

In my last afternoon at the office, I sat with Jeff at the black table next to the kitchen -- where the team had lunch every day, next to those bottles of whiskey that never moved. I left it to the last question。

Over the past year, Hyperliquid has continued to “separate” part of its capacity. Builder Codes, which was launched long before HIP-3, allows independent developers to build trading applications based on platform order book and split them among the fees incurred by their users. Matt Huang (co-founder of the encrypted investment agency Paradigm) described it as “an excellent way to experience licensing by users”. Since October 2024, these teams have accumulated over $7.0 million。

HIP-3 goes further. Within six months of being online, seven independent teams have deployed hundreds of markets, most of which have nothing to do with encryption — including oil, gold, stock indices and foreign exchange. The largest deployment, Trade.xyz, has maintained a 38 per cent weekly increase since October 2025, with a cumulative turnover of over $13 billion, covering 192,000 traders. Today, the market created by independent developers already accounts for half of the volume of Hyperliquid transactions. By February 2026, HIP-4 was proposed - once on line, anyone could deploy options or forecast markets on the platform. The HIP-3 opens "any asset with a price" and the HIP-4 opens "any event with a result"。

Today, the most influential product on Hyperliquid is being built by developers who neither work for Jeff nor ever work for him. I asked him how he saw it -- what the team should do and what it should leave to others。

“This is a dynamic question, there is no standard answer”, he said, “The most critical is a philosophical question, are you building a financial super-application (such as Robinwood) or a financial system?” He admitted that he was not sure which path would prevail, "but I think that an accessible financial system is a better outcome for the world -- a system built on public track, not controlled by a single company."

“To achieve this, we often think about how to enable people to succeed on Hyperliquid and have their own business. When people compete with each other and have their own products, the system becomes more robust and expanded.”

The simplest path, he said, was to finish everything on its own, to shut it down within a company, and they chose the opposite direction. “This is a more difficult path, but what we care about is the process of achieving the goals, because it ultimately determines what we are building.”

The founder of Trade.xyz told me that maybe one day people won't even realize they're using Hyperliquid." Perhaps the final form is that it is only the financial infrastructure and liquidity itself,” he said, “and it is the interface that is directly with the users that is available, interactive Brokers, Phantom and other platforms. It's actually nice."

Paradigm invested heavily through the open market shortly after the HYPE token came online. Huang said to me, "What's more amazing is that it was done by a team of 11 people. Eleven people, almost dependent on AI. In the office, there are AI notebooks that run up-to-date models, but they are only used to explore ideas. "We'll keep watching AI's ability," Jeff says, "but it's not enough to write key codes."

I asked Jeff, a question that has always been at stake: Hyperliquid has accumulated more than $4 trillion since 2023, accounting for 37 per cent of the market for decentrization contracts, but it is not available to the world's largest capital market, the United States。

The obstacle lies in the Dodd-Frank Act, a United States law passed after the financial crisis of 2008, which requires all derivative transactions to be conducted through regulated intermediaries. Ironically, Hyperliquid’s public books have achieved what the bill seeks to achieve: real-time visibility for all leverage in the system, but until the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission has established new rules, US users are still unable to deal legally with derivatives through decentrization agreements. In keeping with its long-standing philosophy, Jeff did not form his own policy team. One month after my visit, Hyperliquid Policy Center was established as an independent not-for-profit organization led by a senior encrypted lawyer, Jake Chervinsky; and Hyper Foundation (an independent organization supporting ecological development) provided 1 million HYPE (approximately $28 million) as start-up funding。

Jeff admits itHyperliquid has reached the stage where building and waiting is no longer a strategyI don't know. “It is true that someone is promoting policies in the opposite direction”, he said, “I cannot be very sure what will eventually happen. But ultimately, regulation reflects the will of the public, and I am optimistic about its direction.”

I kept the last question for a whole week: "Do you really think Hyperliquid will carry the entire financial system?"

He smiled -- for a man who cut his own hair, that smile appeared more frequently than you thought. “The word ‘all’ is indeed exaggerated,” he said, “it is just our vision. But this is a very difficult thing, and it carries with it a certain amount of self-righteousness as it tends to cross decades of objectives.”

“It's a little like the difference between chess and chess”, he continued, “The higher you are in chess, the more you can predict the number of steps; in chess, too many possibilities lie in creating an instinct for the next step, rather than trying to push the whole decision tree.”

I may seem to want to hear more, so he changed his version. He's been trying to follow a principle..There is great confidence in the direction to be taken, but it is not necessary to know the full extent of the end point in implementing this current step。

On the following night (Friday), the team went to a Chinese restaurant located in a hotel. The engineer who turned the office into a Zoo couldn't make it, the rest came, and me. Through the quiet lobby, we walked into a room with dark wooden boards with sculpture and sat around a round table. Before we eat, we drink tea on the other side of the couch。

The room is cold and air conditioning appears to have been set for hotter weather. A blanket was passed to the youngest engineer, who was wearing it and found to be Christian Dior. This triggered a discussion about luxury brands, which Jeff obviously had no experience with。They even read LVMH as "LHVM," and nobody corrected each other, and the iliensinc wearing Ralph Lauren's hat suffocated。

During the meal, the wheel was spinning and a course was set up. At the end of the day, a big blue and white bowl was taken to the table and all of a sudden everyone was quiet. The shallow water in the bowl covered the pebbles and the leaves, like a mini-brick pool. There was a white bowl with noodles in the centre, and three little orange fish were swimming in a “waterway” between the two bowls. The waiter explained that the fish needed a 30-day rest and a five-minute job. We watched them move around in circles, and then they were taken away and started the next round of “leaves”。

Around 9.15 p.m., we left the restaurant and went into the rain. I took a taxi to the airport after saying goodbye. The car travelled not far, along a curved high shelf road, turning around, and the financial zone was marked with the following curtains: HSBC, J.P. Morgan, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, Citi in the night sky. The road was then extended eastward, and one of these towers disappeared into the rear vision mirror until only the wet surface was left。

And Jeff went in the opposite direction -- back to the office, where his bodyguard was waiting for him。