Jeff Yan: Founder of Hyperliquid Revolutionizing DeFi with a User-Aligned Derivatives Platform
Jeff Yan is the founder of Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange (DEX) specializing in perpetual futures, which as of October 2025 handles around $10 billion in daily trades and approximately $308 billion in volume according to DeFiLlama.
The platform has grown to over 570,000 users and operates on a custom layer-1 blockchain engineered for fast, on-chain derivatives trading, featuring sub-second finality and an on-chain order book.
Hyperliquid was self-funded, bootstrapped without external venture capital, relying on profits from Yan's previous firm Chameleon Trading. Growth occurred organically through word-of-mouth and liquidity competitions, avoiding large influencer campaigns.
In late 2024, Hyperliquid launched the HYPE token, allocating 31% of the supply to early users, with the remainder reserved for ecosystem growth, airdrops, and long-term incentives. By mid-2025, the token's market capitalization neared $20 billion before a broader downturn in the cryptocurrency market.
The Hyperliquid ecosystem includes features such as HIP-3, enabling permissionless market creation, and HyperEVM, which offers Ethereum compatibility. Projects including Felix and HyperLend have been developed atop the platform. Hyperliquid's model inspired imitators and encouraged a shift in decentralized finance toward protocols focused on user interests through buybacks and burns.
The platform faced controversy regarding its liquidation system during the October 10 crash; however, Yan and his team defended the design as minimizing systemic risk rather than aiming to maximize protocol revenue.
Yan's background includes growing up in Palo Alto with Chinese immigrant parents. He was a physics prodigy, winning gold at the 2013 International Physics Olympiad, and studied mathematics and computer science at Harvard University. His career includes roles at Hudson River Trading and Google before founding Chameleon Trading (2020–2021), and subsequently Hyperliquid in 2023.
Known for his media-averse and product-focused leadership style, drawing comparisons to Changpeng Zhao, Yan emphasizes iterative upgrades over hype. His vision is to eventually extend broader financial activity on-chain through the evolving Hyperliquid platform.
