- ZERO VC money
- $42B valuation
Here’s how he reshaped DeFi — and what’s coming next👇🧵
1/ Jeff Yan finished college at Harvard in 2017, studying Math and Computer Science.
He landed a top job at Hudson River Trading, a big name in high-frequency trading.
2/ In 2018, he left traditional finance to try something new in crypto.
He started building a decentralized prediction market and raised some funding.
But the idea didn’t take off — people weren’t interested in predictions, they wanted to trade tokens.
3/ So Jeff went back to trading, this time in the crypto world.
He started small, but by 2020, his team became one of the top trading groups on major crypto exchanges.
4/ When FTX collapsed, Jeff didn’t just complain — he saw it as a sign that crypto needed true decentralization.
That’s when he started thinking about building a better solution.
5/ He realized that existing decentralized exchanges (DEXs) weren’t good enough for serious traders.
They were either too slow or too expensive.
So he decided to build a completely new system from the ground up.
6/ Instead of using Ethereum or existing Layer 2 solutions, Jeff and his team built their own blockchain focused on speed.
It came with an on-chain order book that worked faster than most other platforms.
This new exchange was called Hyperliquid — and it was designed to compete with giants like Binance.
7/ While others raised money from investors and gave out free tokens, Hyperliquid kept things quiet.
No venture capital, no airdrops, no special deals.
Just a solid product that attracted users through performance alone.
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