The physics prodigy built the quietest giant in the cryptocurrency world.
Written by: Thejaswini MA
Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News
Jeff Yan has a fondness for chameleons. But it’s not the metaphor of "blending into the environment" that captivates him; rather, it’s his affection for the animal itself. His Twitter handle is @chameleon_jeff (note: chameleon is the English word for 变色龙), and in a recent podcast, he explained his obsession: chameleons can independently turn their eyes in different directions, "with two claws forward and three claws backward, showcasing a very interesting evolutionary trajectory," and they possess powerful tongue projection abilities. "They are a bit like aliens on Earth," he said.
This opening may seem strange, but it helps you understand the man. He built one of the world's largest trading platforms with just a team of 10 people and zero venture capital funding.
In the past 12 months, Hyperliquid's trading volume has reached $1.8 trillion. The platform accounts for over 10% of global perpetual futures trading and over 70% of perpetual contract trading volume on decentralized exchanges (DEX). More than 200,000 active users trade daily on the platform, generating hundreds of millions in revenue.
Jeff Yan did not initially intend to create one of the largest decentralized exchanges in the world. However, in less than two years, he achieved that. Jeff identified problems that others overlooked and solved them.
Systems thinker.
Jeff Yan's journey in cryptocurrency began in Palo Alto, California, where he grew up in the heart of Silicon Valley. Unlike many of his peers focused on creating consumer internet companies, Jeff was deeply interested in the intersection of mathematics, physics, and complex systems.
In 2013, when most high school students were busy worrying about prom, Jeff had already represented the U.S. at the International Physics Olympiad and won a gold medal. Such achievements were enough to get him into any top university and even receive a pile of job offers before graduation.
It was only natural for him to attend Harvard University to study mathematics and computer science, and after graduation, he immediately joined Hudson River Trading. In this extremely secretive high-frequency trading firm, people could earn millions just by being a few microseconds faster than others.
"I learned a lot about the markets and how to think rigorously about them," Jeff said. At HRT, he focused on solving complex problems that combined engineering and mathematics. He learned how to build low-latency systems capable of executing thousands of trades per second. He understood how market makers provide liquidity and how different types of trading flows affect market efficiency.
After working at HRT for a few years, he saw an opportunity and turned to explore the cryptocurrency space.
In 2018, he attempted to build a Layer 2 prediction market platform, even raising some funds and moving to San Francisco to assemble a team. However, that attempt ultimately failed due to regulatory uncertainty and low user acceptance, which led to its demise. This also taught Jeff valuable lessons about what cryptocurrency users truly want.
After his prediction market platform failed between 2018 and 2022, Jeff Yan shifted his focus back to trading. Initially, he treated cryptocurrency trading as a side venture and quickly discovered severe inefficiencies in the market. He recognized this opportunity, scaled up, and founded the cryptocurrency market-making company Chameleon Trading in early 2020. During the bull market, the company rapidly grew to become one of the largest market makers for centralized crypto exchanges, establishing Jeff's reputation in quantitative trading.
Then, FTX had its troubles.
In November 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried's empire collapsed, and the exchange, once seen as a star of the future in cryptocurrency, fell apart. Remember the $135 million naming deal with the stadium? They had celebrities like Tom Brady and Larry David endorsing them.
"We witnessed the problems at FTX," Jeff recalled, "People realized that cryptocurrency was initially a fun game, but it stopped being so when some bad things happened."
Jeff witnessed billions of dollars evaporate overnight, simply because users entrusted their funds to a centralized platform. While most would see this as a warning to stay away from cryptocurrency, Jeff saw it as a challenge.
Building rockets in the garage.
The obvious solution is to build a decentralized exchange that can compete with large centralized exchanges. The idea is simple, but nearly impossible to achieve.
Every blockchain Jeff examined had issues. Ethereum was too slow; Layer 2 solutions added latency; Solana was relatively fast but still insufficient for high-volume trading. All options required compromises, ultimately leading to exchanges being worse off than they are now.
So, Jeff made a reasonable decision: driven by the hard need for user experience, he decided to build his own blockchain from scratch.
The end result is Hyperliquid—a blockchain specifically designed for trading, capable of processing 200,000 transactions per second and achieving near-instant finality. Users can utilize up to 125x leverage across more than 145 different markets while ensuring their funds are secure.
Most startup stories revolve around raising $50 million from top venture capital firms and then recruiting hundreds of engineers to scale. However, Jeff's approach was different. He funded development with the profits from his trading company and kept the team lean, with only 10 people.
"We started from scratch," he said, "No need for funding, so the decision was simple."
Jeff believes that venture capitalists holding large stakes in decentralized networks will become a "scar on the network" and harm its long-term development.
This self-sustaining approach allowed Jeff to focus entirely on creating products that users love, without having to cater to investors' expectations. This also led to one of Hyperliquid's most innovative features: when the platform launches the HYPE token in November 2024, 31% of the token supply will be directly distributed to users based on their trading activity. This is one of the largest user-centric token distributions in the cryptocurrency space. The remaining tokens will be allocated for future community rewards (38.88%), core contributors (23.8%), foundation (6%), community grants (0.3%), and a small amount for protocol upgrades (0.012%).
This token distribution model is feasible because Jeff did not sell equity to venture capitalists, otherwise, they would demand priority allocations. By remaining independent, he can prioritize community ownership over investor returns.
When Hyperliquid launched in 2023, there was no press release, no collaborations with KOLs, and no billboards in Times Square. Jeff simply opened the doors and waited for the future.
This led to explosive growth that caught everyone off guard. Within 100 days, the daily trading volume reached $1 billion. By mid-2025, the monthly trading volume is expected to reach $2.48 trillion, putting Hyperliquid on par with Binance and Coinbase.
In just two years, Hyperliquid grew from zero to over 545,000 users.
"We don’t have a marketing department," Jeff admitted, "I think our community does a fantastic job, better than all those marketing departments at centralized exchanges."
This is not luck. The entire platform Jeff designed revolves around aligning incentive mechanisms with users, rather than extracting value from them.
This approach is so radical that other exchanges may not even be able to replicate it, especially when you've already raised hundreds of millions from venture capital, as you can't just give away most of the tokens to users.
Ecosystem
Although Hyperliquid initially started as a perpetual futures exchange, Jeff's vision was always more than just simple trading. In early 2025, the platform launched HyperEVM, an Ethereum-compatible virtual machine that allows developers to build financial applications directly on Hyperliquid's blockchain.
The ecosystem is developing rapidly: the mortgage debt position protocol Felix currently manages over $400 million in assets, while the lending protocol HyperLend manages $380 million. Jeff indicated that the ultimate vision is to centralize all financial operations on one platform.
The problem Jeff discovered is common across all cryptocurrency exchanges: experienced high-frequency traders would use bots to quickly buy or sell before market makers had even updated their quotes after posting prices. As a result, market makers were forced to widen spreads to protect themselves, and ordinary traders ended up paying higher fees.
Hyperliquid addressed this issue by lowering the priority of fast "market-taking" orders. Instead, the platform provides market makers with a fair opportunity to update prices, meaning lower spreads and better prices for all users.
The platform's order matching engine employs a price-time priority mechanism with additional rules for smooth execution. Under specific conditions, the priority of special orders like cancellations and limit orders can be higher than regular orders, meaning market makers can respond to new information and adjust quotes, avoiding being sniped by fast traders.
This subtle shift encourages market makers to quote tighter spreads as they are less likely to suffer losses from delayed arbitrage. Ultimately, everyone on the platform benefits from better prices and increased liquidity. All of this happens on-chain, making the process transparent, allowing users to see fairer and more consistent results.
This technical depth might be why professional traders (the ones most sensitive to execution quality), despite having access to every centralized exchange in the world, still choose to use Hyperliquid.
What will happen next?
However, Jeff faces an interesting question: how to scale a 10-person company handling trillions of transactions?
His solution, as always, is counterintuitive: instead of hiring more staff, he creates tools that allow others to build applications on Hyperliquid.
"If something can be done by someone else, it should be done by someone else," Jeff said. "We can hardly do anything. I think this is actually a blessing in disguise."
The platform recently launched a permissionless market creation feature, allowing anyone to create new trading markets by staking HYPE tokens. However, a threshold of 1 million HYPE tokens (worth tens of millions of dollars) means not everyone can access this service. For users who meet the threshold, developers can retain 100% of the fees from their created markets, something no traditional exchange can offer.
Jeff is also in talks with sovereign wealth funds to build financial infrastructure, but he is unwilling to disclose specific countries. The goal is to prove that decentralized systems can handle the scale and complexity of national financial systems.
In July 2025, Nasdaq-listed biopharmaceutical company Sonnet BioTherapeutics announced its entry into the cryptocurrency space, establishing an entity valued at $888 million, focusing on holding HYPE tokens. This deal would make the newly renamed Hyperliquid Strategies Inc. the company holding the most HYPE in the U.S. public markets.
In an industry filled with grand promises to change everything, Jeff built something simple yet effective. No high-profile claims of "serving the unbanked," no grand visions of "Web3 changing the world," just a platform that traders genuinely love to use.
"We focus on creating products that users love," Jeff explained, "Everything else is secondary."
This approach seems to be effective. Hyperliquid currently handles over 10% of global cryptocurrency derivatives trading, operating with just a team of 10 people and no marketing budget. For Jeff, this was just another engineering problem to solve.
