The Sky is the Limit: Wearing Only One Outfit, Cutting My Own Hair, and Giving Billions to Strangers — The Story Behind Hyperliquid

Original Title: Beyond The Sky

Original Author: Dom Cooke, colossus

Original Translation: SpecialistXBT, BlockBeats

Editor's Note:

Over the past few years, the crypto industry has experienced frenzy, collapse, rebuilding, and polarization. Endless debates on social media continue to surround issues related to exchanges, custody, market-making, governance, and asset issuance. The emergence of Hyperliquid has garnered widespread attention because it seeks to directly address these questions: How can a truly usable large-scale trading market be built in a public, transparent on-chain environment? This article focuses on Hyperliquid and its founder Jeffrey Yan, documenting how this experiment unfolded and the price it is paying.

The following is an excerpt from the main text:

Jeff turned down a $100 million investment, airdropped billions of dollars to strangers, and now cannot travel without a bodyguard. This article tells the story of how he turned blockchain and the Hyperliquid crypto exchange into the world's most profitable per capita startup.

On a Friday in January, before the sun had risen, a 43-year-old man was taken from his home in Saint-Lezoux-la-Leu by individuals. He was driven to the town of Bascule-en-Sologne, 30 miles away, where he was beaten, bound, and abandoned. Twelve hours later, as the sun set in the suburbs of Paris, three men with a handgun kicked open the door of a home in Verneuil-sur-Seine. They assaulted a couple in front of their children, tied up the family of four with zip ties, ransacked the house, and then headed to the train station to depart. This was the 70th such attack worldwide in less than a year.

Two days later, I boarded a flight to Singapore.

I was on my way to visit a team of only 11 people, but the first person I saw in their office was not part of these 11. He was a burly American man, with short hair, a stubble, sitting behind a small table in the corner of the lounge area with an Apple laptop in front of him. His physique made it clear he wasn't there to code. He was a bodyguard.

One of the company's co-founders walked me from the hotel to the office. She goes by the online alias iliensinc, short for Aliens Incorporated. As we walked, the rain trees intertwined above the streets, she told me they didn't used to have an office in this area of Singapore. The company originally operated out of a coworking space in the financial district, but her co-founder—the only person in the team who worked without a pseudonym—began to attract more and more attention. Initially, people just stared at him, trying to remember his face. Then strangers started approaching him. Eventually, someone followed him into the elevator of his apartment building. So, the company moved to a quieter place, a building where no one would think to look for them.

Even the cleaning lady had no idea what they were doing. In her eyes, she was servicing a peripheral company that produced plush cat toys. Considering there were indeed 34 plush toys in the office, this misunderstanding was not hard to fathom. The company's mascot was a cat named Hypurr, with 12 of them perched on a cabinet. But there were also sharks, lizards, koalas, penguins, and dragons in the office, several of them nestled on Dell monitors like furry gargoyles. Most of the plush toys belonged to an engineer. His wife wouldn't let him bring any more home, so he brought them to the office instead. The team did not correct the cleaning lady's misunderstanding.

The reason being, Hyperliquid—a blockchain and cryptocurrency exchange—was one of the most profitable companies per capita in the world. Last year, its 11 employees generated over $9 billion in profit. The company, founded just three years ago, has a market capitalization of $100 billion and has never taken a cent of venture capital. The key figure behind it, Jeff, 31 years old this year, almost involuntarily became one of the most recognizable faces in an industry where "the more successful you are, the easier it is to be kidnapped."

Prior to founding Hyperliquid, Jeff lived in Puerto Rico and single-handedly ran one of the largest anonymous trading businesses in the crypto space. That company was called Chameleon Trading—'Chameleon' was his gaming nickname in junior high. He initially started with his $10,000 in savings, and over the next two and a half years, the company grew annually by several thousand percentage points. When he told me about his returns, he immediately tried to convince me not to be too impressed. I noted his objections and also noted one other thing: Chameleon made him incredibly rich. At 27, he was carefree. To the surfers, bartenders, and waitresses in San Juan, he was just an ordinary young man in beach shorts.

Now, he sat barefoot in a gray armchair in a highly guarded office in Singapore, wearing black shorts and a navy T-shirt, explaining to me why the entire financial system needed to be rebuilt from scratch. What I really wanted to know was: why did he trade the first life for the second?

He said it wasn't for money. Jeff didn't come from wealth, and his current lifestyle showed no interest in the "rich adult lifestyle." He wore the same Lululemon shorts and T-shirt every day—15 pairs of shorts, 10 T-shirts, each in three different colors. There was no trace of wealth in the office either. The furniture was left behind by the previous tenant. The team only added two board games, NFTs on the wall, and those plush cats. I confirmed this when I found four books on the shelf, one of which was Frank Slootman's "Amp It Up," a management book whose core idea is that most people don't work hard enough. I mentioned this to iliensinc. She shrugged. That creed was their own, not learned from a book. In the kitchen, there were three bottles of Grey Goose vodka and Macallan whiskey, untouched since a community event two years ago where the minimum spend wasn't met. This team drank tea.

Nor is it out of love for the crypto industry. Bitcoin, still the most iconic asset of this industry, has fallen by about 30% since its early October peak. Meanwhile, gold, which was supposed to be replaced by Bitcoin in its function, has risen by 7% over the same three months. Most tokens have performed even worse. When I asked Jeff how he views the external negativity towards this industry, he did not defend it.

「There is indeed a lot of unreliable behavior in this field,」 he said. 「Perhaps making people realize that these things are not as advertised is a healthy thing.」

He does not see Hyperliquid as a crypto company.

「People nowadays wouldn't say a certain company is an 'internet company,'」 he told me. 「We use cryptographic technology, but it does not define us.」

Including Jeff, only two out of the 11 team members had been involved in the crypto industry before founding Hyperliquid. This was somewhat deliberate. According to Jeff, early crypto people were mainly concerned with how to make money quickly. He said he was building for the long term, which resonates more with those who think more like technologists rather than traders. But it's also a supply issue. When Hyperliquid hires, they pick from international math competition medalists. Jeff won a physics gold at 18. One of his engineers won a silver in informatics, and another was trained in the U.S. national team system. Jeff wants to hire more of these people. In fact, since my visit earlier in the year, he has hired two more. But the pool of people willing to enter the crypto industry and reach this level has long been diluted by years of scams, mistrust, and the recent wave of artificial intelligence.

So, since he has already made enough money to do anything, why is Jeff still here?

At least to outsiders, the answer is becoming increasingly clear.

Hyperliquid is a blockchain that has a native exchange built on top of it. In a traditional exchange, a company holds your funds and controls the infrastructure. On Hyperliquid, your funds are always under your control, and the platform is public. The vision that Jeff paints for it — without a hint of irony — is to carry the entire financial system. Whether this is ambitious or absurd depends on whether you are staring at those plush cats or looking at the platform's numbers. Because, in the few months since my visit, some markets that have operated in an unchanging manner for centuries have begun to bend in small but quantifiable ways.

Hyperliquid started in 2023 with perpetual contracts. A perpetual contract is a derivative and the largest single market in the crypto space. In a perpetual contract, you bet on the price of an asset you don't actually hold, and unlike traditional futures, it never expires. The market around these bets is 6 to 8 times the size of the spot market, with a monthly volume of about $7 trillion. Until recently, this was almost entirely handled by centralized exchanges, with Binance leading by far in size. Previously, no decentralized platform could truly challenge it. Hyperliquid was the first to do so, and its market share has now grown to about 14% of Binance's.

Then, in October 2025, Hyperliquid did something a centralized exchange couldn't: it allowed anyone to launch new perpetual markets on the platform, as long as the asset had a price oracle. An independent team called Trade[XYZ] became the most active deployers. They initially launched the silver market. By January of the following year, its 24-hour trading volume had reached about 2% of CME's. CME, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, is the world's largest derivatives exchange, founded in 1898. Next, Trade[XYZ] launched crude oil contracts. Crude oil has always traded in markets closed on weekends. But on a Saturday in late February, the US and Israel began bombing Iran. CME closed, but Hyperliquid did not. Crude oil's daily trading volume surged from $21 million to $3.7 billion. A month later, Trade[XYZ] launched S&P 500 perpetual contracts, receiving official authorization from S&P Dow Jones Indices. This market trades around the clock, even on weekends.

Today, the most influential products on Hyperliquid are increasingly being built by those who neither work for Jeff nor will ever work for him in the future.

Trade[XYZ]'s founder requested to remain anonymous. He bought his first bitcoin for $66 in 2013 and had been an investor for many years, not a builder. He never intended to start a company. He told me that if it weren't for Jeff, he probably would have left the crypto industry long ago.

"Hyperliquid has the opportunity to save the crypto industry," he said.

However, all of this still cannot explain why Hyperliquid might end up being what Jeff said—in an industry where things always seem to be "about to happen" but then collapse at the last minute; nor can it explain why he would give up the kind of life in Puerto Rico to verify this.

That summer, he woke up at five every morning, downloaded past competition papers online, and worked on them alone in his room. He didn't have a mentor, nor could he afford a summer program. No one was forcing him to do this.

“Later on, I realized that I am actually very competitive,” he said. “There was this competition, and others had been in the race since they were kids, while I was behind.”

A year later, in ninth grade, he had already been selected for the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad training camp, a camp consisting of the top 50 high school students in the country. He was one of the youngest in the group. He didn't make it to the national team, but he said he didn't mind. During those three weeks, he sat with a group of teenagers who could stare at three sentences for five hours and extract truths that most people couldn't see at all.

Jeff told me that the math world doesn't have a Roger Federer-like universally known superstar, but at the highest levels, there is indeed some Federer-esque quality. The way a proof is constructed has style and elegance, and during that training camp, he saw this up close for the first time.

“It’s like being able to play football with Tom Brady,” he said, “just the geeky version of that feeling. Something most people will never experience in their lives.”

The following year, he was eliminated in the middle-stage selection round of a math competition. He was 16 at the time and had to wait a whole year to try again. I asked him if this was his first experience of failure.

“Losing is a very common experience,” he said, “Most people are supposed to lose. Usually, there's only one winner.”

The issue wasn't the failure itself but rather the feeling of emptiness that followed.

“I felt like there was a void in my heart,” he said, “I knew I had to learn something new.”

So, he got hold of some physics textbooks used by seniors. The school only offered this course in the twelfth grade, but having just learned calculus, he finally understood what it was for. He started reading the Feynman Lectures.

“I devoured them like I was binge-watching a TV series,” he said.

Within a year, once again through self-study, he became one of the top five teenage physics players in the United States.

He made it to the United States Physics Olympiad national team, traveled to Estonia — his first time in Europe — and won a silver medal. The following summer, in Copenhagen, he won a gold medal, ranking 24th globally. He was 18 at the time and returned to the Bay Area with a whole new understanding of “the sky's the limit”: above him, precisely, were 23 people.

Harvard University covered almost all his tuition. In the spring semester of his freshman year, Jeff took Computer Science 124 "Data Structures and Algorithms." This course is mainly taken by sophomores and juniors and is known for being "torturous." Students in Harvard's course catalog describe it as "necessary evil," with comments like, "No social life. You are destined to be single." The course had 150 students. As a freshman, Jeff ranked first by a significant margin.

At Harvard, students are assigned to upperclassman dorms after their freshman year. Jeff was assigned to Pforzheimer House and formed a close relationship with Scott Wu, who was two years younger. The two had first met at a summer camp for Olympiad students. Wu had won gold for the U.S. three years in a row at the International Olympiad in Informatics, scoring full marks in his final year, and later co-founded Cognition AI. When Wu was assigned to Pforzheimer as a sophomore, he texted Jeff, "Yo, I'm also in Pfoho." Jeff replied, "Great!"

Wu would find Jeff by the grand piano in the common room—Jeff was then self-studying jazz, repeating certain phrases until they truly "clicked." They played chess, Go, poker together, and spent hours debating what it means to truly excel at something. Jeff would talk about Faker—the greatest player in League of Legends history—and about Go masters and top high-frequency traders.

"He was always thinking, why is someone exceptional," Wu told me, "What is the essence of this field? And what does true excellence really mean?"

In Wu's memory, Jeff was extremely countercultural. Most Harvard students absorb the same information in the same environment and often come to roughly the same conclusions. Jeff never did. He was also very humorous.

"That very deadpan humor," Wu said, "He would say something completely unexpected, but with a deadpan expression and tone."

Every summer, Jeff would take on internships. He interned at Google X, working on the self-driving project (which later became Waymo), and at the trading firm Tower Research Capital. In his senior year, he took a part-time job at another self-driving company Nuro because he felt that at least one year of his four years in college was redundant.

In his junior year winter, he and Wu became two of the ten interns for Hudson River Trading's inaugural internship program. HRT is one of the world's most successful quantitative trading firms. Among the same group of interns were Alexandr Wang and Jesse Zhang, who later founded Scale AI and Decagon, respectively. This internship program was structured as a three-week competition, and in each round, Wu and Jeff consistently took first and second place.

After graduating with a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and a Master's degree in Computer Science, Jeff joined HRT full-time at the end of 2017 and was assigned to the US Stock Algorithmic Trading Team. Every week, he would have a meeting with his manager. This manager had mentored many newcomers. Typically, these meetings followed a fixed rhythm: newcomers would hit a wall in the code, the manager would help them solve it together, and then the newcomers would go back and hit another wall.

But Jeff never hit a wall. The manager recalled that he came with his own ideas. The meetings were unusually efficient, but there was always a certain feeling that made the manager subtly uneasy. After a while, he realized what it was: Jeff seemed to do everything right, but these accomplishments seemed to have no weight on him personally. Eight months later, when Jeff came to tell him he was leaving, the manager immediately understood. The language he used to announce Jeff's departure in an internal email was so warm, which was particularly rare in the company culture.

Jeff actually loved HRT. He believed trading was the most pure game in the real world. You were either right or wrong, and the market would tell you the answer. Many of the world's smartest people were competing with you, and in this ruthless game, the results of collisions were a product of great value to the world: a market with ample liquidity and efficiency.

However, the issue was that he spent eight months optimizing a system that was already very good, and he was working at a company that would still be excellent even without him. This meant that he could never quite answer that persistent question:

What value did you actually add to this world?

In December 2017, the answer came knocking on his door. Bitcoin was nearing $20,000, Coinbase became the most downloaded app in the US, and billions of dollars flowed into ICO projects like Jesus Coin. It was the "Crypto Christmas." Jeff heard about Bitcoin for the first time during his internship at HRT, where two former partners came to introduce this concept to the interns. Nobody was impressed at the time. But later, while still working at HRT, he read the Ethereum whitepaper. The paper described a globally shared computer that no one could shut down. He was dealing with finance every day and could see the underlying logic that supported financial operations. The whitepaper described a way to replace trust with code.

"I felt I could go build something that fundamentally changes finance," he said.

Around April 2018, he left HRT to create a prediction market where users could bet on anything with outcomes like weather, elections, and sports events. This platform would run on the blockchain with no single entity controlling the funds. Its architecture was based on an idea that Jeff believed he and his co-founder were among the first to think of: off-chain matching, on-chain settlement, because Ethereum was too slow to run a real exchange. Funds were held in smart contracts managed by code, but the user-facing interface was fast and clean. It retained the promise of decentralization in the crypto world without the complexity and friction.

He worked on this project with his college roommate, Brian Wong. Brian also left HRT. The two of them built it in San Francisco during the inaugural Binance Labs incubation program and named it Deaux.

Kalshi, founded in 2019, took a similar approach. Polymarket followed suit in 2020. Today, the combined valuation of Kalshi and Polymarket exceeds $40 billion.

Meanwhile, Deaux only attracted 100 users.

As Jeff got to this point, the sky in Singapore suddenly opened up. The raindrops were massive and heavy, filling the drains in minutes. From the balcony, we could hear the rain hitting the street, cars passing on the wet road, tires making long hissing sounds.

“It was never going to work,” he continued.

By the time Deaux launched, Bitcoin had dropped over 80% from its peak. Jesus Coin was long dead, beyond resurrection. No one really cared to bet on the weather tomorrow. More importantly, Jeff and Wong had hardly considered regulatory issues at the time. Kalshi spent a full three years navigating with regulatory bodies before they could finally launch.

When Deaux shut down, Scott Wu was one of the few people on Earth genuinely disappointed about it. He was one of the five regular users.

Jeff returned over half of the $450,000 investment to investors. Bound by HRT's non-compete agreement, he went to Lake Tahoe in California with a friend who was similarly restricted, skiing until the end of the season. He then traveled very frugally to China, Japan, and Peru. He tried to convince me that being a tourist actually requires skill. It was clear he lacked that skill.

At the end of 2019, after the non-compete expired, Jeff moved to Puerto Rico. There, capital gains tax could almost legally drop to zero. With $10,000 and a vague yet strong sense that something big was coming, he made the move.

His partner also joined him in Puerto Rico. They shared a one-bedroom apartment near the beach, renting for less than $2,000 a month. However, the term "shared" carried somewhat of a cohabitation implication, of which Jeff left almost no time for. Without even having a monitor, he took over the TV and set up his workspace in the living room. For the first year or so, he probably only allocated about 30 minutes a day to his partner, with the rest belonging to the trading algorithm constantly scrolling on the TV screen.

Jeff works at least 14 hours a day, easily surpassing 100 hours per week. He started by writing scripts in Python, connecting to various cryptocurrency exchanges, allowing the program to trade on his behalf 24/7. He watches these programs run, continuously optimizing logic, tracking data, and if the system doesn't perform as expected, he takes it down and rewrites it.

His ability to do this stems from the fact that the cryptocurrency market is open to the world in a way that traditional finance has never been. In the stock market—similar to the trading he did at HRT—if you want to place a single trade on a single exchange, you need to connect to 13 public exchanges in three major data centers in New Jersey, comply with a complex set of SEC regulations called Reg NMS, and obtain CME futures data from Chicago via microwave links, with upfront infrastructure costs amounting to tens of millions of dollars. However, in the cryptocurrency market, whether you are an HRT employee or a solo operator in front of a TV, everyone connects to the same rundown infrastructure originally designed for web pages called HTTP. You just need to rent a server on Amazon Cloud.

For nearly two years, Jeff's partner had no idea what was happening at the other end of the TV. Their life seemed unchanged. Rent paid, meals eaten. She knew he was dedicated and driven, thought he was probably doing fine, but she couldn't see any tangible evidence of success. It wasn't until a Friday night in the summer of 2021 when she tried to urge him to go out for a dinner reservation she had made a week prior. He flat out refused to leave.

"You don't understand," he told her, "if I don't fix this bug now, I'll lose $100,000."

After that night, Jeff decided to turn this into a real company. He needed one person who could help him with everything other than coding.

During his time at Harvard, there was someone in Pforzheimer House who seemed to him to have everything in life under control at the same time—a capability so foreign to him that it was almost superhuman. But as far as he knew, iliensinc was in Asia at the time, serving as a chief of staff at a venture capital firm, shuttling between Tokyo, Seoul, and Hong Kong.

When he finally got in touch with her, he found out that she was actually in San Francisco. The pandemic had halted travel, turning the job that used to take her across Asia into a series of late-night conference calls in her apartment. Jeff explained his needs to her. He didn't provide a formal job description, no title, and barely even explained exactly what she would be doing. But she had spent three years evaluating entrepreneurs as an investor. Whatever Jeff was describing, she felt it wasn't a bet-the-farm situation.

The company officially got a name: Chameleon Trading. iliensinc started accompanying him to Zoom meetings with the business development teams of various exchanges, adding a layer of professionalism to this business, which in the physical world was just a "one-man show above a building by the San Juan seaside." Beneath those whale-sized market makers—such as Jump Trading, Tower, HRT, and Jane Street—there existed another layer of anonymous market makers, whose size was difficult for the outside world to verify. Chameleon was the most significant among them.

By 2022, Jeff began to feel restless. By then, he had spent four years in the crypto world, accessing various markets, both centralized and decentralized, and had deeply engaged with them. He began to care not only about his own gains and losses. Bitcoin had given the world a way to hold and transfer funds without relying on trusted intermediaries; Ethereum provided a computer that no individual could shut down. Between the two, almost everything needed to rebuild the financial system had been outlined. But this industry had built almost nothing substantial. The two largest exchanges—Binance and Coinbase—were still centralized. The crypto industry repeatedly brought back what it was supposed to eliminate.

That summer, iliensinc arranged an offline team building retreat at a hotel in the English countryside. By then, she had expanded Chameleon into a six-person team. Jeff gave her a Bitcoin budget. The team flew to London, visited the British Museum, and stayed at a countryside estate for a few days. The leader—who was away from the screen for the first time for an extended period—didn't seem truly relaxed.

Back in Puerto Rico, the trading continued. But Jeff told the team that they were going to start building something new. He wasn't sure what exactly that was. He had some ideas, but none convinced him entirely. All he knew was that Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision for Bitcoin was quietly being buried by this industry that Satoshi himself had initiated. And this, for someone who had earned millions of dollars in this industry without building anything from those blanks, shouldn't have had such a significant impact.

To the team, Jeff seemed like "he went out to vent a bit, and then the issues vented out of him instead."

In November 2022, the world's third-largest cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, collapsed within nine days. It had been lending user deposits to Alameda Research—a trading company run by the founder's girlfriend. When users requested their money back, it was no longer there. Less than half a year ago, Terra, a $500 billion crypto ecosystem, also went to zero within three days. It had attempted to construct a currency backed by the system's own logic, pegged to the dollar, but the algorithm meant to maintain the peg accelerated its collapse instead. The industry's two largest projects met their demise within less than half a year.

Jeff had seen enough.

He told his team of six that the trading stops here. You may disagree, but the Chameleon is done. If I'm wrong, we can always go back to trading. Some in the team did disagree, and some did leave. But that did not shake his decision. No investors to consult, no board to persuade—this was his own money, his call. And now, a new mission emerged.

"I was overly confident at the time, thinking that FTX would be the turning point for the decline of centralized exchanges," Jeff told me. "But it actually helped, as it made me determined to chase after this massive market."

The market he was referring to is the perpetual contract.

The perpetual contract stems from an insight by economist Robert Shiller in the 1990s. Traditional futures contracts have expiration dates. At expiry, traders either take delivery of the underlying asset—like oil, wheat, pork bellies—or close and reopen positions, racking up fees each time. Shiller posed a rather obvious question: If hardly anyone trading pork belly futures actually wants the pork bellies, why force the contract to expire?

The traditional markets had workable solutions already in place, hence no impetus for change. In 2016, however, a crypto exchange named BitMEX saw an opportunity. Since then, perpetual contracts have become the dominant trading mode in the crypto market. These contracts never expire, allowing traders to hold positions with extremely high leverage, often 10x, 20x their capital. The fees and liquidations it brings have made centralized crypto exchanges among the most profitable companies in the industry.

Yet, by the end of 2022, there was still no truly user-friendly decentralized version in sight. The reason lay in the underlying tech. Most modern markets operate on an order book. Buyers state the price they are willing to pay, sellers state the price they are willing to accept, and when the two match, a trade occurs. The more participants, the narrower the bid-ask spread. From the NYSE to Binance, it's mostly the same mechanism.

But the order book isn't just about trades; it must also handle a constant flood of price updates—traders revise quotes repeatedly, often many times before an actual trade occurs. Existing blockchains are simply not suited for this task. They are too slow, too expensive, too clunky. Every update incurs a fee and requires confirmation. Running an order book on such a chain is like trying to run the NYSE on dial-up internet.

By the end of 2022, Jeff and the team reviewed all the blockchains other projects were built on, finding none that met their needs. So, they built their own. Three months later, Hyperliquid had a custom blockchain robust enough to run an exchange on. Jeff then spent a significant part of that entire year on Twitter promoting Hyperliquid, explaining what it offered and why it was superior to everything the industry had grown accustomed to.

The exchange's dilemma is: it is utterly useless until it is "useful." A buyer enters an empty market and finds no seller. The traditional solution is to pay a market maker to ensure that anyone who comes here has a counterparty to match. You can pay them in cash, equity, or token shares. Hyperliquid had many suitors as well. One of them even told iliensinc directly that his company was a "Kingmaker."

"If you don't pay us, you will never rise."

They did not pay. None of them paid.

Hyperliquid went live at the end of February 2023. Throughout March and April, the users were mainly a group of NFT collectors who had never traded perpetual contracts, engaging in $10 small transactions, learning about leverage through simulated matches. There were no real "Jeff cult users" at all.

By May, Jeff took those strategies that made Chameleon one of the most successful anonymous trading services in the crypto space and packed them into an on-chain vault: HLP (Hyperliquidity Provider). You could deposit $10 or $10 million into it. There were no management fees or performance shares. This vault ran automated strategies, and every dollar of profit would flow to the depositor. All accounts were recorded directly on the blockchain. Even if you only deposited $10, you could watch your $10 grow in real-time. If FTX was built this way, Alameda's black box should have been transparent to the whole world.

At once, HLP solved two problems. It provided liquidity to the exchange; and users providing liquidity encountered something that traditional finance had never truly opened to the public. An early user told me that this was almost the first time in history that an ordinary person could invest in high-frequency trading strategies at zero cost.

"If Jeff was willing to charge a 2% management fee plus a 50% performance fee, I would also invest without hesitation," the user told me. "But in reality, an ordinary person with no background, no connections, sitting in any corner of the world can access one of the greatest market-making strategies in crypto. People still don't realize how special this is."

At that time, almost no one understood. By autumn, while crypto assets were rising every day, users deposited in HLP watched the vault balance decline while Bitcoin soared. The algorithm itself performed well and made money through trades, but because everything ran on-chain, it could not hedge the overall market exposure. Traditional market makers could offset risks in other exchanges, which HLP was not designed to do. Therefore, even though it was profitable on each trade, it was effectively in a "short" position in a continuously rising market. People were furious. Other projects attacked Hyperliquid on Twitter and Discord, and Jeff fought back. It was still early enough then that he took these things quite personally.

But HLP was never meant to be the final answer. Jeff built it with the intention of bootstrapping liquidity before the arrival of independent market makers. He knew those market makers would eventually seize the opportunity. The demand far outstripped the supply, and the significant spread meant easy money for those willing to make a market. He wrote documentation, tweeted lengthy threads explaining what market-making was all about, and personally guided various companies to connect. However, most people remained hesitant. Other exchanges paid market makers, but Jeff refused to do so; at the same time, HLP itself could not infinitely scale to fill this gap.

“Alameda is key to FTX’s operation,” he said. “We don’t want HLP to become key to Hyperliquid’s operation.”

All metrics were growing, as were the complaints. Logically, market makers should have arrived by now. But if they hadn’t arrived and users left first, everything would come to an end.

However, there was always one type of person who would show up on time.

Venture Capitalists.

Their analysts had long been using this exchange in private, going back one by one to tell the partners: this thing is really good. So, the partners started calling. Jeff and iliensinc had never engaged in any fundraising promotion. They didn’t have a roadshow deck. The protocol did generate fee revenue, but from the beginning, Jeff insisted that none of that revenue should flow to the team. When VCs came online for meetings and asked for a deck, Jeff and iliensinc just talked to them, and by the end of the conversation, the other party would finally understand: no, there isn’t one.

By January 2024, some funds had already visited in person. iliensinc was very familiar with this. She had been an investor before, so she began explaining various financing terms to Jeff and reminding him which rights needed special caution. For about two weeks, he followed this procedure.

“It was almost like it was instinctual,” he told me, “When VCs started to come knocking, I thought: Oh, it looks like it's time to raise funds.”

His only condition was that he would only consider a term sheet with a valuation above $1 billion. It was less than a year before Hyperliquid went live. The team was burning hundreds of thousands of dollars every month, all from Jeff's savings. When an investor quoted the price he wanted, Jeff spent a weekend seriously considering it.

He went to people who had started companies and asked VCs themselves: What was the meaning of fundraising? But they couldn’t persuade him why “their money” would be more valuable than “money itself.” At some point, he felt that saying “no” seemed to be the right thing to do. Once that feeling settled in, it was the end of it.

On Monday morning, he said to iliensinc:

「We're not taking this money.」

「What the heck?」

She could hardly believe it. She was the one handling the money, watching it burn little by little. Now there was a hedge fund willing to invest nearly $100 million, and he, after she had spent a full two weeks preparing for the fundraising, suddenly decided to refuse. The rest of the team's reaction to this wasn't any better.

He called the fund, officially rejecting it. They didn't believe it either. Had you accepted someone else's term sheet? No. Hyperliquid isn't a company; it's a protocol. From day one, its neutrality was the most core thing.

「If Bitcoin had raised VC money back in the day,」 he said, 「I really don't think it would still be Bitcoin. Its most core value proposition would be completely destroyed.」

And besides, he didn't need the money. To this day, many of the team's expenses are still paid by Jeff himself.

On January 28, 2024, he tweeted four lines:

No investors.
No paid market makers.
Dev team doesn't take fees.
No insiders.

Hyperliquid has only one meeting every day: the morning stand-up. On my second day in Singapore, I witnessed this meeting. The team gathered around a screen with an engineer. Above the screen sat a plush dragon. At that moment, they were testing a new feature called portfolio margin, and almost all the discussion was about "where things could go wrong." But for a long time, it wasn't really a conversation. Jeff would cross his arms, lower his head, and stare at his bare feet in thought. The engineer standing next to him did the same. The silence was neither awkward nor brief, and no one in the room found it strange.

This meeting atmosphere, in part, is due to personality. The team is very young, ranging from 24 to 31 years old, and almost everyone is an extremely intelligent introvert. But when I asked Jeff afterwards if he usually read a lot, his answer made me feel that things weren't just as simple as "shy."

「By the most optimal standard in most people's eyes, I read much less.」 He adjusted his dark-framed glasses, smiled, and said, 「If a book is really going to get into you in a way that permanently changes you, it actually takes a lot of time. In terms of time return on investment, it's not that worthwhile.」

He gave a slight chin raise—a small gesture I would later become familiar with—almost as if someone on a plane trying to equalize the pressure in their ears. One particular risk of young tech people is that sooner or later they will tell you: they don't read. So when Jeff then added that he probably reads a book every two months, and also looks forward to sitting down one day to finish all the books he hasn't read yet, I actually felt relieved. Then he continued to explain why reading more books at the moment had to wait.

“If you are not the first person to do something,” he said, “then most likely it's not worth your time to do it. That's really how I think. Acting on this premise, reading doesn't really help. Because if what you are doing already has enough background material readily available, it has probably already been done. Since it has been done, why should you do it?”

By the end of 2023, Hyperliquid encountered a problem in the crypto world that had a well-established pattern. And Jeff, as in the previous times, had no interest in following that script.

A project's token in crypto means that holders can share in the project's success. Who gets the token first, and under what conditions, is usually distributed through a “point system.” The project team announced that user behavior on the platform would earn points, and everyone assumed that these points would eventually be exchanged for tokens. As a result, a large number of people rushed in, trying to hoard as many points as possible before the exchange took place.

The issue is that the majority of those who actually rushed in cannot really be considered “users” at all. They are professional rug pull teams who reverse-engineer the points formula, use automation strategies to maximize returns, and then leave. The group of users who were truly intended to be rewarded can only pick up the scraps left behind by them.

Hyperliquid's version was launched on November 1, 2023. Users traded on the platform and accumulated points weekly, but this plan did not have a public formula. No one knew exactly how it worked. Every Friday, iliensinc would announce the points for the week, and then a kind of fixed ritual emerged: users stared at Discord, waiting for her account to start showing “typing,” then they all rushed out to compare how much they had received, sharing screenshots, and speculating on how the entire system calculated points.

“Rewarding real users is crucial,” Jeff said, “it's hard to define, but Hyperliquid's points system may have reduced the proportion of ‘professional farmers’ from 99% to 20%.”

Around this time, those market makers that Jeff refused to pay directly finally began to enter the scene one by one. One of them was one of the largest market makers on Binance. After FTX, he was especially cautious of all new trading venues. But he had several mutual acquaintances who spoke highly of Jeff. In September 2023, at a conference in Singapore, he met Jeff and iliensinc for the first time.

"Jeff is very ambitious, but not arrogant," the market maker told me. "He was very restrained when describing what he wanted to do, and almost all the key points aligned."

He messaged the team as soon as he stepped out the door: we should integrate.

Two weeks later, they went live officially.

And when the market maker actually integrated, he found many thoughtful details buried in the platform that only traders would notice. Hyperliquid built in a "speed bump" that made it harder for the most aggressive quant firms to snipe other market makers. Later on, this mechanism was widely copied across the industry. The result was that market makers could provide deeper liquidity without having to push themselves to the edge of latency competition to survive. Jeff was essentially proactively sacrificing some exchange volume — the volume generated by market makers sniping each other — in exchange for better execution prices for regular users.

This trade-off would reduce Hyperliquid's own revenue.

It was also at that conference — Token2049 — that Jeff and iliensinc decided to relocate the team. Jeff told me that the regulatory outlook for crypto derivatives in the U.S. was too uncertain, and continuing to build there felt like an unnecessary risk. A lawyer I interviewed described that period as the U.S. regulators "utilizing nearly every tool in their arsenal to push this technology out of the US." iliensinc weighed between Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Singapore, finally settling on Singapore. It was modern, secure, and there were not too many distractions.

By the spring of 2024, the team had all moved. Jeff liked it here because the city-state was "boring" enough. His life had only two modes: work and exercise. He swam, ran, anything that would exhaust him without risking injury was fair game. This principle stemmed from an accident he had while riding a moped in Puerto Rico, leaving him scarred on his face and unable to sit back at a keyboard for a full week. Exercise existed only to clear his mind so he could go back and keep building. His only leisure concession was Sunday mornings. The rest of the week belonged to Hyperliquid. He even cut his own hair because, after all, going to a barbershop would also take time.

He did not see anything unusual about this. Or more accurately, he felt that most people's approach to work was unusually lax.

"I think people, on the whole, are a bit too soft," he said. "The brain is also an organ. If you need to work longer, you can train yourself to do it."

He had already learned not to impose this set of demands on the team. Everyone would have lunch together every day at noon, sitting around a black wooden table like a family. Every Thursday, they would eat Chipotle. Since there was no Chipotle in Singapore, they handed the menu recipes to the chef, who now prepares the food. Lunchtime conversations would usually drift to what everyone had been watching or listening to lately. Whenever this happened, Jeff would often fall silent, wearing a look that suggested he was thinking about something else—and most likely, he was indeed thinking about something else.

It was also that spring when Hyperliquid's perpetual contract daily trading volume had exceeded $1 billion, and the underlying infrastructure began to creak under pressure. One afternoon, the alarm system went off, and it kept blaring. The platform couldn't handle the influx of new users. This was Hyperliquid's first downtime. But what people outside the office truly cared about was the upcoming Hyperliquid token.

In May, Jeff posted a roadmap for the next six months on Twitter. It was filled with various technical ambitions. Not a single word mentioned the token.

In the months prior, Hyperliquid had expanded from derivatives to spot trading. The first spot token it listed was called Purr, named after that cat. Launching spot was a necessary step: to issue the Hyperliquid token, the team needed a spot market to trade it. But this also introduced a problem that a perpetual exchange had never faced. When trading perpetual contracts, no one actually needs to hold the underlying asset; you're just betting on the price. But with spot trading, someone has to custody the assets. And this was exactly what Jeff didn't want to do. The whole point of the system was for users to have control over their own assets.

To address this issue without acting as a custodian, he realized he had to stop viewing Hyperliquid as a "blockchain-based exchange" and instead understand it as a "blockchain with built-in exchange functionality." The chain the team had previously built to run the exchange was already capable of processing hundreds of thousands of orders per second; if made programmable, it would become an open system: anyone could write code on it, build financial apps, just as thousands of developers had long done on Ethereum. The difference was that Ethereum was too slow to run a proper exchange, which was why Jeff had initially set out to build his own chain.

If this chain were opened up, assets could be brought into Hyperliquid through decentralized cross-chain bridges secured by the protocol itself, without the need for any single party to custody them. And anyone building an app on this programmable layer could directly tap into the exchange's order book and all the liquidity already pooled there. Developers could create lending platforms, stablecoins, mobile trading apps, all plugging into the same market—where institutional players quoted liquidity in the billions of dollars daily.

Jeff doesn't like analogies. He will tell you that Hyperliquid has no true equivalent in traditional finance; people always try to shoehorn new things into old categories instead of understanding them for what they are, which is a mistake. But for those of us who are not Jeff, this is like Amazon originally creating cloud services to support its e-commerce platform, only to later realize that the cloud service itself might be bigger than the marketplace. The wording Jeff first used on that Twitter was: Hyperliquid will underpin the entire financial system.

He actually didn't want to take this step. He told me that subconsciously he never wanted to give himself this additional task. Integrating a virtual machine into Hyperliquid is a massive undertaking; the team has no idea if it's feasible and doesn't know how much work needs to be done from scratch. But at some point, it became too obvious: if they didn't do this, they would spend the next few years cobbling together components that were "sort of like Binance and sort of like Ethereum," ending up not like either and ultimately regretting it.

The community was furious. What they expected was an airdrop, but what they got was a tweet discussing infrastructure upgrades. In many of those top comments, there were references to a meme from "Breaking Bad": "We had something good going for us." "I hate this. You've betrayed us." Users don't want just another blockchain; they want money. Xulian, the person who joined the team after a user interview that was supposed to last only 15 minutes but dragged on for an hour and a half, took a lot of the heat.

"Jeff is thinking long-term," he told me, "we really don't care if something doesn't look good right away."

According to iliensinc, the loudest complainers eventually got tired. For the next six months, the team focused on advancing the spot market, building the programmable layer, conducting tests on a separate network, and preparing for the staking mechanism. Then, on November 29, a Friday, the HYPE finally arrived.

Hyperliquid airdropped 31% of the total token supply to around 94,000 early users. There were no conditions attached, and no unlocking period. If you had ever used the platform and earned points, then that morning you woke up, your wallet was already filled with tokens, richer than the night before. By the opening price, this airdrop was worth over $1 billion; at the all-time high, it reached a value of $16 billion. This was the largest wealth transfer in cryptocurrency history, and every dollar of it flowed to the users.

The team's own allocation is 23.8%, even smaller than the community share, and is vested over multiple years. On the airdrop day, they didn't receive a penny. VCs didn't receive anything either. If they want to hold this token, they can only buy it on the open market at the same price as everyone else, and the only place to buy is Hyperliquid because the token is not listed on any other exchanges. Listing elsewhere also incurs a cost; they didn't pay.

That morning, Jeff didn't need to explain much on Twitter.

"Woke up to find I received a mid-six-figure airdrop," one user wrote.

Another replied, "Today, HYPE changed my life. This money is enough to live comfortably for many years, help my family, and continue to participate heavily in the bull market."

Someone else wrote, "A seven-figure airdrop, thanks Jeff, blessed by the divine."

"I feel really good," Jeff told me, "most of the time, those who truly support something early on often can't share in its later upside and don't get meaningful ownership. But this time is different."

I asked him, how does it feel now that everything has such a public price tag.