There's the sky: the story behind Hyperliquid

Original title: Beyond The Sky

Photo by Dom Cooke, colossus

Original: SpecialistXBT, Block Beats

Other Organiser

Over the past few years, the encryption industry has experienced fanaticism, collapse, reconstruction and polarization. A range of issues surrounding exchanges, hosting, marketing, governance and asset issuance continue to generate endless disputes in social media. The emergence of Hyperliquid has given rise to widespread concern because it attempts to respond positively to these questions: How can a truly accessible large-scale trading market be built in an open and transparent chain? This paper focuses on Hyperliquid and his founder Jeffrey Yan, documenting how this experiment is going on and the costs it is paying。

Here is the text:

Jeff refused $100 million in financing and dropped billions of dollars on strangers, and now he can't travel without bodyguards. This post describes how he managed to turn the block chain and encryption exchange Hyperliquid into the world's most profitable business company per capita。

One Friday in January, before dawn, a 43-year-old man was taken from his home in San Lége Suchole in western France. He was driven to Basgulan, a small town 30 miles away, where he was beaten, bound and abandoned. Twelve hours later, when the sun had fallen on the outskirts of Paris, three men with a pistol kicked the door of a family in Vernay-Sul-Senna. They beat a couple in front of the children, tied the family to four of them with bandages, turned the house upside down and left for the train station. This is the 70th similar attack on a global scale in less than a year。

Two days later, I boarded a flight to Singapore。

My trip was to visit a team of 11 people, but the first person I met in their office did not belong to the 11 people. He was a strong American, short-haired, with a bush, sitting behind a small table in the corner of the rest area, with an apple laptop. He's not here to write code. He's a bodyguard。

A co-founder of the company took me from the hotel to the office. Her Internet name is iliensinc, full name Aliens Incorporated. On the way, the rain trees were woven over the street, and she told me that they had not previously worked in the Singapore area. The company was initially located in a shared office space in the financial zone, but her co-founder — the only person in the team who worked without an alias — became increasingly visible. At first, someone looked at him and tried to remember his face. Later, strangers started talking on their own initiative. Later on, someone followed the elevator in his apartment. As a result, the company moved to a quieter place where no one would have thought of looking for their building。

Even the cleaning aunts don't know what they do. In her view, she served as a peripheral company for the production of velvet cat toys. Given the fact that there are 34 fuzzy dolls in the office, it's not hard to understand this misunderstanding. The company mascot is a cat called Hypurr, of which 12 is sitting in a cupboard. But there are sharks, lizards, koala, penguins and dragons in the office, several of which are on Dale's monitors like furry rocks. Most dolls belong to an engineer. His wife refused to allow him to bring new ones home, so he took them to the company. The team did not correct auntie's misunderstanding。

The reason is that Hyperliquid — a block chain and encrypted currency exchange — is one of the most profitable enterprises in the world. Last year, its 11 employees made profits of over $900 million. The company had been in existence for only three years, had a market value of $10 billion and had never received a penny for venture capital. Jeff, the central figure behind it, is 31 years old, almost involuntarily, one of the most recognized faces in an industry that is "more successful and more vulnerable to abduction."。

Prior to the establishment of Hyperliquid, Jeff lived in Puerto Rico and operated almost entirely on his own one of the largest anonymous transactions in the field of encryption. The company, Chameleon Trading, is his online name for playing games in junior high school. He started with his $10,000 savings, and for the next two and a half years, the company grew at thousands of percentage points a year. When he told me about his rate of return, he immediately tried to convince me not to think it was so remarkable. I wrote down his objections and another thing: Chameleon made him very rich. He was 27 years old, free. In the eyes of San Juan's surfers, bartenders and waitresses, he was simply an ordinary young man in sanden shorts。

TODAY, HE IS BAREFOOTED, WEARING BLACK SHORTS AND DARK BLUE T-SHIRTS, SITTING ON A GREY ARMCHAIR IN A HEAVILY GUARDED OFFICE IN SINGAPORE, EXPLAINING TO ME WHY THE ENTIRE FINANCIAL SYSTEM NEEDS TO BE REBUILT FROM SCRATCH. WHAT I REALLY WANT TO KNOW IS: WHY WOULD HE REPLACE THE FIRST LIFE WITH THE SECOND

He said it wasn't for the money. Jeff is not a rich man, and his life today does not see any interest in "the lifestyle of wealthy adults". He wears the same Lulemon shorts and T-shirts every day - 15 shorts, 10 T-shirts, three colors each. There are no traces of wealth in the office. The furniture was left behind by the previous tenant. The team only added two tables and tours, the NFT on the wall and the fury cats. I confirmed this when I found four books on the shelf, one of which is Frank Slootman's "Amp It Up," a management book, the core view being that most people don't work hard enough. I brought this up to iliensinc. She shrugged. It was theirs, not theirs. There are three bottles of Grey Goose vodka and macallan in the kitchen, which have remained untouched since a community event that did not reach minimum consumption two years ago. This team has tea。

And it's not because it loves encryption. Bitcoin, the industry ' s still most representative assets have fallen by about 30 per cent since the beginning of October. And the gold that was supposed to be replaced by bitcoin went up 7 percent in the same three months. Most tokens perform worse. When I asked Jeff how he saw the negative sentiment about the industry, he didn't defend it。

"It is true that there are a lot of unconscionable behaviors in this field," he said, "may well make people aware that these things are not as healthy as propaganda."

He doesn't see Hyperliquid as a encryption company。

"A man now would not say that a company is an Internet company," he told me, "We use encryption, but it does not define us."

Of the 11 members of the team, including Jeff, only two were involved in encryption before the launch of Hyperliquid. To some extent, this is deliberate. According to Jeff, the primary concern of the early encryption circle is how to make money quickly. And he said he was building for the long term, which was more for those who thought more like technicians than traders. But this is also a supply issue. Hyperliquid was recruited from among the winners of the international mathematical contest. Jeff had a physical gold medal when he was 18. One of his engineers took a silver medal in informatics and another was trained in the United States National Team system. Jeff wants more of these people. In fact, since my visit earlier this year, he has recruited two more. However, the pool of people willing to enter the encryption industry and reach that level has been further eroded by years of deception, mistrust and recent waves of artificial intelligence。

So, now that you've made enough money to do anything, why are you here

At least from outside, the answer is becoming clearer。

Hyperliquid is a block chain that builds up an exchange. In the traditional exchange, a company holds your funds and controls your infrastructure. And on Hyperliquid, the money is always in your hands, and the platform is open. Jeff's vision for it — no irony at all — is to carry the entire financial system. Whether it's ambitious or ridiculous depends on whether you're staring at those fury cats or at the numbers on the platform. For, in the months since my visit, a number of markets that have been operating in a 100-year constant fashion have begun to bend in a small but quantifiable way。

Hyperliquid began in 2023 with an eternal contract. A lasting contract is a derivative and the largest single market in encryption. Persistence is a bet on the price of an asset that you do not really hold and that, unlike traditional futures, it never matures. The market around such bets is six to eight times larger than the spot market, at about $7 trillion per month. Until recently, almost all of this was taken over by the Centralized Exchange, with Binance as a far-reaching lead. There was no centralized platform that could really shake it. Hyperliquid was the first to do so, and its market share has now increased to about 14 per cent of Binance。

Then, in October 2025, Hyperliquid did something the Centralized Exchange could not do: It allows anyone to open a new and sustainable market for the platform, as long as the asset has a price predictor. An independent team called Trade [XYZ] became the most active deployer. They started off on the silver market. By January of the following year, its 24-hour turnover had reached about 2% of CME. CME, the Chicago Institute of Business Transactions, is the largest derivative exchange in the world, founded in 1898. Then Trade [XYZ] went back to the crude oil contract. Crude oil has always been traded on the weekend market. But in late February, on Saturday, the United States and Israel began bombing Iran. CME closed, Hyperliquid. The daily turnover of crude oil surged from $21 million to $3.7 billion. A month later, Trade [XYZ] launched the S&P 500 lasting contract and obtained the official authorization of S&P Dow Jones Institutions. This market trades around the clock, even on weekends。

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

The founder of Trade [XYZ] requested anonymity. He bought the first bitcoin in his life in 2013 for 66 dollars, and has been an investor for years, not a builder. He was not planning to start a company. He told me if it wasn't Jeff, he would have left the encryption business。

"Hypeliquid had the opportunity to save the encryption industry," he said。

But it still doesn't explain why Hyperliquid might turn into what Jeff said... In one thing, it seemed like it was going to happen, but it was always in the industry that collapsed at the end of the day; it was not possible to explain why he had given up the life of Puerto Rico to prove it。

These issues have been on my first afternoon in the office. I was sitting in the lounge with iliensinc, and there was a fluffy cat on the table, and the residual ginger and sesame smell of lunch was still in the air. She told me three years ago when Jeff announced the end of Chaleleon, the team asked him the same question. The answer she gave was not from encryption, but from Jeff himself。

"You should ask his mother. She said:。

Jeff likes to meet outside. We were sitting on the roof of a balcony with four grey seats and a coffee table. Downstairs on the street. Every few minutes, gardeners start lawn mowers. The crosswalks sound intermittently。

Jeff put his feet under him. When I mentioned his mother, he thought for a moment。

He said that she used to say in Chinese: "There is one outside, and there is one outside."

It is to be said, "You think you are strong, but there are more above you, and more than you see." She was not the kind of mother who would force the child, but she wanted him to understand that, no matter how good he felt, what he saw was only a fraction of the outside world。

He and his sister were raised by their mothers alone and lived at the centre of the most lucrative part of the United States business history: the Redwood Coast, between San Francisco and Palo Alto. Oracle's mirror glass headquarters building was high above the community. Neighbors are engineers and product managers, and their children, who have been raised since then, are the kind of people that Jeff will achieve. Jeff's parents were Chinese immigrants and divorced in his third grade. Father left. The mother is an accountant and works late every tax season. He can see it all。

"I can feel that others are more generous than us," he said, "but I've never been angry about it." It won't cost much to go out

His school does not have a strong academic competition culture. Despite the fact that the mother used to say, "There is one day outside," she did not force him. Almost no one forced him to do anything until he reached puberty. He goes out, goes to school, goes home, goes out again. By the standards of his post district, he was the rarest child: a child who was actually raised。

In the eighth grade, a friend who had just transferred from a private school took him to a math contest. That friend just wants a date. Jeff has never seen anything like this before. It's not like that at school. There are no formulas to remember hard backs and no computational questions to advance mechanically. You only get one question, sometimes just one word, and then you have to find your way in. The answer is not a number, but a proof — a complete set of arguments as to why something has to be true. And finally, they'll give everyone a ranking, just like a sprinter. For Jeff, it's like the most fascinating part of the movement, combined with understanding the most fascinating part of the world。

That summer, he woke up every morning at 5 a.m., downloading past competition papers from the Internet and making questions in his room. He has no mentors and cannot afford summer projects. Nobody forced him to do that。

"Then I found out that I was the best." He said, "There was such a race, and others ran from childhood, and I was behind."

One year later, in the ninth grade, he was elected to the American Math Olympic Camp, which is the top 50 high school students in America. He was one of the youngest of them. He was unable to join the national team, but he said he didn't care. In those three weeks he sat with a group of young men who could stare at three words for five hours and excavated from them the truth that most people could not see。

Jeff told me that there is no "Roger Feder" in mathematics as a popular superstar, but at the highest level there is something like Federer. The demonstration was styled and elegant, and he saw it for the first time at close range in that training camp。

"Just like playing ball with Tom Brady," he said, "just like a nerd. Most people will never know."

In the following year, his mathematics competition was suspended in mid-level selection rounds. He was 16 years old and had to wait another year to try again. I asked him if it was his first failure。

"Lost is a common experience," he said. "Most people are losers." There's usually only one winner."

The problem is not the failure itself, but the sense of frustration。

"I feel like there's a hole in my heart," he said, "I should learn something."

So he found some physics materials for senior students. The school didn't open until the third grade, but he just learned calculus and for the first time really understood what it was for. He started reading Feynman。

"I've finished them like a chase. He says:。

Within a year, he became one of the top five young physicists in the United States, once again on his own。

He was elected to the American Physical Olympics National Team to Estonia — his first trip to Europe — and took the silver medal. Next summer, in Copenhagen, he won the gold medal, ranked 24th in the world. When he was 18, he returned to the Bay Zone with a fresh understanding of "the sky and the sky": On top of him, exactly, there's 23 more。

Harvard University paid almost all of his tuition. In the first spring semester, Jeff chose Computer Science. This course is mainly taught by junior and senior students and is known as Torture. In the Harvard course guide, students described it as "necessary evil" and some commented: "No social life." You'll be single. There are 150 students. As a freshman, Jeff took first, and the lead was not small。

At Harvard, students are assigned to higher-level student dormitories at the end of their first year. Jeff was assigned Pforzheimer House and was close to Scott Wu, two years younger than himself. They first met in an Oseison summer project. For the third year in a row, Wu represented the United States in the International Olympics of Informatics, and the final year was full, after which Cognition AI was created. Wu was assigned to Pforzheimer when he was a sophomore and texted Jeff: "Yo, I'm in Pfoho. Jeff replies: "Great!"

U will find Jeff by the grand piano in the public lounge - he was learning his own jazz music, repeating certain music words until they were really "stucked." Together, they play chess, chess, poker, and it will take hours to discuss what is called "the best thing to do." Jeff talks about Faker, the greatest player in the history of Heroes Alliance, and about chess celebrities and top high-frequency traders。

"He's always wondering why a man is special," Wu told me, "What is the essence of this field?" And what does it mean to be truly extreme?"

In Wu's memory, Jeff was a very anti-mainstreamer. Most Harvard students, who have absorbed the same information in the same environment, tend to arrive at similar conclusions. Jeff never would. He's also very funny。

"That very cold sense of humor," said Wu, "he will say something completely different from what you expected, but neither the face nor the tone can do more."

Every summer, Jeff goes to work. He worked in Google X to develop tools for the autopilot project (which later became Waymo); and in the trading company Tower Research Capital. At 4 a.m., he worked part-time in another autopilot company, Nuro, mainly because he felt that the university had been redundant for at least one year in four years。

In that winter, he became one of the 10 interns of the Hudson River Trading first internship. HRT is one of the most successful quantitative trading companies in the world. The same interns included Alexandre Wang and Jesse Zhang, who later founded Scale AI and Decagon, respectively. The internship was designed to be a three-week competition, and in each round, Wu and Jeff always covered the first and the second。

After graduating as a Bachelor of Mathematics and Master of Computer Science, Jeff joined HRT on a full-time basis at the end of 2017 and was assigned to the United States stock algorithm team. He meets the manager once a week. The manager brought a lot of new people. Usually, there is a fixed rhythm for such meetings: the newcomer crashes into the wall in code, the manager takes care of it with him, and the newcomer goes back to the wall。

But Jeff never hit the wall. The manager recalled that he came with his own thoughts. The meeting was extremely efficient, but there was always a feeling that the manager was indifferent. It took him a while to realize what it was: Jeff was doing everything right, but it seemed like he had nothing to do with it. Eight months later, when Jeff came to tell him he was leaving, the manager immediately understood. In his internal e-mail, he announced that Jeff had left with warm words, which were unusual in corporate culture。

Jeff actually liked HRT. He felt that trade was the purest game in the real world. You're either right or wrong. The market will tell you the answer. Many of the world's brightest people are competing with you, and in this cruel game, the result of collisions is a product of great value to the world: a fully mobile and efficient market。

But the problem is that he spent eight months optimising an already very good system and working in a company that would have been very good even without him. That means he's never been able to answer the lingering question:

What value have you added to this world

In December 2017, the answer came to you. At that time, bitcoin was close to $20,000, and Coinbase was the largest download application in the United States, with billions of dollars flowing into ICO projects like Jesus Coin. It's "encrypted Christmas." Jeff first heard of Bitcoin, a concept that was introduced to interns by two former partners during the HRT internship. Nobody was moved. But then, while still working at HRT, he read the Ethera Yellow Book. The book describes a global consensus computer that no one can shut down. He was exposed to finance on a daily basis and saw the bottom logic that underpinned its operation. The White Paper describes a way to replace trust with a code。

"I think I can build something that's completely financial. He says:。

He left HRT in April 2018 to make a forecast market where users can bet on weather, elections, sports events — anything with results. The platform would operate on a block chain, with no single agency controlling the funds. Its structure is based on an idea, and Jeff believes that he and the co-founder were the first to think of it: the chain is set together, the chain settles, because the Ether is too slow to run a real exchange. The funds are in smart contracts managed by code, but the interface for users is fast and clean. It's not just about keeping the promise of "decent" in the encrypted world, it's not about the complexity and friction。

He did this with college roommate Brian Wong. Brian also left HRT. They built it in San Francisco, Binance Labs, the first business incubator, and named it Deaux。

Kalshi, founded in 2019, takes the same approach. Polymarket followed up in 2020. Today, the combined valuation of Kalshi and Polymarket exceeds $40 billion。

Deaux only got 100 users。

When Jeff was talking here, the sky in Singapore suddenly fell. The heavy raindrop fills the drain in a few minutes. From the balcony, we can hear the rain on the street, the cars passing by on the wet road and the tires making a long heic。

"It is impossible to succeed. He goes on。

By the time Deaux officially went online, bitcoin had fallen from a high point to more than 80%. Jesús Coin is already dead and will never be "restored". Nobody really wants to say what the weather will be like. More importantly, Jeff and Wong gave little serious consideration to regulation at the time. It took Kalshi three years to travel with regulators to finally launch the product。

When Deaux closed, Scott Wu was one of the few people on Earth who really regretted it. Because he's one of those five common users。

Jeff returned more than half of the $450,000 investment to investors. As he was still subject to HRT restrictions, he went to Lake Tahoe, California, skiing to the end of the snow season with a friend who was also in a restricted period. He then travelled to China, Japan and Peru in a very economical manner. He tried to convince me that being a tourist really needed skills. And he obviously does not have the skills。

At the end of 2019, Jeff moved to Puerto Rico after competitive restrictions had ended. There, the tax on capital gains can be legally reduced to almost zero. He's carrying $10,000 and a vague but strong feeling: something big is coming。

His partner also went to Puerto Rico. They shared a one-bedroom apartment near the seaside, less than $2,000 per month. But the so-called "shared rent" implies some kind of living together, and Jeff leaves little time for this. He did not even have a monitor, and then directly requisitioned the television and placed the work area in the living room. For an initial period of about a year, he gave his partner about 30 minutes a day, all the rest of which was a rolling trade algorithm on that television screen。

Jeff works at least 14 hours a day, easily over 100 hours a week. He started by writing scripts in Python, connecting to encrypted exchanges, so that the program would trade for itself all day. He kept an eye on the operation of the procedures, constantly optimising the logic, tracking the data, and rewrite the system once it had not met expectations。

He was able to do so because the encrypted market was open to the public in a way that had never existed in traditional finance. In the stock market – as he did in HRT – if you want to place a single order on a single exchange, that is all, you need access to 13 open exchanges in the three main rooms of New Jersey, to comply with the SEC’s complex regulatory rules called Reg NMS, and to obtain CME futures from Chicago via a microwave link, with tens of millions of dollars in forward construction costs. But in the encryption market, whether you're an HRT employee or a single person who works on television, you're connected to the same rag of HTTP infrastructure that was designed to build a web page. You just need to rent a server on Amazon cloud。

In almost two years, Jeff's partner didn't know what was going on on the other side of the TV. Their lives look like nothing has changed. The rent is paid and the food is taken. She knew that he was very committed and hard-working and felt that he was doing well, but did not see any physical evidence of success. Until a Friday night in the summer of 2021, she tried to drive him out to a dinner that she had booked a week ago. He won't 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 company. He needs someone who can do everything for him except write codes。

At Harvard, there was a man in Pforzheimer House who, in his eyes, seemed to be able to manage everything in life at the same time. This ability is alien to him as it is almost superpowered. But to his knowledge, iliensinc was in Asia, serving as a chief of staff between Tokyo, Seoul and Hong Kong。

When he contacted her, she was actually in San Francisco. The epidemic put travel on hold, and the work that had led her to travel across Asia turned into a series of teleconferences in her apartment late at night. Jeff explained her needs. He did not provide an official job description, did not have a title, and almost did not even specify what she was going to do. But she had spent three years assessing entrepreneurs as investors. Whatever Jeff described, she felt that it was not the right person to bet he would fail。

The company officially has a name: Chameleon Trading. iliensinc began to accompany him at the Zoom meeting of business outreach teams on various exchanges, adding a professional coat to the business in real space, which is "one person on one person above the San Juan Sea". There is also an anonymous association under the very large-scale traders — such as Jump Trading, Tower, HRT and Jane Street — whose size is difficult to verify. Chameleon is the most remarkable of them。

By 2022, Jeff was beginning to get upset. At that time, he had spent four years in the encrypted world, with access to markets, both central and decentralized, and had been deeply involved. He began to stop worrying about his own profits and losses. Bitcoin has given the world a way to hold and transfer funds without trusting intermediaries; in the same way, it provides a computer that no individual can shut down. In between, almost everything necessary to rebuild the financial system has been outlined. But it's basically nothing really built up. The two largest exchanges -- Binance and Coinbase -- remain central. The encryption industry has, over and over again, redirected what it was supposed to destroy。

That summer, iliensinc arranged a team formation at a hotel in the UK. By that time, she had expanded Chaleleon into a six-person team. Jeff gave her a bitcoin budget. The team flew to London and visited the British Museum, where it stayed for a few days. The leader — who left the screen for the first time for a long time — does not seem to be really relaxed。

Trade continued after returning to Puerto Rico. But Jeff told the team they were gonna start building something new. He's not sure what that is. He had some ideas, but none really convinced him. All he knows is that the original vision of the Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino-Sino vision is being buried quietly buried by this industry. This is a matter that should not have had such an impact on a man who made millions of dollars out of a gap not created by the industry。

In the team's view, Jeff was like, "Go out and get some air, something's wrong."。

In November 2022, the world's third largest encrypted currency exchange, FTX, crashed within nine days. It has been lending user deposits to Alameda Research, a trading company run by the founder's girlfriend. When users asked to recover their money, it was no longer there. Less than half a year ago, $50 billion in encrypted ecology was zero in three days. It attempts to construct a currency that is linked to the United States dollar, backed by the logic of the system itself, and which should be used to maintain the linkage, instead accelerates its collapse. Two major projects in the industry ' s history have been killed in less than six months。

Jeff, that's enough。

He told the six-person team that the deal was over. You may disagree, but Chameleon is over. If I'm wrong, we can go back and make a deal. There are people on the team who disagree, and there are people who leave. But this did not shake his decision. No investor needs to be consulted and no board of directors needs to convince — it's his own money, he makes his own board. And now there is a new mission。

"I thought too confident that the FTX would be the turning point in the decline of the central exchange," Jeff told me, "but it did help because it made me determined to pursue this huge market."

This market he's talking about is a contract for eternity。

The contract of durability stems from an insight by economist Robert Schiller in the 1990s. Traditional futures contracts have maturity dates. At the end of the period, traders either accept the delivery of lower-level assets — oil, wheat, piglets, etc. — or settle and re-open, each paying a handling fee. Schiller asked an obvious question: If there's hardly any trade in pigsty futures that really want to get them, why do you have to let the contract expire

Traditional markets already have sufficient viable solutions and therefore have no incentive to change. In 2016, an encrypted exchange called BitMEX saw this opportunity. Since then, the contract of durability has become the dominant trade in encrypted markets. The contract will never expire, and traders can use extremely high leverage, usually 10 times the principal, 20 times the principal. The commissioning fees and silo clearings have made the centralized encryption exchange one of the most profitable companies in the industry。

But by the end of 2022, there was no really good decentrized version. This is because of the technology at the bottom. Most modern markets rely on order books. The buyer offered the price to be paid and the seller offered the price to be accepted, and when the two paired, the transaction took place. The greater the number of participants, the smaller the difference in prices. From the New York Stock Exchange to Binance, this is largely the mechanism。

However, the order book is not just a transaction, but it must also update the flood stream of ongoing prices — the traders modify the price over and over again, often many times before the real deal is made. And the existing block chains are not very good at this. They're too slow, too expensive, too heavy. Each update is subject to a fee and is subject to confirmation. Running order books on such chains is like trying to use dial-up Internet to run the New York Stock Exchange。

At the end of 2022, Jeff and the team examined the block chains attached to all other projects, none of which were close to their needs. So they created one of their own. Three months later, Hyperliquid already had a custom block chain sufficient to run the exchange on it. Jeff then spent a significant part of the year on Twitter creating a campaign for Hyperliquid to explain what it offers and why it is better than what the industry is used to。

And the difficulty of the exchange is that it is useless until it is "useful." A buyer walked into an empty market and could not find a seller. The traditional solution is to pay to be a marketer, so that anyone who comes here can be matched by a match. You can pay them in cash, in equity or in currency. Hyperliquid has a lot of people coming. One of them even directly said to iliensinc that his company was the Kingmaker。

"If you don't pay us, you'll never get up."

They didn't pay. They didn't pay anyone。

Hyperliquid went online at the end of February 2023. Throughout March and April, users were mainly a group of NFT collectors who never traded a permanent contract, who did a $10 small deal to learn leverage through a simulation drive. There is no real "Jeff user" at all。

By May, Jeff had put the tactics of making Chameleon one of the most successful anonymous transactions in encryption into a chain vault: HLP. You can save $10 million in it or $10 million in it. There was no management fee and no split of performance. This vault operates an automated strategy, and every dollar of profit goes to the people who deposit it. All accounts are recorded directly on the block chain. If you save only $10, you can watch your $10 grow in real time. If FTX was built in this way, Alameda's cave would have known the world。

HLP SOLVED TWO PROBLEMS AT ONCE. THE TRANSACTION IS ALL LIQUID; AND FOR THE FIRST TIME, THE USERS WHO PROVIDE LIQUIDITY ARE EXPOSED TO WHAT TRADITIONAL FINANCE HAS NEVER REALLY OPENED UP TO ORDINARY PEOPLE. AN EARLY USER TOLD ME THAT THIS WAS ALMOST THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY THAT AN ORDINARY PERSON COULD INVEST AT ZERO COST IN A HIGH-FREQUENCY TRADING STRATEGY。

"If Jeff were willing to charge 2% plus 50% of the performance, I wouldn't hesitate to go in," the user said to me, "but in fact, an ordinary person with no background, no connections, sitting anywhere in the world, has access to one of the greatest marketing strategies in encryption. People have yet to realize how special this is.”

Almost no one understood it at the time. In the fall, encryption assets were rising every day, and users of HLP were watching the balance of the vault go down, while bitcoin went up. The algorithm itself works well and makes money through trade, but because everything runs on the chain, it cannot hedge against the overall market opening. Traditional traders can offset risks in other trading places, and HLP can't be designed. Thus, while it is winning every transaction, it is actually in the "float" of a continuously rising market. People are angry. Other projects were rounded up on Twitter and Discord, and Hyperliquid, Jeff, also countered back. It was early enough for him to look at these things personally。

But HLP was never the final answer. Jeff built it so that mobility could be held up before the arrival of independent business. And he knew that sooner or later those traders would see the opportunity. Demand is already far beyond supply, and the huge trade-and-trade gap means that there is easy money to earn as long as there is a willingness to report. He writes documents, explains what is going on in the market, and personally directs companies to access them. But most people still hesitate. Because other exchanges pay, and Jeff refuses to do so; at the same time, HLP itself cannot expand indefinitely to fill this gap。

"Alameda is the key to the operation of the FTX," he said, "We don't want HLP to be the key to the operation of Hyperliquid."

Indicators are growing and complaints are growing. It's logical that business should be here any minute. But if they don't come and the users go first, it's over。

However, there is always a category that appears on time。

Wind throw。

Their analysts used the exchange in private and went back to the partners one by one: it was really good. So the partners started calling. Jeff and iliensinc have never done any financing promotion. They don't have road shows. The agreement does generate transactional revenue, but from the very beginning Jeff insisted that none of this revenue goes to the team. When VC goes online and asks if there's a deck, Jeff and iliensinc are just talking to them, talking to them at the end, and they finally understand: No, no。

By January 2024, some of the funds had already made direct visits. iliensinc is familiar with this. Having been an investor, she began to explain various financing provisions to Jeff, reminding him of which rights required special care. For about two weeks, he's been following this process。

"ALMOST OUT OF INSTINCT," HE TOLD ME, "VC STARTED LOOKING FOR THE DOOR, AND I THOUGHT, "OH, LOOKS LIKE THE FINANCING."

His only condition is to consider a valuation of more than $1 billion. It was less than a year before Hyperliquid went online. The team burned hundreds of thousands of dollars a month and it was Jeff's own savings. When an investor reported the price he wanted, Jeff spent a weekend thinking about it。

HE ASKED THOSE WHO HAD STARTED A BUSINESS, AND VC HIMSELF: WHAT'S THE POINT OF FINANCING? BUT THEY FAILED TO CONVINCE HIM WHY "THEIR MONEY" WAS MORE VALUABLE THAN "THE MONEY ITSELF". AT SOME POINT HE FELT THAT IT SEEMED RIGHT TO SAY NO. ONCE THAT FEELING IS ESTABLISHED, IT'S OVER。

monday morning, he said to iliensinc:

"We don't take the money."

"What the hell?"

She can't believe it. It's her. It's her who looks at the money. Now there was a fund willing to invest nearly $100 million, and he suddenly decided to refuse after she had spent two weeks preparing for the financing. The rest of the team's reaction to this has not been much better。

He called the fund and officially refused. Neither do they. Did you accept someone else's? No. Hyperliquid is not a company, but an agreement. From day one, its neutrality is the core。

"IF BITCOIN HAD MELTED VC MONEY," HE SAID, "I REALLY DON'T THINK IT'S GONNA BE BITCOIN." ITS CORE VALUES WILL BE COMPLETELY DESTROYED.”

And he doesn't need money. Until today, much of the team's expenses are still being paid by Jeff himself。

On January 28, 2024, he wrote four lines on Twitter:

No investors。
There is no payment for the market。
Development teams do not charge fees。
No insiders。

Hyperliquid has only one meeting a day: one in the morning. I watched the meeting the next day in Singapore. The team was surrounded by an engineer's screen. On top of the screen there's a furry dragon. They were testing a new feature called portfolio margin, and almost all the discussions were on "where there could be problems". But for a long time, that was not dialogue at all. Jeff would cross his arms, bow his head and stare at his bare feet. The same goes for engineers standing next to him. These silences are neither awkward nor brief, and no one in the house is surprised。

This atmosphere of meetings is partly due to character. The team is young, between the ages of 24 and 31, and almost everyone is an introverted personality. But when I asked after, if Jeff usually read, his answer made me feel that things were more than shy。

"I've read far fewer books by the best standards of the world," he pushed the dark mirror and smiled, and said, "If a book really wants to enter you in a way that permanently changes you, it'll take time. It's not very cost-effective in terms of time return.”

He stretches his chin — a little move that I became familiar with later on — as if someone was trying to blow his ear on the plane. A particular risk for young technologists is that sooner or later they'll tell you that they don't read. So when Jeff went on to add that I would probably read one every two months, and I looked forward to the day when I could sit down and finish all the books that I hadn't read, I was relieved. Then he went on to explain why the reading of more books at the moment had to be in the back。

"If you're not the first person to do something," he said, "Well, it's probably not worth your time. I really do. If you act on this premise, reading is not very helpful. Because if what you're doing already has enough background information, it's probably already done. Why did you do it now that you've done it?"

By the end of 2023, Hyperliquid had another problem with the mature world of encryption. And Jeff, like a couple of times before, wasn't interested in the play。

A token for a encrypted project means that the holder can share the benefits of the success of the project. And who gets the tokens first, on what terms, is usually distributed through the "cent plan". The projecters announced that the user ' s use on the platform would receive credits, which they agreed would be converted into coins in the future. As a result, there was an influx of people trying to build up as many points as possible before exchange。

The problem is that most of the people who come in are not really users. They are a professional furry team that produces a reverse engineering score formula, extracts maximum returns with an automated strategy, and leaves. The ones that are really designed to reward the users, they're the only ones left。

The version of Hyperliquid came online on November 1, 2023. Users trade on the platform and accumulate points on a weekly basis, but the plan does not have an open formula. Nobody knows how it works. Every Friday, iliensinc announces the week points, and then a fixed sense of ritual follows: Users are staring at Discord, and when her account starts showing it's being entered, then a beehive comes out to compare how much it's got, shares a screenshot of each other, and guesses how the whole system works。

"Incentives for real users are essential," Jeff says, "It's difficult to define precisely, but Hyperliquid's credit scheme may have reduced the share of "professional farmers" from 99% to 20%

Around this time, the marketers who Jeff refused to pay directly finally began to enter. One of them is one of the biggest dealers in Binance. After FTX, he was particularly vigilant at all new trading places. But he had a few acquaintances who rated Jeff very highly. In September 2023, at a Singapore congress, he first met Jeff and iliensinc。

"Jeff is ambitious, but he is not arrogant," the businessman told me, "He is very restrained in describing what he wants to do, and almost all the key points are right."

As soon as he left, he sent a message to the team: we should get in。

Two weeks later, they officially went online。

And when the marketer actually got in, it was discovered that the platform contained a lot of intentions that only traders would notice. Hyperliquid has built a “lower belt” inside, making it more difficult for the most radical quantitative companies to target other businesses. This mechanism was later widely replicated throughout the industry. The effect is that marketers can move deeper mobility without having to push themselves to the forefront of delayed competition. Jeff is willing to sacrifice a portion of the exchange's turnover — that is, those generated by the shooting of traders — in exchange for a better transaction price for ordinary users。

This trade-off will reduce Hyperliquid's own income。

Also at that conference -- Token 2049 -- Jeff and iliensinc decided to move the team. Jeff told me that the United States’ regulatory prospects for encrypted derivatives were too uncertain, and that it continued to feel like taking an unnecessary risk. One of the lawyers I interviewed described that period as a period in which United States regulators had “almost used all possible means to drive the technology out of the United States”. The choice between Hong Kong, Switzerland and Singapore was made by iliensinc and was finally set for Singapore. This is modern, safe and without much distraction。

By spring 2024, the team had moved in. Jeff likes it here because the city country is boring enough. There are only two models of his life: work and exercise. He swims and runs, and he can do anything if he can get himself exhausted without risking injury. That principle had arisen from an accident in Puerto Rico on a light motorbike that had scarred his face and prevented him from sitting back in front of his keyboard for an entire week. The exercise was just to clear his head so he could go back and build. His only casual concession is Sunday morning. The rest of the week belongs to Hyperliquid. He even cut his own hair because it took time to go to the barber shop。

He doesn't feel anything unusual about that. Or, more precisely, he felt that the way most people treated work was extremely loose。

"I feel a little soft in general," he said, "The brain is also an organ. If you need to work longer, you can be trained."

He has learned not to impose this on his team. Everyone eats together every day at noon, sitting around a black wooden table like a family. Every Thursday they eat Chipotle. Singapore had no Chipotle, so they gave the menu recipe to the cook, who now made it. The conversation at lunch usually floats to what everyone's been watching and listening to lately. Every now and then, Jeff tends to be quiet, showing the look of thinking about something else -- and he's probably thinking about something else。

Also in the spring, Hyperliquid's sustainable contracts had been traded by more than $1 billion a day, and the base infrastructure began to squeak under pressure. One afternoon, the alarm system went off and kept ringing. The platform cannot withstand the influx of new users. This is Hyperliquid's first crash. But the only real concern outside the office is the forthcoming Hyperliquid token。

In May, Jeff posted a road map on Twitter for the next six months. It's full of technological ambitions. There is no word for tokens。

In previous months, Hyperliquid had expanded from derivatives to spot transactions. The first spot on the line is Purr, named from the cat. On-line spot is a necessary step: to issue Hyperliquid's token, the team needs a spot market to trade it. But this has also introduced a problem that the permanent exchange has never faced. No one really needs to hold the bottom asset when the deal continues; you're just betting on the price. In the case of spot transactions, assets are always held in trust. And that's exactly what Jeff didn't want to do. The meaning of the whole system is that the users control their own assets。

In order to solve this problem without being a trustee, he realized that he had to stop treating Hyperliquid as an "exchange on a block chain" and instead interpret it as a "inline block chain with an exchange function". The chain previously built by the team to run the exchange would have enabled hundreds of thousands of orders to be processed every second, and if it were programmed again, it would have become an open system: Anyone can write codes and build financial applications on them, as thousands of developers have done on the Ether. The difference is that the Etherport is too slow to get out of a really decent exchange, which is why Jeff started to build his own chain。

If the chain is opened, the asset can be introduced into Hyperliquid through a decentrified cross-chain bridge, which is secured by the agreement itself, without any single-party hosting. And anyone who constructs applications on this programmable level also has direct access to the exchange's order book and to the entire liquidity that has been deposited there. Developers can do lending platforms, stabilize currency, move-end trading applications and insert directly into the same market — where professional institutions report billions of dollars a day in liquidity。

Jeff doesn't like the analogy. He'll tell you that Hyperliquid has no real counterpart in traditional finance; it's a mistake to push new things into old classes, not understand them as they are. But for those of us who are not Jeff, it's like the Amazon built a cloud service to support its own electric platform, and then it turns out that the cloud service itself may be bigger than the mall. Jeff, for the first time on Twitter, used the phrase: Hyperliquid will carry the entire financial system。

He was not really willing to take that step. He told me that he had never wanted to give himself another assignment. The integration of the virtual machine, Hyperliquid, is a huge project that the team has no idea whether it is feasible or how much work must start entirely from scratch. But at some point, it became too obvious: otherwise, they would have been working together for the next few years on components that were "a little like Binance and a little like Etheum" and would have turned out to be different on both sides and would have regretted it。

The community is angry. What you were expecting was airdrops and, as a result, a tweet on infrastructure upgrading. Many of those comments quote "We had a good thing." "I hate this. You betrayed us. Users don't want a block chain. They want money. Xulian — the one who joined the team for an hour and a half after a user interview that was supposed to be 15 minutes ago — bore a considerable amount of anger。

"Jeff was thinking of the best in the long term," he told me, "We really don't care if something looks good right away."

According to iliensinc, the loudest people end up complaining tired. For the next six months, the team focused on moving the spot, building programmable layers, testing on a separate network and preparing the pledge mechanism. Then, November 29th, a Friday, hype finally came。

Hyperliquid dropped 31% of the total currency supply to about 94,000 early users. There were no conditions attached, nor were there any untying periods. If you used the platform and got points, that morning you woke up with a token in your wallet, which is richer than sleeping. The value of this air drop, at opening prices, was more than $1 billion; at one point, it reached $16 billion at historical heights. This is the largest transfer of wealth in the history of encrypted money, and each dollar goes to the user。

The team ' s own share is 23.8 per cent, which is smaller than the share of the community and is divided into years. They didn't get any money on the day of the drop. VC got nothing. If they want to hold the token, they can only buy it on the open market at the same price as the owner, and only Hyperliquid, because the token does not have any other exchange. It takes money elsewhere; they don't。

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

"I woke up and found myself in a six-digit drop. A user wrote:。

ANOTHER REPLY: "TODAY, HYPE CHANGED MY LIFE. THIS MONEY IS ENOUGH TO MAKE ME COMFORTABLE FOR YEARS TO COME, TO HELP MY FAMILY, AND TO STAY IN THE BULL MARKET

Others wrote: "Thank Jeff, God bless us."

"I feel very good," Jeff told me, "In most cases, people who really support something early in the day don't always share it, nor get meaningful ownership. And this time it's different

I asked him how it had been since everything had been labeled so openly。

"It's bad." He said。

That was a Wednesday night late in March 2025, when the iliensinc computer suddenly started to sound the alarm. She was on the phone and hung up immediately. On the screen, the balance of HLP, the community vault of Hyperliquid, is falling。

A few days earlier, a trader had been testing Hyperliquid's defence lines with small, complementary silos. Now, the test is over. The other side opened three silos on a cold coin called Jelly Jelly. The total market value of such tokens is approximately $15 million, with only $72,000 being traded daily. One is a large blank, the other two is a large one. The blank sheet was designed to explode. This man gambles on a token that he's about to pull up, and then he dumps the hot potato when the silo collapses. It's like pulling the grenade safety off and stuffing it into someone else's hand。

The "other" is HLP. In Hyperliquid, if the order book does not have the capacity to absorb a strong level position of a trader, the community vault will take over the position and then gradually level it down. Normally, this is a routine mechanism. But Jelly Jelly had little depth in the order book, and HLP would never get out once it was stuck in it. And at the same time, the dealer was scavenging on the open market, Jelly Jelly. Less than an hour, the price went up 500% or more. Every price jumped, the treasury lost one point more。

iliensinc stares at the screen and looks at losses through $5 million, $8 million, $12 million. there is no mechanism in the system to stop this. no one has ever designed a world where a $15 million dollar currency is used as a weapon。

Throughout Asia and Europe, the certifiers are on the line. The hyperliquid block chain is maintained by about 20 independent certifiers who verify each transaction and obtain the right to vote by pledging large amounts of hype. Many people used Hyperliquid long before the hype came into existence. They can see what is happening on the same public books as anyone anywhere in the world. And in their eyes, this is not a normal deal. Within a few minutes, all the certifiers voted to lower the shelf, Jelly Jelly, and to settle the relevant positions at the price before the manipulation took place. All users who actually hold legal space are compensated. The only person who lost money was the one who launched the attack。

In this case, the critics of Hyperliquid finally asked the question they had been waiting to ask: How central would the system be if more than twenty certifiers could overturn market prices and settle a contract by the number they themselves chose

Jeff didn't avoid it. The small size of the certificationer cluster is the result of design. A system requiring upgrades every few weeks cannot coordinate thousands of participants with each upgrade. This pool will expand, but not at the expense of the pace of development that Hyperliquid has reached today。

"This repair took a month," Jeff said, "It's bad to learn it through a real attack. It would have been nice if someone had just told us what the problem was."

Hyperliquid never paid the marketer, nor did it pay the team from the Platform's fees, but was willing to pay up to $1 million for the submission of the leak report。

"But these people obviously didn't want to inform us of a problem," he said, "They want to exploit it."

At the time of the attack, the world's largest centralized exchanges, Binance and OKX, were also fast on their own platforms and Jelly Jelly's contract was renewed. On Twitter, one user, Ayt Binance, was one of the CEOs, Yi He, encouraging her to follow。

"If you go online, Jelly Jelly," the user wrote, "Hyperliquid may be finished."

In English:

"Okay, arrange."

That is the price of ambition. You left the beach in Puerto Rico, where no one knew your name. You built something from scratch with a TV and your savings. You rejected $100 million. You send billions to strangers. And then what did you get

War

In 2023 and 2024, Hyperliquid was small enough that nobody really took it seriously. Airdrops change everything. As the market value rises to $4.2 billion, to $9 billion, or even higher, the big companies in the encrypted world are beginning to see a future profile: Hyperliquid might take their jobs. Binance announced the launch of its decentralised exchange. Coinbase and Robinwood started offering futures. The new agreement came up one after the other, and the goal was Hyperliquid. Then someone followed Jeff's elevator in the building。

This may have been nothing. In 2025, however, violent attacks against encrypted currency holders almost doubled. In France, the co-founder of a hardware wallet company was sawn off a finger, and a finger photograph was sent to his business partner as extortion. One family in Canada was subjected to water sentence. Encrypted currency transfers are instantaneous, irreversible and do not require bank approval. A man with a wrench and a wallet is enough to rob a fortune。

Jeff moved to safer houses, hired bodyguards and, to some extent, trapped in the safest island city in the world. On a mission, he will bring two security details. iliensinc started interrogating members of the team over and over again, and if a stranger asks where you work, what do you say? That's why almost all of the people I interviewed showed up in an alias。

But when I asked Jeff, what was the most difficult time in 2025, he mentioned neither Jelly Jelly nor a competitor, nor a bodyguard。

HE SAID: API SERVER。

Throughout the summer, Bitcoin went up by $100,000, Hyperliquid processed transactions of over $40 billion a month, and servers connecting traders to block chains began to fail frequently. An increasing number of institutions are accessing, each sending bulk orders, withdrawal orders and updates, and the infrastructure responsible for forwarding them to the chain is no longer up to date. It would take three seconds for an order to be liquidated immediately。

The chain of blocks itself did not fail. User funds have never been at risk. But in a market where fate is determined by milliseconds, three seconds has been a Jeff heavy alarm。

"if we're already congested under conditions that are not extremely volatile," iliensinc said, "it's totally unacceptable to wait until the real sharp swings."

Jeff barely slept for weeks. He goes to bed at 1:30 in the morning, and at 3:00 he wakes up and tells him he's in trouble again. The team rewrited the entire server。

On October 10th, that real big event came. President Tripp threatened to impose 100 per cent of customs duties on Chinese imports, and within 24 hours, more than $19 billion in encrypted leverage levels were flattened, the largest bomb-shape in the history of the industry. More than 1.6 million traders have been caught in a self-reinforcing chain: flattening the market, pushing more and more, and further lowering the price。

Hyperliquid did not fail and did not suspend withdrawals. The rewrite server is holding. The repairs taken from the Jelly Jelly incident were also carried out. HLP, the last recipient, took over the clearing of billions of dollars and thus earned $40 million。

However, since every transaction in the Hyperliquid block chain is open, anyone can accurately calculate the amount of its liquidation. Other exchanges do not disclose their data with the same precision. Binance even publishes only one per second. The data aggregaters on which mainstream media rely can only use the data they obtain, which are per se misleading. As a result, the media reported that Hyperliquid had handled more explosive warehouses than any other exchange. It seems to be the most dangerous place to trade, and the only reason is that it is the most transparent。

Three days later, while the entire encryption market was still taking stock of the losses, Jeff's team issued an upgrade that would determine what Hyperliquid would become: Hyperliquid Improvement Production 3 (HIP-3). The HIP-3 allows any pledge of 500,000 HYPEs to deploy on the platform a new permanent contract market, set its own parameters, select a price predictor and retain half of the transaction fee。

By the end of the year, the second year of full operation, Hyperliquid had achieved about $900 million in profits. And none of this money went to the team. Of these, 99 per cent were automatically bought back and destroyed, permanently moved out of circulation and almost all of the Platform ' s proceeds were returned to token holders。

when i asked iliensinc how to look back in 2025, she said:

"It feels like we're growing up."

The last afternoon before I left the office, Jeff and I sat at the black table by the kitchen, not far from those bottles of unopened whiskey — the team eating lunch here every day. I've left some questions for the last time。

Over the past year, Hyperliquid has been taking the initiative to "segregate" a part of himself. The builder code, which was launched before the HIP-3, allows independent developers to develop their own trading applications based on the platform order book and to share a share of their own user transaction fees. Matt Huaang, a co-founder of Paradigm, one of the largest investment agencies in encryption, describes it as "a wonderful way to experience licensing." Since October 2024, these teams have earned over $7 million。

HIP-3 goes further. In the six months since it went online, seven independent teams have deployed hundreds of markets, most of which are not encrypted: oil, gold, stock indices, foreign exchange. The largest deployer, Trade [XYZ], has grown at a rate of 38 per cent per week since October 2025 and has accumulated over $130 billion in transactions, covering 192,000 traders. Markets created by independent deployers now account for half of the total volume of Hyperliquid. In February 2026, HIP-4 announced its launch. Once it is online, anyone will be able to deploy options or forecast markets on the platform. HIP-3 opens Hyperliquid to any "priced" asset, while HIP-4 opens it to any "resulting" event。

Today, the most decisive product on Hyperliquid is being built by those who neither work for Jeff nor will work for him. I asked him what he saw: what should be done by his team and what should be left to others

"This is a dynamic question, and I don't think there is a standard answer," he said, "The most important entry point is at the philosophical level. Are you building a financial super app, like Robinwood, or a financial system?"

He admits he doesn't know which way to win。

"But I think that a financial system that is widely accessible is a better outcome for the world. It is based on an infrastructure that is open and not exclusive to a single company.”

"To do this, we often think about what we need to do to get people here, succeed and have their own business on Hyperliquid. When people can compete here and truly have something of their own, the system becomes more resilient and more expanding.”

He said that the least resistance was, of course, to finish everything and put it in a company. And they chose the opposite。

"This is a much more difficult path, but we care how we reach the target, because the way we arrive will determine what we ultimately build."

The founder of Trade [XYZ] told me that he thought that one day he might not even realize that he was actually using Hyperliquid。

"Maybe in the final form, it's just a financial infrastructure and a layer of liquidity," he said, "and then, interactive Brokers, Phantom, and others, deal with the end-users. It's a beautiful picture

Paradigm's Huang bought a considerable amount of space on the open market shortly after the HYPE token came online。

"The most amazing thing," he told me, "It was actually a team of 11 people."

ELEVEN PEOPLE, AND HARDLY RELIED ON AI. THERE ARE SEVERAL OTHER AI LAPTOPS IN THE OFFICE THAT RUN THE LATEST MODELS, BUT THEY'RE ONLY FOR IDEAS。

"We look very closely at the boundaries of AI's capabilities," Jeff said, "It's not good enough to write important codes."

And I ask the greatest cloud that lies above all this. Since 2023, the cumulative volume of Hyperliquid transactions has exceeded $4 trillion, accounting for 37 per cent of the market for decentralised and sustainable contracts. All of this has been achieved with users in the world ' s largest capital markets simply unable to use it. Americans are blocked out。

The obstacle is the Dodd-Frank Bill. This United States law, introduced in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, requires that all derivative transactions be carried out through regulated intermediaries. Ironically, the public books of Hyperliquid have naturally provided what Dodd-Frank wanted to achieve: regulators can see the leverage of the system in real time. However, until the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) introduced new rules, there was still no legal path for Americans to trade derivatives through decentrization agreements。

Following its own philosophy as always, Jeff did not personally form a policy team. Just a month after my visit, Hyperliquid Policy Center was established as an independent not-for-profit institution, led by Jake Chervinsky, a well-known lawyer active in encryption law for 10 years. The independent body responsible for supporting eco-growth in Hyperliquid, Hyper Foundation, donated 1 million HYPE coins to finance its launch, valued at $28 million at the time。

Jeff admits that Hyperliquid is too big to be pushed forward by "building first and leaving the rest to fate."。

"Someone is lobbying in the opposite direction," he told me, "I can't say with particular certainty which side I'm going to go." But eventually regulation will reflect the will of the people, and I am optimistic about its direction.”

And finally, I asked that last question that I'd left all week:

Do you really believe Hyperliquid can carry the entire financial system

He laughed. For a man who cuts his own hair, he laughs more than you expect。

"Well, I think that the word "the whole" does have some of the highest words," he said, "that's our ideal goal." But this is extremely difficult, and it is rather inconvenient to set the target in the range of decades.”

"It's a little bit like the difference between chess and chess," he continued, "The stronger you are in chess, the more you can read forward. But there are too many possibilities for chess. The focus is more on creating an intuition for the next step than on trying to read the whole transformation tree.”

I probably had a "not enough" expression, so he changed it。

He said that he had always tried to live according to one principle: he had to be very confident that he was moving in the right direction; but he had to focus on that small step at the moment, without having to know exactly where to end。

The following evening, on Friday, the team went to a Chinese restaurant in a hotel in the city. The engineer who fertilized the office didn't show up, the rest were there, plus me. Through the quiet hall, we went along a corridor to a dark-board-decorated box with a sculpture fence and a round table with utensils. Through a screen, there were several armchair and a tea table at the end. We'll sit there for tea。

The room is cold, and air conditioning appears to have been set on a hotter night. Someone handed over a blanket to the youngest engineer in the team. He wore it before he found out it was a Christian Dior blanket. This has led to a discussion about luxury brands, and it is clear that neither Jeff nor he has any background on this subject. One of them said LVMH, and the other didn't correct it. The iliensinc wearing Ralph Lauren's baseball cap sighs。

When you go to the round table for dinner, the wheel starts and hardly stops. The dishes were put up one by one until a large pan in blue and white was taken to the table and the whole table suddenly quieted down. A shallow layer of water in a large basin covered with pebbles and tiny blades, like a mini-wall pool. The center is a white bowl with noodles, and three orange little fish circled the "waterway" between the two bowls. The waiter explained this to us. Those fish, he said, had to rest for 30 days to work for five minutes. We watched them swim around. They were then taken away to start the next one-month vacation。

We left at about 9:15 p.m. It's raining outside. After I said goodbye, I went to the taxi at the airport. Shortly after the car drove out of the hotel, it climbed up a fast road along a long left bend, and the financial district suddenly appeared in the curtains: HSBC, Morgan Chase, Slags, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, whose symbols were so bright in the black night sky. Then the road was straight eastward, and the buildings retreated behind me, until the rear-view mirrors left only the road that had been wet by rain。

And Jeff went back in the opposite direction。

Go back to work。

Go back to where the bodyguards were。

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