In today's restless crypto market, few founders maintain the nearly "fundamentalist" clarity and restraint like Hyperliquid's Jeff Yan. This Harvard CS and math graduate, former Wall Street high-frequency trader, and international physics Olympiad gold medalist, leads a team of only 11 people, creating a financial infrastructure that dominates 70% of the global perpetual contract market without a cent of VC investment.

Listen to what Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan has to say_aicoin_img1

In this process, Jeff's way of thinking and values are more worthy of our inquiry than Hyperliquid's soaring trading volume and coin price. Below are key quotes from our recent interview with Jeff Yan. These impactful words may help us see the true direction of DeFi's future.

1. Tear off the disguise of VC and the company

In the crypto industry, taking money from top VCs seems to be "politically correct," but Jeff chose an entirely opposite path. He believes excessive capitalization can harm the long-term value of the protocol.

"I have never done this for the money. I think trading teaches you that money is really just a number."

"VCs often create an illusion of 'progress' by inflating valuations without providing real utility to users."

"If a bunch of VCs own 50% of the network, I do believe that this will always be a scar on the network itself. Ownership should be community-driven. Real progress is when users actually receive value, not when investors cash out early."

AiCoin Insights: Hyperliquid directly airdropped 31% of its initial tokens to real users, while the VC allocation was 0%. This zero-VC structure not only earned community trust but also eliminated the structural pressure caused by institutional unlocks in the secondary market, resulting in an exceptionally healthy token structure for HYPE.

2. Protocol fundamentalism: Eliminate human decision-making authority

Many projects see themselves as "companies," trying to manage market capitalization through management's "discretion" (like timing buybacks). Jeff harshly rebuked this practice of applying traditional financial logic to decentralized protocols.

"Hyperliquid is not a cryptocurrency company, but a financial protocol that upgrades financial infrastructure using cryptographic technology. It is a rules-based protocol, not a company that can make subjective decisions."

"Eliminating human decision-making authority is not optional, but a prerequisite for building a truly on-chain financial system."

"We are not at all a discretionary buyback program. Fees are automatically converted to HYPE and burned, which is an on-chain execution logic, not manual intervention. Many people misunderstand 'protocol-level automatic burning mechanisms' as 'company-level timing buyback strategies.'

AiCoin Insights: Hyperliquid automatically converts 97% of protocol fees to HYPE and burns them through on-chain smart contracts, akin to Ethereum's EIP-1559. It does not rely on team judgment but serves as the underlying rule of the protocol, ensuring transparent and efficient value capture.

3. A "decentralized Amazon" accommodating all finance

Hyperliquid's ambition is not limited to becoming an excellent crypto derivatives DEX but aims to be the underlying infrastructure for the entire financial system.

"Our vision is to enable the financial system itself to operate on the blockchain. Financial systems should be neutral, programmable, and globally open infrastructures like the internet."

"The financial system should not be fragmented. A user's entire financial life should be completed in one place."

"If we really want to move the entire financial system on-chain, we must let true 'domain experts' deploy and build these products. When a system centralizes everything, the risks also centralize."

AiCoin Insights: Through HIP-3 (permissionless perpetual contracts), Hyperliquid is breaking the bottleneck of CEX where "a single team lists all assets." Currently, its trading share of non-crypto assets (such as the S&P 500 and commodities) has significantly surged, indicating that Hyperliquid is successfully unbinding from a single crypto bull and bear cycle.

4. Extreme construction philosophy

Faced with competition and noise, Jeff exhibits a rare focus, stemming from his admiration for the "integration of Eastern and Western values."

"A very American way of thinking—daring to dream, believing that small teams can change the world—combined with traditional Eastern values of 'humility, doing more and saying less, and strong work ethic.'

"We do not have a marketing department. I think our community does a great job, better than all those marketing departments of centralized exchanges."

"You can win by doing less. Less hype. Less dilution. Less noise. More engineering. More fairness. More real users."

"In an era of accelerated AI development, if the financial system does not upgrade to an on-chain, programmable, open architecture, humanity will have no place in the future financial world."

Conclusion

From these quotes, we see a builder who refuses to compromise and insists on underlying logic. Jeff Yan has proven with Hyperliquid that in the crypto world, "doing the right thing" can still achieve tremendous commercial success.

As a professional crypto asset data analysis platform, AiCoin continues to track Hyperliquid's on-chain capital flows and primary large orders.

Through the AiCoin terminal, you can:

Real-time monitor HYPE on-chain buyback data: Grasp the deflationary effect brought by the AF mechanism accurately.
Track changes in HIP-3 non-crypto asset OI: Gain insights into the inflow trends of TradFi funds.
One-stop authorized trading: Seamlessly connect Hyperliquid through AiCoin and enjoy a smooth decentralized trading experience.

Actual operation is super simple:

Step 1: Open Hyperliquid BTC/USDC K-line in AiCoin

Listen to what Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan has to say_aicoin_img2