Author: Zen, PANews
The title of the world's most 'lucrative' company has changed hands, but it remains a crypto project. Recently, HyperliquidFR claimed that the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid generates an average revenue of $102.4 million per employee annually, surpassing Tether, OnlyFans, Nvidia, and Apple, ranking first in global companies in terms of revenue per employee. Previously, the stablecoin issuer Tether held the top position with over $90 million in revenue per employee. Additionally, according to data from DefiLlama, the Hyperliquid team has only 11 core members, with estimated annual revenue of approximately $1.127 billion.
In the cryptocurrency industry filled with myths of getting rich quickly, it is not uncommon for project teams to rake in profits and for young founders to transform into crypto billionaires. However, cases like Jeff Yan and the Hyperliquid he founded, creating such scale and efficiency with a small team, are still rare. A closer look at Jeff's family upbringing, educational background, and career experience reveals that the emergence of Hyperliquid and its development path may not be coincidental.
From top 'problem solver' to founder of a decentralized exchange
Jeff Yan was born and raised in Palo Alto, California, to Chinese immigrant parents. From a young age, Jeff began to exhibit strong mathematical talent. In 2012, he won a silver medal at the 43rd International Physics Olympiad (IPhO), despite having only focused on physics research for about a year. In 2013, Jeff again participated in the 44th International Physics Olympiad and ultimately won a gold medal, ranking 24th—this was the first time a graduate from his alma mater, Palo Alto High School, achieved such a remarkable result in this top competition.
Jeff Yan (right 4) poses for a photo with other members of the American and Swiss teams.
As a top 'problem solver', Jeff successfully gained admission to Harvard University, majoring in mathematics and computer science. After graduating, Jeff joined high-frequency trading giant Hudson River Trading (HRT) as a quantitative trader. At HRT, he conducted in-depth research on the U.S. stock market, designed low-latency systems capable of executing thousands of trades per second, and gained a deep understanding of how market makers provide liquidity and the impact of different trading flows on market efficiency.
In 2018, Jeff was attracted to the burgeoning cryptocurrency industry. He attempted to build an Ethereum Layer 2 prediction market platform, but it ended in failure due to regulatory uncertainties, limited applications, and a lack of users. After gaining experience, he refocused on trading, and combined with his work experience, he founded the cryptocurrency market-making company Chameleon Trading in early 2020. During the bull market, Chameleon Trading quickly grew to become one of the largest market makers among centralized exchanges.
Until November 2022, the collapse of the FTX exchange shocked the world. 'People realized that cryptocurrency was originally a fun game until some bad things happened,' Jeff recalled. After witnessing billions of dollars evaporate overnight due to user trust in centralized platforms, many saw it as a signal to 'abandon the pit' and began to distance themselves from cryptocurrencies, causing the industry to fall into a prolonged slump. However, Jeff saw challenges and opportunities.
Jeff realized that ordinary users would place greater emphasis on self-custody and tend to trade crypto assets in a decentralized manner. At the same time, they found that the market lacked a trading platform that balanced decentralized principles with a high user experience. Based on this judgment, the core idea of Hyperliquid emerged: to create a 'fully on-chain' high-performance perpetual contract exchange that allows users to enjoy a trading experience close to centralized exchanges while retaining control over their assets—Hyperliquid theoretically can handle 200,000 transactions per second, supporting multiple markets and high leverage.
Self-funding and streamlining: Jeff Yan's small team strategy
In traditional startup stories, initial teams usually showcase their unicorn potential and then start running around seeking funding and resource support from venture capital firms while rapidly expanding team size. This script is rarely an exception even in the decentralized Web3 and cryptocurrency industry. However, Jeff and Hyperliquid represent that exception.
Jeff emphasized that the development of Hyperliquid was entirely self-funded and has never accepted venture capital. He stated that he did not start a business for wealth; to him, 'money is just a number,' and what matters more is creating valuable and meaningful products. Jeff believes that rather than continuously seeking venture capital for milestone publicity, allowing users to experience real value is true progress.
Therefore, from the very beginning, Hyperliquid has adhered to the concept of 'community-led ownership': distributing tokens directly to users through trading, never allowing venture capitalists to control the network. As Jeff said, 'Allowing venture capitalists to hold large stakes in a decentralized network will become a scar on the network'; his vision is to build a financial system 'constructed by users and belonging to users.'
In terms of team building, Hyperliquid has always maintained a 'small but elite' strategy, currently with a core team of only 11 people, about half of whom are engineers, while the rest are responsible for product and operations. The team maintains a flat and efficient work atmosphere. Jeff grants the team ample autonomy in management but remains actively involved in technical aspects, staying informed about all developments. Hyperliquid insists on operating with light assets, with no separate marketing department or traditional business development team.
In the early stages of the startup, Jeff and other members experienced various challenges together, working harmoniously. This is attributed to Jeff's persistent principle of 'striving for excellence' in talent recruitment. He admits to being very picky about every partner who joins, as 'hiring the wrong person is even worse than not hiring anyone at all.' While he is willing to expand the team appropriately as the business grows, he insists on only bringing in those who are 'extremely smart, ambitious, and truly passionate about this endeavor.'
Jeff once stated in an interview: 'We are not like the common teams in the cryptocurrency field; they have grand long-term visions, raise large amounts of money, and formulate multi-year roadmaps. I think that approach is cool, but it's not our strength.' Jeff claims that the team focuses more on the actions needed to be taken next and believes they are heading in the right direction, but they do not create plans that include hundreds of steps.
How did Hyperliquid rise?
Hyperliquid's technical architecture is completely different from traditional DEXs. It is a fully on-chain matching decentralized perpetual contract exchange, rather than an AMM model like Uniswap. The Hyperliquid team specially built a high-performance Layer-1 blockchain (also named 'Hyperliquid'), giving it trading throughput close to centralized exchanges. Based on this foundation, Hyperliquid achieved complete order book matching—limit orders, trades, cancellations, and settlements all occur transparently on-chain and can be completed within a single block. Analysis indicates that by June 2025, Hyperliquid had captured about 78% of the on-chain derivatives market, with daily trading volume exceeding $5.5 billion.
Hyperliquid's matching engine also introduces special rules: the platform intentionally lowers the priority of high-frequency 'taker' market orders to give market makers the opportunity to update quotes. This encourages market makers to offer tighter bid-ask spreads, thereby providing better pricing for traders. Under this price-time priority and strategically smooth matching mechanism, all trades are executed on-chain, and the entire process is completely transparent to users. Such complex matching rules and decentralized execution have attracted professional traders.
Regarding liquidity, Hyperliquid established a protocol-level HLP: a hybrid fund pool combining market-making and clearing functions. The HLP treasury is owned by the protocol, and any user can deposit funds to participate in market-making. When there are no matches in the order book, the HLP will act as the counterparty to complete the transaction. Jeff emphasized that, apart from HLP, Hyperliquid has not signed any private agreements or funding arrangements with any market-making institutions. In other words, Hyperliquid does not designate internal fund pools or market makers like some centralized exchanges; the only liquidity supply comes from the open HLP, which is also designed to ensure fairness and transparency.
Moreover, Hyperliquid's decentralized design is also reflected in its token economy. The native token HYPE serves as a governance tool for the network and can reduce trading fees through staking, with a buyback mechanism to capture value. When launching the HYPE token in November 2024, Hyperliquid airdropped 31% of the tokens to about 94,000 users, making it one of the largest user-centric distributions in recent years.
From the very beginning, Hyperliquid began to experience explosive growth. With its fully on-chain transparency, Hyperliquid successfully attracted a large number of crypto whales and top institutions to participate. All transaction, position, and margin data is publicly accessible, and this unprecedented transparency not only established a strong trust foundation but also became its most impressive business card. The frequent entries and exits of well-known trading institutions and capital giants not only brought enormous liquidity but also, in an intangible way, provided 'credit endorsement' for the platform, allowing it to rapidly rise in the derivatives sector.
When it launched in 2023, without extensive marketing or KOL promotions, the platform's daily trading volume exceeded $1 billion in less than 100 days. A DWF research article stated that Hyperliquid's crypto perpetual contract trading volume in July 2025 would be approximately $320 billion, with protocol revenue reaching $86.6 million, both setting historical records. Hyperliquid announced on August 15 on the X platform that it set a new milestone, with 24-hour trading volume reaching $29 billion and fees amounting to $7.7 million.
According to a new report on Hyperliquid released by data provider RedStone, in just one year, Hyperliquid has captured over 80% of the decentralized perpetual contract market, comparable to some of the largest centralized exchanges. These astonishing numbers have led the community to refer to Hyperliquid as the 'on-chain Binance'. And all of this was achieved with a team of only a dozen people and zero marketing budget.
