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One of the most surprising stories in the crypto industry over the past two years comes from a small team based in Singapore, which has only about ten employees for a long time.

This company, established only three years ago and with a market value of ten billion dollars, has never taken a penny from venture capitalists. Last year, its 11 employees generated more than nine hundred million dollars in profit, making it one of the highest profit per capita companies in the world.

A Founders Who Does Not Mix in Social Circles, Propel, or Speak Out

The story of Hyperliquid revolves almost entirely around one person—Jeff Yan.

Jeff's parents are Chinese immigrants. His parents divorced when he was in the third grade, and he was raised by his mother, who was an accountant. His mother often worked overtime during tax season and reminded him that "there are always people stronger than yourself." Jeff represented the United States in the International Physics Olympiad, winning a silver medal in Estonia in 2012 and a gold medal in Denmark in 2013.

He graduated from Harvard's computer science program in 2017, then went on to work as an algorithm developer at high-frequency trading firm Hudson River Trading. In early 2020, he shifted to the crypto field and founded the market-making firm Chameleon Trading, eventually partnering up to create Hyperliquid.

The name Chameleon comes from his gaming ID during high school and his fascination with the animal. He sincerely admires chameleons and has explained in a podcast that their eyes can move independently in different directions, with "the two front toes facing forward and the two back toes facing backward," and they possess a powerful tongue that can spring out like an "alien on Earth."

Before Hyperliquid, Jeff lived in Puerto Rico, almost single-handedly running one of the largest anonymous trading operations in the crypto field, Chameleon Trading. At the end of 2019, he moved to Puerto Rico, starting market-making with ten thousand dollars. Over two and a half years, his fund grew by thousands of percentage points annually, allowing him to achieve financial freedom by the age of 27.

The founder's personal style is rather extreme. Jeff is not driven by money, living a minimalist lifestyle. He wears the same outfit every day, cuts his hair himself to save time, works at least 14 hours a day, sometimes reaching 100 hours a week, believing that most people are "generally too soft." Due to the increased publicity as the founder of Hyperliquid, after being followed into an apartment elevator, he began taking strict security measures, including moving, hiring bodyguards, and being accompanied by two private security personnel when going out.

According to a senior crypto executive who knows both Jeff and SBF, Yan has a more refined, professional, and sincere image—"Jeff gets his hair cut, SBF doesn’t," and "SBF's shorts are too long and ill-fitting, Jeff looks clean and sharp." This contrast from appearance to behavior compared to the era of FTX has also become part of the narrative surrounding Hyperliquid.

Hyperliquid founder Jeff

Predecessor

Jeff first became involved in prediction markets. In April 2018, influenced by the rise of crypto and Ethereum, he co-founded the blockchain-based prediction market Deaux in the Binance Labs incubator, which attempted an off-chain matching + on-chain settlement design, but ultimately failed to gain traction, only attracting about 100 users before shutting down.

The real first pot of gold came from Chameleon. In May 2023, Yan integrated strategies validated over the years into an on-chain vault called HLP (Hyperliquidity Provider), where users could deposit ten dollars or ten million dollars, with no management fees or performance fees. The vault operated automated strategies, and all profits from every dollar belonged to the depositors, with all accounts on-chain—if FTX had been built this way, Alameda's hole would have been visible to the whole world.

HLP is key to understanding Hyperliquid. It provides liquidity to exchanges while offering ordinary users a zero-cost "high-frequency strategy entry."

An early user described that regular people can invest in high-frequency trading strategies with no fees, which is a first in history.

"I would have been willing to pay Jeff a 2% management fee plus a 50% performance fee to enter this strategy."

Starting in the second half of 2023, users traded on the platform and accumulated points weekly. The points calculation rule remained confidential and was announced every Friday by iliensinc. Community members gathered weekly on Discord to compare their harvests about this aspect.

Jeff later stated, "Rewarding real users is key," and the points project "may have reduced the robot ratio from 99% to 20%."

In January 2024, Yan published a four-line declaration

No investors.

No paid market makers.

No fees to the dev team.

No insiders.

It formally established the project's neutral stance. The HYPE token airdrop was completed on November 29, with part of the team's allocation unlocked over time, and no shares distributed to investors.

"Don't involve VCs" became a product strategy

Hyperliquid's rejection of VCs is a well-considered strategy. Yan and the team decided not to seek VC funding, relying instead on the considerable profits they earned from their crypto trading business. Yan covered the costs himself, believing that "to build a truly credible and neutral platform for everyone to build on, an important principle is that there should be no insiders."

"We are self-funded, so the decision is straightforward."

This choice led to a subsequent effect: because they did not leave shares for VCs, the team was able to allocate almost all of the 31% genesis share to real users. When the platform launched HYPE, 31% of the supply was directly distributed to users based on trading behavior, making it one of the most user-centered distributions in crypto history. The rest was allocated for future community rewards (38.88%), core contributors (23.8%), foundation (6%), community funding (0.3%), and a very small amount for protocol upgrades.

Jeff decided not to sell equity to VCs, so the VCs naturally could not demand preferential shares, thus ensuring the implementation of this distribution structure.

CEX Experience × DEX Transparency (Boring Technical Part)

Hyperliquid is an independent Layer 1 chain designed specifically for trading, independent of ecosystems like Ethereum or Solana.

The network is protected by HyperBFT. This is a BFT protocol designed from the ground up for high latency and high throughput, capable of tolerating no more than two-thirds of staked shares being malicious nodes.

HyperBFT supports about 200,000 transactions per second, with a block time of 0.07 seconds. Holders delegate HYPE to validators, and the system selects 24 active validators from the amount staked. Every round of transactions needs to achieve more than a two-thirds quorum, and a 7-day unstaking queue is required to prevent large-scale consensus attacks.

The chain itself is divided into two layers. The complete execution state includes HyperCore and HyperEVM, both protected by HyperBFT. Every order, cancellation, execution, and settlement is completed on-chain with one block finality; Hyperliquid operates in a non-custodial mode, meaning the platform does not take custody of user funds; it is best known for perpetual and spot trading of cryptocurrencies, stocks, commodities, and foreign exchange, and users can also lend, issue, and transfer assets; HyperEVM is the Ethereum-compatible execution layer that allows users and developers to build applications using smart contracts.

HyperEVM enables DeFi applications deployed by external developers to directly connect to Hyperliquid's on-chain liquidity and order book, turning the exchange into foundational infrastructure that other projects can build upon, creating an open ecosystem platform. HyperEVM went live on February 18, 2025, allowing EVM smart contracts to access native trading liquidity directly without cross-chain bridges.

The matching mechanism itself is designed to prevent front-running.

Jeff identified a common problem: high-frequency traders utilize bot programs to quickly eat orders after market makers place them, forcing market makers to widen spreads for self-protection, resulting in higher costs for ordinary users.

Hyperliquid solves this issue by reducing the priority of quick order eating, giving market makers a fair chance to update quotes, leading to narrower spreads.

The matching engine uses a price-time priority principle and allows special orders like cancel-or-flip or post-only to take precedence over regular orders under certain conditions, ensuring that market makers can adjust quotes without being outrun by faster traders.

Hyperliquid Deep Dive: Understand HYPE and HLP Model

The Most Discussed Airdrop

The circulating supply of HYPE is 222 million, with a total supply of 1 billion; at current prices, the FDV is approximately 60.27 billion dollars; allocations include 38.89% for future release and community rewards, 31.00% for genesis distribution, 23.80% for core contributors, 6.00% for Hyper Foundation budget, 0.30% for community funding, and 0.01% for HIP-2 Hyperliquidity.

In November 2024, the airdrop distributed about 310 million HYPE, accounting for 31% of the total, which is one of the largest in terms of absolute quantity and USD value distributed to real users in crypto history.

The airdrop was completed on November 29, 2024, distributing HYPE to over 90,000 eligible users, which starkly contrasts with many projects that allocated a large amount of tokens to VCs.

The core contributors’ portion has a lock-up arrangement. Over 61% of the HYPE supply remains locked; the genesis distribution immediately issued about 310 million HYPE to early protocol participants and community members and reserved about 237 million for core contributors with a cliff period of one year plus a 24-month unlocking schedule.

Most allocations employ a cliff-style release mechanism, with the entire unlocking schedule continuing until 2027, the next unlocking scheduled for June 6, 2026, targeting core contributors.

The most critical design is the buyback. Hyperliquid uses 99% of the transaction fees for buying back HYPE, pushing the token price beyond 62 dollars; this buyback is executed as an on-chain mechanism automatically block by block, converting transaction fees into HYPE purchases, unaffected by market conditions; since its launch, the protocol has generated over 1.16 billion dollars in revenue, almost all used for buying back its own tokens, including 316.8 million dollars' worth of HYPE bought back in the third quarter of 2025.

This structure creates lasting buying pressure beneath the token; the underlying business remains robust, and Hyperliquid has become one of the leaders in decentralized perpetual exchanges, supported by real transaction fees without relying on inflation token incentives. However, this also brings risks—the price of HYPE is becoming increasingly closely linked to the trading volumes of a single exchange.

The total amount of HYPE is fixed at 1 billion, with over 70% allocated to the community, and 97% of the transaction fees directed towards token buybacks; the protocol has cumulatively generated 1.24 billion dollars in fees, with an annual income reaching 800 million to 1 billion dollars, placing it among the top fee generators in DeFi.

The buyback flywheel also has its vulnerabilities.

This relationship is bidirectional; as crypto activities cool down, buybacks also follow with declining revenues. Hyperliquid's quarterly buybacks have dropped from 316.8 million dollars in Q3 2025 to 192.3 million dollars in Q1 2026, a decrease of about 40% over two quarters; at the same time, more locked tokens will enter circulation, bringing potential selling pressure for the Assistance Fund to absorb.

From Developer Sandbox to Trillion Transactions

Hyperliquid's growth is not linear, it bursts forth upon opening. In 2023, Yan launched Hyperliquid on the self-developed L1, and the early versions resembled a developer sandbox but offered sub-second finality, on-chain order books, and a nearly Binance-like user experience. Within months, daily transactions surpassed 1 billion dollars, followed by monthly transactions exceeding 10 billion dollars.

By mid-2025, it directly competes alongside CEX giants.

In mid-2025, Hyperliquid's monthly transaction volume reached 24.8 trillion dollars, rivaling Binance and Coinbase. It took two years to grow from 0 to 545,000 users, and Jeff himself stated:

"We don't have a marketing department; the community does better than all the CEX marketing teams combined."

By early 2026, its market capitalization was pushed to another level.

HYPE is one of the top ten crypto assets by market capitalization, hovering around 11 billion dollars, less than two years since launch; on May 15, 2026, Bitwise listed BHYP, the first homegrown Hyperliquid spot ETF in the U.S. that includes staking.

On-chain growth is not solely driven by trading. In early 2025, the platform launched HyperEVM, allowing developers to build financial applications directly on the Hyperliquid chain, rapidly expanding the ecosystem, with the CDP protocol Felix managing over 400 million dollars in assets, and the lending protocol HyperLend managing 380 million dollars.

In the past 12 months, Hyperliquid's trading volume reached 1.8 trillion dollars, accounting for over 10% of the global perpetual contract total and over 70% of the DEX perpetual total. After opening in 2023, daily trading volume reached 1 billion dollars within 100 days; by mid-2025, monthly trading volume reached 24.8 trillion dollars, paralleling Binance and Coinbase. In just two years, the platform has amassed more than 545,000 users.

Jeff Yan seldom speaks publicly, does not engage in social media, and has never taken VC investments but is still included in CoinDesk's Most Influential 2025.

The Hyperliquid he founded processes approximately 10 billion dollars in transactions daily, with DefiLlama showing October's monthly trading volume reaching 308 billion dollars. The platform has over 570,000 users, matching the speed and stability of centralized platforms with its own chain.

Fee revenues create a fascinating contrast with Ethereum. Hyperliquid once surpassed Ethereum in weekly protocol revenue, 12.8 million versus 11.5 million dollars; it occupies about 70% of the perpetual contract market; as of February 10, 2025, the daily trading volume reached 470 million dollars, with cumulative trading volume nearing 1 trillion dollars; HYPE has increased over 500% since its airdrop on November 29, 2024, and the TVL reached 1.27 billion dollars.

What is Hyperliquid (HYPE): A Beginner's Guide

The Great Collapse and the General's Test (Loyalty!)

If only the good side is considered, Hyperliquid becomes a fairy tale. However, the two major liquidation incidents in March 2025 almost sent it into the intensive care unit.

The first involved a large ETH order. On March 12, 2025, a skilled trader or group of traders discovered a loophole in ETH perpetual, attacking during a timeframe of low market liquidity. They used 4.3 million dollars in USDC as collateral, opening a position with a face value of 200 million dollars at 50x leverage (the maximum leverage at the time, which has since been lowered to 20x), pushing the price of ETH on Hyperliquid up by over 3% relative to other exchanges.

At that time, HLP recorded a loss of 4 million dollars, but afterwards, due to market loss of confidence in Hyperliquid's risk management, HLP withdrawals exceeded 80 million dollars; the attacker exploited the platform's feature allowing the withdrawal of unrealized profits, amplifying the effect, a feature that mainstream CEXs like Binance typically do not offer.

Then, on March 26, a more severe JELLY incident erupted.

In March 2025, Hyperliquid was almost hit with a 12 million dollar capital loss as attackers took advantage of a loophole in the protocol’s liquidation mechanism, inflating the price of the JellyJelly token by 429%. The attackers established two long positions and one short position on JellyJelly, where the short was worth 4.1 million dollars, constituting a significant portion of its 25 million dollar market cap, with the two longs offsetting each other.

Subsequently, the attackers raised the JELLY price across various exchanges, causing it to surge over 400% within an hour, leading to deep floating losses in their own short position. According to Hyperliquid’s inheritance rules, HLP automatically took over this short position.

When the loss reached 12 million dollars, the validators quickly delisted the JELLY token and settled all positions at 0.0095 dollars (the price of the attacker’s short), while the listed price was 0.50 dollars at that time.

Reaching consensus among the validators within two minutes exposed a high level of centralization.

The attackers ultimately withdrew 6.26 million dollars from the 7.17 million dollars deposited, after which the protocol froze their withdrawals.

This incident quickly ignited industry criticism.

Bitget's CEO Gracy Chen referred to this move as "immature, unethical, and unprofessional," stating that "Hyperliquid might be heading towards FTX 2.0," suggesting this handling set a dangerous precedent, describing Hyperliquid as an "offshore CEX without KYC/AML disguised as an innovative decentralized exchange, facilitating illicit funds and bad actors."

On-chain investigator ZachXBT pointed out that Hyperliquid appeared indifferent to North Korean hackers using stolen funds on the platform, yet acted decisively during the JELLY incident.

"When Radiant hackers and DPRK funds involved thousands of victims, they said they could do nothing; when a low market cap PVP meme coin encountered problems, a few validators and the large proportion of staked Hyperliquid rushed to close positions at arbitrary prices. True decentralization remains rare in this space."

Former BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes also joined in the criticism: "If HYPE can't handle JELLY, stop pretending Hyperliquid is decentralized."

There is also a particularly intriguing aspect to the incident.

After Hyperliquid delisted the token, larger players entered the arena—Binance, the largest global trading volume exchange, saw an opportunity and announced the launch of JELLY futures, causing the spot price to surge 560%.

At the moment Hyperliquid was on shaky ground, Binance’s launch of JELLY perpetuals was interpreted by many as taking advantage of the situation. OKX and Binance both listed JELLY futures.

This move was termed "suspicious" by Blockworks analyst Boccaccio; while the exact motives were unclear, Hyperliquid was in distress at that time, making the incident "appear as an attack on Hyperliquid."

Following the incident, the Hyperliquid team responded positively, making a series of structural adjustments.

From then on, the proportion of the Liquidator Vault in the overall strategy of HLP was strictly limited to a small portion of the vault's total value, and the re-evaluation frequency was reduced; the OI cap formula was modified to directly consider the actual market value of assets and order book depth, preventing oversized positions in low liquidity assets; validators would gain on-chain voting rights to vote for delisting assets falling below volatility thresholds, suspected of manipulation, lacking volume, or making market-making difficulties.

a16z's Money and CZ's Shadow

Once Hyperliquid expanded, it inevitably attracted a batch of "copy Hyperliquid" projects, a phenomenon in the industry. What’s worth discussing are two of its most respectable competitors—Aster and Lighter.

First, Aster, which has very clear positioning. Aster is a rapidly growing DEX built on BNB Smart Chain, aimed as a primary competitor to Hyperliquid, with some daily trading volumes having surged into the tens of billions, occasionally exceeding Hyperliquid.

Its association with Binance co-founder CZ has attracted considerable market attention. Aster's momentum derives from its close ties to CZ, who serves as an advisor, and many in the industry directly call Aster "Binance's DEX." It has launched tokenized stocks, allowing users to leverage up to 1000x and plans to launch its own L1.

This combination makes Aster one of the boldest experiments in current DEX design.

Lighter, on the other hand, follows a different path.

Former Hyperliquid team member Novakovski later left to found Lighter, backed by Founders Fund, Ribbit Capital, David Sacks’s Craft Ventures, and a16z crypto.

The comparison with Hyperliquid is very subtle—one represents "refusal of VCs," while the other represents "top-tier Silicon Valley VCs." Lighter has become a go-to for institutions and smart money because of its low latency and gas-efficient order book layered on zk-rollup speed, offering standard accounts without maker/taker fees, allowing retail users to trade across markets at zero cost, and its points system hints at future airdrops.

In September 2025, a "coup" occurred.

A sudden shift of power occurred in the DeFi market, with Aster, just after launching its governance token, capturing nearly 70% of the global perpetual DEX trading volume. During this period, Hyperliquid's share briefly dropped to about 10%, tilting the market scale.

However, this momentum did not last long.

By January 2026, Hyperliquid regained its lead, with weekly trading returning to around 40.7 billion dollars, making it difficult for competing platforms to sustain their previously surged activity; by March 2026, Hyperliquid held over 70% of the perpetual DEX positions.

The difference mainly does not come from speed but from transaction quality. Hyperliquid holds approximately 9.57 billion dollars, far ahead; its "positions/trading" ratio is the healthiest in the field, unlike Lighter's artificially inflated trading designed for points, with 9.57 billion dollars in OI indicating this is capital that has genuinely been committed and will not flee once the rewards period ends.

Sharper judgments are beginning to emerge.

The "points for airdrop" model as a sustainable growth strategy is dying; the 2026 market no longer rewards temporary TVL but rewards technological moats and UI stickiness, and Hyperliquid’s L1 infrastructure still leads on these fronts.

When Wall Street Begins to Join

The story of Hyperliquid enters a "financialization" phase in the second half of 2025. It no longer stays within the realm of DeFi protocols, gradually connecting to mainstream entries such as stocks, ETFs, and SPACs.

The fastest route into compliance is through ETFs.

Bitwise has submitted an updated S-1 for the Hyperliquid ETF (code BHYP) to NYSE Arca, with an annual management fee of 0.67%.

On May 15, 2026, Bitwise launched BHYP, the first native Hyperliquid ETF that supports staking in the U.S.

The SPAC route is also halfway through.

In October 2025, Hyperliquid Strategies, a SPAC entity merged with Sonnet BioTherapeutics, submitted an S-1 to the SEC, planning to raise 1 billion dollars for a listing on NASDAQ, with the final entity trading under the stock code PURR, holding 12.6 million HYPE, planning to generate returns for shareholders through staking.

Stablecoins and compliance layers are also weaving new stories.

The USDH that Hyperliquid designed is a MiCA compliant, dollar-backed stablecoin, directing 95% of the reserve interest into HYPE buybacks, meeting EU Electronic Money Token (EMT) requirements and creating a sustainable cycle of "stablecoin yield → native token demand."

HIP-3 reduced fees by 90%, pushing TVL to 2.15 billion dollars, cooperating with licensed custodians like Anchorage Digital and Circle’s CCTP V2 to address institutional compliance and asset mobility issues.

A noteworthy hedge action is the supply reduction.

Starting at the end of 2025, about 23.8% of the HYPE supply will be gradually released over 24 months, potentially bringing selling pressure. Analysts warned that if staking or utility demand does not grow proportionally, the buyback absorption capacity may be offset. To address this, Hyperliquid proposed a 45% supply destruction plan, reducing the FDV from 49 billion dollars to 16 billion dollars, aligning with circulating supply.

On the institutional front, Yan announced an expansion at the end of October 2025, increasing the Hyperliquid Labs team from 11 to 14 people, an increase of nearly 30%. Nonetheless, this scale is still counterintuitively small compared to a company generating 900 million dollars in annual profit, considered a "quasi-NASDAQ company."

Some Juicy Tidbits While Writing This Article

The tales in the crypto circle have always been intertwined with gossip.

Lighter's Departure Drama. Hyperliquid's most dramatic "internal conflict" occurred after team member Novakovski left. His project Lighter, backed by Founders Fund, Ribbit, Craft Ventures, and a16z crypto—almost all VCs that Hyperliquid openly rejected—makes the combination of "the departing partner + top-tier VCs" the most direct rebuttal to Hyperliquid's "no VC model."

The Shadow of Binance. The relationship between Hyperliquid and the Binance group has always been a potential narrative. Aster, a "copy of Hyperliquid," closely aligns with Binance’s position. Additionally, during the JELLY short squeeze period, Binance and OKX opportunistically launched JELLY perpetual contracts, leading the external world to generally interpret it as "CEX wanting to strike DEX a blow." These actions amplify the potential losses for Hyperliquid, leading some users in the community to openly call for Binance to list the token to "deliver a fatal blow to Hyperliquid."

Lighter's Own Blowup. Lighter's launch was also not smooth. After 8 months of private testing, Lighter publicly launched its mainnet on October 1, only to face a major outage during the market crash on October 10, with the team later acknowledging that the system could not withstand the traffic and had to upgrade database capacity. Traders suffering about 50 million dollars in losses due to the downtime were compensated with Lighter points, redeemable for future airdrops. Subsequently, Lighter experienced a classic "airdrop hangover" after the TGE on December 30, with trading volume plummeting nearly 70% from its peak.

Internal Disputes within Aster. Recently, there has been friction in Aster's community, with token holders complaining about not receiving rewards; some accuse the ongoing airdrop plan of diluting token value; a more significant issue is that even with increased buybacks, the token price is still declining, leading to doubts about "whether the team is selling back the tokens bought through buybacks via another wallet."

Sun's Reverse Operation. While most people were selling off Lighter's airdrop, Justin Sun went against the grain, switching about 33 million dollars into approximately 13.25 million LIT, becoming one of the whale leaders within the Lighter ecosystem.

Security Anxiety. At the beginning of the report on Colossus, it mentioned a dawn on a Friday in January when a 43-year-old man in Saint-Léger-sous-Cholet, western France, was abducted from his home, beaten, bound, and thrown into a town 30 miles away; 12 hours later, three armed robbers kicked open the door of a family in Verneuil-sur-Seine, near Paris, subjecting the couple to beating and binding in front of their children, ransacking their home, marking the 70th such attack globally in less than a year. Yan has reportedly also begun to be very vigilant about personal and travel safety. This is an atmosphere that has been widely underestimated in the crypto circle from 2024 to 2026.

My Questions

Is decentralization a means or an end?

Jeff Yan has publicly stated, "I won't sacrifice speed for superficial decentralization." If gradual decentralization requires a 5-10 year timeline, will early users and investors buy into it? Will the market continue to give a "quasi-decentralized" protocol valuations akin to decentralized protocols?

Is Hyperliquid building an exchange or a financial system?

Jeff's answer is clearly the latter, but his actual product roadmap emphasizes "trading" far more than "financial infrastructure." HyperEVM is an important first step, but the lending protocols and stablecoins above it have yet to undergo a complete de-leveraging cycle test. In the crypto industry, there’s a significant distance between "looking like a financial system" and "performing like a financial system in a crisis."

How much bonus can James Wynn’s celebration bring?

To some extent, Hyperliquid's community culture is defined by a trader who "gambled 100 million dollars." The tension in this culture attracts the most extreme traders but also creates a scenario where "being completely wiped out is glorious." As KOL liquidations become a routine landscape, can the community's trading culture evolve from "degen frenzy" into a more sustainable paradigm?

If CZ really launched a dark pool perpetual contract DEX, where would the trading volume flow?

So far, Hyperliquid's full transparency—all positions and all liquidations are public on-chain—remain its proudest features but also the structural reasons it gets targeted and harvested by MEV. If a product emerges in the market that can protect the privacy of large traders while maintaining on-chain settlement efficiency, the "transparency-first" narrative would face a real challenge.

In Conclusion

Hyperliquid has achieved a leap that few projects in the crypto industry can attain in just three years: transforming from an idea into an independent chain, a product that trounces all competitors in the perpetual contract field, executing one of the largest community airdrops in history, and generating nearly 1 billion dollars in annual profit—accomplished by an 11-person team that refuses VC funding.

It has also accumulated enough controversy, attack, and criticism to make "Will it become FTX 2.0?" a topic of industry debate.

However, upon serious examination of these controversies, it can be found that Hyperliquid's transparency—from on-chain liquidation data to the real-time verifiable Assistance Fund balances—serves as a structural barrier preventing it from collapsing like FTX. Every liquidation by Hyperliquid can be verified by anyone, and every buyback is recorded on-chain.

This fundamental difference distinguishes a semi-transparent black box from a fully transparent system.

In an interview with Colossus, Jeff Yan stated:

"Money is really just a number. I'm not super materialistic. I don't actually care about money. For me, it's about doing something interesting and valuable to the world."

You can read this as hypocrisy, sincerity, or some form of elitist narcissism.

But the fact is, over the past three years, he has not taken VC money; he has given 31% of the tokens for free to users; he has directed 97% of the platform’s income towards token buybacks in the open market.

The next three years for Hyperliquid will answer a more fundamental question:

Can a financial system built at the intersection of high-speed, centralized technology and decentralized ideals find a time-tested balance between efficiency and security?

If it cannot, it will be a splendid experiment.

If it can, akin to how Steve Jobs redefined the mobile phone, Hyperliquid is reinventing the exchange.

I am Dax, a PM at an LLM factory, an old Web3 veteran, and a hackathon bounty hunter.

Feel free to follow my column and Twitter; I hope all is well with you.

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