Author: Zen, PANews
The world's most profitable company per capita has changed hands, but it is still a crypto project. Recently, HyperliquidFR announced that the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid has become the world's most profitable company per capita with an average annual revenue of US$102.4 million per employee, surpassing Tether, OnlyFans, Nvidia, and Apple. Previously, stablecoin issuer Tether ranked first with an average revenue of more than US$90 million per person. According to DefiLlama data, the Hyperliquid team has only 11 core members, and the annual revenue is estimated to be approximately US$1.127 billion.
In the cryptocurrency industry, which is full of get-rich-quick myths, there are many stories of project parties earning a lot of money and young founders transforming into cryptocurrency tycoons. But cases like Jeff Yan and his Hyperliquid, who can create such scale and efficiency with a small team, are still rare. By taking a glimpse, looking back at Jeff's family growth, educational background, and career experience, we can see that the emergence of Hyperliquid and its development path may not be accidental.
From Top "Test Taker" to Decentralized Exchange Founder
Jeff Yan was born and raised in Palo Alto, California, and his parents were both Chinese immigrants. In his teenage years, Jeff began to show a strong mathematical talent. In 2012, Jeff won a silver medal in the 43rd International Physics Olympiad (IPhO), and at that time, he had only focused on physics research for about a year. In 2013, Jeff participated in the 44th International Physics Olympiad again, and finally won the gold medal and ranked 24th, which is also the first time that his alma mater Palo Alto High School has a graduate achieve such great results in this top competition.
Jeff Yan (right 4) with other members of the US and Swiss teams
As a top "test taker", Jeff also successfully entered Harvard University, majoring in mathematics and computer science. After graduation, Jeff joined the high-frequency trading giant Hudson River Trading (HRT) as a quantitative trader. At HRT, he studied the US stock market in depth, designed low-latency systems that could execute thousands of transactions per second, and gained a deep understanding of how market makers provide liquidity and how different trading flows affect market efficiency.
In 2018, Jeff was attracted by the emerging cryptocurrency industry. He tried to build an Ethereum Layer-2 prediction market platform, but failed due to regulatory uncertainty, limited applications, and a lack of users. After learning from his experience, he refocused his attention on trading. Combining his work experience, he founded the cryptocurrency market-making company Chameleon Trading in early 2020. During the bull market, Chameleon Trading quickly grew into one of the largest market makers in centralized exchanges.
Until November 2022, the FTX exchange exploded, shocking the world. "People realized that cryptocurrency was originally a fun game until something bad happened," Jeff recalled. After witnessing billions of dollars evaporate overnight due to users trusting centralized platforms, many people regarded it as a "quitting" signal and began to stay away from cryptocurrencies, and the industry has since fallen into a long-term downturn. However, Jeff saw challenges and opportunities.
Jeff realized that ordinary users would value self-custody more and tend to trade crypto assets in a decentralized manner. At the same time, they found that the market lacked a trading platform that combined decentralized principles with a high user experience. Based on this judgment, Hyperliquid's core concept came into being: to create a high-performance perpetual contract exchange that is "completely on-chain", allowing users to enjoy a trading experience close to that of a centralized exchange while retaining control of their assets - Hyperliquid can theoretically process 200,000 transactions per second, and the platform supports multiple markets and high leverage.
Self-funding and Streamlining: Jeff Yan's Small Team Strategy
In traditional entrepreneurial stories, start-up teams usually start running around to seek funding and resources from venture capital companies after showing their unicorn potential, and start to expand their team size crazily. This kind of script is rare even in the Web 3 and cryptocurrency industries, which are known for decentralization. And Jeff and Hyperliquid are the exception.
Jeff emphasized that Hyperliquid's development is completely self-funded and has never accepted venture capital. He said that he is not starting a business for wealth. In his opinion, "money is just a number", and what is more important is to create valuable and meaningful products. Jeff believes that instead of constantly raising venture capital in exchange for milestone publicity, it is true progress to let users experience actual value.
Therefore, Hyperliquid has implemented the concept of "community-led ownership" from the very beginning: distributing tokens directly to users through user transactions, and never letting venture capitalists control the network. As Jeff said, "Letting venture capitalists hold a large stake in a decentralized network will become a 'scar on the network'." His vision is to build a financial system that is "built by users and belongs to users."
In terms of team building, Hyperliquid has always maintained a "small and refined" strategy. The core team currently has only 11 people, about half of whom are engineers, and the rest are responsible for product and operations. The team maintains a flat and efficient working atmosphere. Jeff gives the team full autonomy in management, but is always actively involved in the technical aspects and understands everything. Hyperliquid insists on light asset operation and does not have a separate marketing department or traditional business development team.
In the early days of the business, Jeff and other members went through various difficulties in the early stages of the project and cooperated well with each other. This is due to the fact that Jeff has always adhered to the principle of "excellence" in talent recruitment. He admitted that he is very picky about every partner who joins the company, because "hiring the wrong person is even worse than not hiring anyone." Although he is willing to expand the team appropriately as the business grows, he always insists on only absorbing those who are "extremely smart, motivated, and truly passionate about this business."
Jeff said in an interview: "We are not like those common teams in the cryptocurrency field. They have grand long-term visions, raise a lot of money, and develop a multi-year roadmap. I think this approach is cool, but it's not our strength." Jeff claims that the team is more focused on the next step they need to take and believes they are moving in the right direction, but will not create a plan that includes hundreds of steps.
How did Hyperliquid rise?
Hyperliquid's technical architecture is completely different from traditional DEXs. It is a fully on-chain matched decentralized perpetual contract exchange, rather than an AMM model like Uniswap. The Hyperliquid team has created a high-performance Layer-1 blockchain (named "Hyperliquid") to give it a trading throughput capacity close to that of a CEX. Based on this, Hyperliquid has realized complete order book matching - limit orders, transactions, cancellations, and liquidations all occur transparently on the chain and can be completed within a single block. Some analysis pointed out that by June 2025, Hyperliquid had occupied approximately 78% of the on-chain derivatives market, with a daily trading volume of more than US$5.5 billion.
Hyperliquid's matching engine also introduces special rules: the platform deliberately reduces the priority of high-frequency "taker" market orders, giving market makers the opportunity to update their quotes. This encourages market makers to quote tighter bid-ask spreads, thereby providing traders with better pricing. Under this price-time priority and strategically smooth matching mechanism, all transactions are executed on the chain, and the entire process is completely transparent to users. This complex matching rule and decentralized execution are favored by professional traders.
Regarding liquidity, Hyperliquid has established protocol-level HLP: a mixed fund pool that combines market making and liquidation functions. The HLP vault is owned by the protocol, and any user can deposit funds to participate in market making. When there is no match in the order book, HLP will act as the counterparty to complete the transaction. Jeff emphasized that in addition to 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 a design to ensure fairness and transparency.
In addition, Hyperliquid's decentralized design is also reflected in its token economy. The native token HYPE, on the one hand, serves as a network governance tool, and on the other hand, staking can reduce transaction fees, and a listing repurchase mechanism is set up to capture value. When the HYPE token was launched in November 2024, Hyperliquid airdropped 31% of the tokens to approximately 94,000 users, one of the largest user-centric distributions in recent years.
From the beginning, Hyperliquid began to grow exponentially. With its fully on-chain transparent characteristics, Hyperliquid has successfully attracted the participation of a large number of crypto whales and top institutions. All of its transaction, position, and margin data are publicly available. This unprecedented transparency not only establishes a strong foundation of trust, but also becomes its most eye-catching business card. The frequent entry and exit of well-known trading institutions and capital giants not only brings huge liquidity, but also implicitly "endorses" the platform, making it rise rapidly in the derivatives track.
When it was launched in 2023, the platform's daily trading volume exceeded US$1 billion in less than 100 days without overwhelming marketing or KOL promotion. A DWF research article stated that Hyperliquid's crypto perpetual contract trading volume in July 2025 was approximately US$320 billion, and the protocol revenue reached US$86.6 million, both of which set historical best data. Hyperliquid stated on the X platform on August 15 that the platform has reached a new milestone, with a 24-hour trading volume of US$29 billion and a fee of US$7.7 million.
According to a new report on Hyperliquid released by data provider RedStone, Hyperliquid has captured more than 80% of the decentralized perpetual contract market in just one year, comparable to some of the largest centralized exchanges. These amazing figures have also made Hyperliquid hailed as "on-chain Binance" by the community. And all of this was achieved with a team of only a dozen people and zero marketing budget.
