Written by: Ryan Weeks, Bloomberg

Translated by: Saoirse, Foresight News

I specifically traveled to Washington, D.C. to speak with Jeff Yan and learn about his follow-up strategic planning for his fast-growing crypto platform Hyperliquid. We settled at a cafe on the first floor of the formal Riggs Hotel, with his security personnel on alert not far away. During our conversation, I found that this 31-year-old founder may not provide straightforward and definitive answers.

This programmer, whose valuation has reached a billion dollars, is well-versed in the expression logic of the crypto industry. Hyperliquid is generally defined by the outside world as a digital asset exchange, but he always emphasizes that Hyperliquid itself is not an exchange, but "the underlying infrastructure layer that supports exchanges." He likens it to the Internet: developers building applications on top of Hyperliquid need to design their own risk control and checks and balances mechanisms. Jeff Yan is not interested in talking about the industry's long-term vision, but rather focuses on code development. "I spend almost all my time working," he says, "for me, work occupies all my energy."

This dedication has brought significant results: Hyperliquid initially started as a niche offshore platform, primarily focused on perpetual contracts (Perps), which are contracts that allow for continuous trading without expiration. Today, it has grown into a core trading market that supports agency contract trading of various assets such as stocks and gold, with the platform generating $713 million in revenue over the past 12 months.

Hyperliquid launched in 2023, and although it is not open to the U.S. market, its growth momentum has already shaken leading industry institutions, including the world's largest derivatives exchange, CME Group, and has attracted the attention of the White House. Donald Trump is a supporter of the crypto industry and earned over $1.4 billion through his own crypto project last year; he has stated that regulators are studying the regulatory framework for perpetual contracts vigorously. Jeff Yan is based in Singapore, and this visit to Washington was to support the Hyperliquid Policy Center. This organization is an independent lobbying entity that continuously submits documents to U.S. regulators to explain the platform's value.

The cafe where we were interviewed is a niche communication hub in the crypto industry. On our way to our seats, we saw two women deeply discussing stablecoins. Jeff Yan referred to this trip as a meeting with policymakers but declined to disclose their identities. He was dressed in a dark suit and tie, fitting the style of the political scene in Washington, rather than the T-shirts and hoodies he usually wears while coding. He has a lean physique and speaks cautiously; when discussing the project that has brought him into the billion-dollar valuation realm, his attitude is sincere yet humorous.

It is not easy to accurately assess his assets. Public information shows that current and future "core contributors" of Hyperliquid (which almost certainly includes Jeff Yan) hold at least 238 million native platform tokens HYPE, corresponding to an approximate value of $20 billion. When I asked about his net worth, Jeff Yan did not respond directly: "That is not a goal I pursue." He has no interest in the material enjoyments that vast wealth can bring. He does not own a car or property, admitting he has no time to engage in purchasing.

Jeff Yan grew up in Redwood Shores, California, raised by his mother, an accountant who immigrated from China to the United States. He studied mathematics and computer science at Harvard University, and after graduating, he joined the New York quantitative trading firm Hudson River Trading, where he decided to start his own venture within less than a year. He was initially attracted to Ethereum — a blockchain on which many mainstream crypto applications run. However, he ultimately judged that Ethereum was not suitable for the products he wanted to build.

In 2024, Jeff Yan established the platform development entity in Singapore, where the regulatory environment is friendlier compared to the U.S. At that time, perpetual contracts had already dominated the crypto trading space, but most trading was concentrated on exchanges that operated similarly to traditional companies. Decentralized finance put control in the hands of automatically executed smart contracts, which was another development path, but at that time, it had a limited scale and frequent vulnerabilities. Jeff Yan wanted to change this situation. During the initial phase of the project, he gave up the venture capital funding that his peers commonly relied upon. Self-funding is more challenging, but he believes it is crucial: this neutral technology layer should not have privileged internal investors. "If Satoshi Nakamoto had completed A-round financing with institutions, Bitcoin would not be the Bitcoin it is today; that's just how it is."

He co-founded the company with a partner using the pseudonym Iliensinc. Many Hyperliquid developers and ecosystem third-party partners also chose to remain anonymous. On one hand, this is for security reasons: the blockchain security firm CertiK reported that in the first half of 2026, crypto asset holders faced a total of 52 violent attacks, which is also why Jeff Yan was equipped with discreet security during the interview. On the other hand, it stems from ideological alignment, as many crypto practitioners believe privacy is inviolable. Jeff Yan stated that, in principle, anonymity "makes perfect sense to me." However, to promote the development of Hyperliquid, he ultimately chose to reveal his identity. He recalled his thoughts at that time: "If the project starts and no one continuously promotes it externally, it will be difficult for the project to succeed."

The core of Hyperliquid is a blockchain + decentralized exchange; perpetual contracts support leverage of up to 50x, with profits and losses amplified accordingly. For traders, this business carries high risks: during extreme price fluctuations, positions can be auto-liquidated. In a downturn in October 2025, approximately $19 billion worth of assets were liquidated across the market. According to Event Horizon Labs data, less than a quarter of accounts on Hyperliquid are profitable.

Even so, Hyperliquid has a stable user base among crypto traders, many of whom are HYPE token holders. While the prices of most tokens have declined this year, the price of HYPE has doubled. (Last week, Binance suffered a hacking attack, causing the crypto market to weaken further and exposing the inherent risks of these assets.) But what truly brought Hyperliquid into the purview of traditional finance was its recent foray into the stock and commodity markets.

The shift began with the launch of the HIP-3 upgrade last year: anyone who invests 500,000 HYPE (currently worth about $43 million) can establish a new trading market based on Hyperliquid's trading infrastructure. The platform is responsible for fundamental processes such as trade matching and clearing. After the upgrade, the ecosystem experienced rapid expansion. Trade.xyz became the core operator in the HIP-3 market, launching perpetual contracts for indices, precious metals, crude oil, and stocks, with trading volumes reaching hundreds of billions of dollars.

Theoretically, the aforementioned trading growth does not include U.S. traders. Jeff Yan explained that the feasible pathway to enter the U.S., the world's largest financial market, is to have HIP-3 partners, not the Hyperliquid entity itself, accept U.S. regulation and implement compliance requirements such as KYC and market surveillance. (This is also the core logic behind his assertion "we only provide a technology platform, not an exchange.") In September, Hyperliquid began testing the revised HIP-3 framework, adding identity verification features to complete the previously missing basic due diligence steps. In the same month, the parent company of the crypto exchange Kraken started negotiations, planning to access this system and offer Hyperliquid perpetual contracts to U.S. users.

Notably, the trading volume of real-world assets (RWA) on Hyperliquid has now matched the trading scale of native crypto assets: in July alone, the trading volume of real-world assets surpassed $115 billion. Such transactions stand out in the context of geopolitical conflicts, unrestricted by traditional trading hours. When the conflict in Iran erupted in February of this year, the traditional crude oil market closed, but Hyperliquid continued trading, and the daily trading volume of its crude oil perpetual contracts quickly soared to several billion dollars.

After this incident, CME Group and ICE, which operate major global commodity exchanges, pressured U.S. regulators to control Hyperliquid, citing risks of false orders and price manipulation in the platform’s transactions. However, leading institutions are also planning collaborations: ICE recently announced that it plans to launch Trade.xyz's perpetual contract products in the U.S. market after regulatory approval and invest in this startup project. Jeff Yan stated: "I believe that in the coming years, those institutions that see Hyperliquid as a competitor may gradually accept that this technology can also be used by them."

Of course, some U.S. traders have accessed Hyperliquid via VPN. Jeff Yan clarified that the platform and applications built on it clearly prohibit U.S. users from using the service and have set up corresponding interception mechanisms. However, he reiterated that Hyperliquid is a neutral protocol. The underlying technology of the Internet itself does not block users from accessing content prohibited by their national laws; "the responsibility for this type of control should fall on the upper-level applications."

Jeff Yan has been answering my questions for over an hour, but I still find it difficult to get clear and definitive conclusions from him. As the project founder, he prefers for this continuously expanding ecosystem to prove its value by itself. However, he did reveal the next phase of Hyperliquid's development direction.

"If we could launch a product from scratch, I believe that high-quality tokenization of real assets would be very appealing." What he means is, in the long run, Hyperliquid could offer users large enterprise stock tokenization trading products. Supporters believe that this model can create a market with liquidity superior to traditional stocks. Of course, the ultimate direction is "hard to predict," because which products the platform can launch is largely decided by third-party developers.

As the interview nears its end, he needs to cross the street to the National Portrait Gallery for a shoot. His team specifically requested that no portraits of current or former presidents appear in the background. After all, Hyperliquid is a neutral protocol.

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