Hyperliquid, at the center of the cryptocurrency storm: a leverage tool without investors

A decentralized exchange with only approximately 11 employees, no external investors, and no board of directors is rapidly rising to become a cryptocurrency giant with a daily trading volume exceeding $13 billion, leveraging the anonymity and high leverage it offers traders. This platform, called Hyperliquid, has achieved annualized revenue exceeding $1 billion while being entirely self-funded. Its unique model and enormous market influence are making it the center of the latest controversy in the cryptocurrency world. According to a recent report from Theinformation, Hyperliquid has become a focus of attention during the recent cryptocurrency market crash for processing over $10 billion in forced liquidations. This incident has also brought this exchange, which is little-known outside the crypto market, into the public eye. Further spurring market scrutiny was the discovery that just minutes before US President Trump's significant tariff announcement triggered market volatility, two user accounts on the Hyperliquid platform precisely placed large short-selling bets. This coincidence immediately sparked intense speculation about insider information behind the anonymous transactions, highlighting the potential risks posed by the platform operating in a regulatory gray area. Despite the controversy, Hyperliquid continues to grow rapidly. Its trading volume has reached 10% of similar products on Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. Founded by Harvard graduate Jeff Yan, the platform is attracting investors from retail investors to large institutions with its unique token economic model and disruptive ambitions for traditional finance. Hyperliquid's rise is inextricably linked to its founder, Jeff Yan's technical background and personal vision. The founder, who grew up in Silicon Valley and graduated from Harvard University, was a gold and silver medalist in the International Physics Olympiad and briefly worked at Hudson River Trading, a high-frequency trading firm in New York. The collapse of the FTX exchange inspired him to create Hyperliquid, a decentralized platform where users can self-custody their assets. People familiar with him describe Jeff Yan as a highly skilled and ambitious technical expert. He has built a lean but efficient team around him. Hyperliquid's website shows that most of its core members remain anonymous or use pseudonyms, such as co-founder "iliensinc" and market strategy lead "Xulian." Team members hail from top universities like Caltech and MIT and have experience at renowned companies like Citadel and Airtable. This structure gives Jeff Yan significant autonomy. "He doesn't have a board of directors, he doesn't have investors calling him up and telling him what to do," says David Schamis, the incoming CEO of Hyperliquid Strategies, a publicly traded company that plans to hold Hyperliquid tokens. "That's great because he can focus completely on his mission."

HYPE Token: A $10 Billion Growth Engine That Turned Down VCs

Hyperliquid's most distinctive feature is its growth model. Rather than following the traditional path of seeking venture capital for startups, it rejected investment offers from top VC firms including Paradigm and Founders Fund. Instead, the platform is bootstrapping by issuing its own HYPE token. “When Hyperliquid was first starting out, the standard approach was to raise big rounds of funding from venture capitalists to generate hype,” Jeff Yan told the Wu Blockchain podcast in August. “But that always felt a bit fake to me. It wasn’t real progress.” Hyperliquid successfully attracted a large number of users through an “airdrop,” distributing 31% of the total token supply for free to users based on their trading volume. The platform also used most of its trading fee revenue to buy back HYPE tokens from the market, reducing supply and driving up the price. This strategy has been incredibly successful: the price of the HYPE token has soared from $3.90 at its launch in November last year to $38 today, with a circulating market capitalization of approximately $10 billion, making it one of the most successful token launches in history. It's reported that nearly all well-known crypto funds, such as Paradigm, a16z, and Pantera, now hold HYPE tokens. Hyperliquid's core appeal to traders lies in its two key features: anonymity and high leverage. The majority of the platform's trading volume comes from perpetual swaps—highly leveraged derivatives with no expiration date, which are unavailable on regulated US platforms. Because Hyperliquid only provides trading software and doesn't act as a broker, it doesn't require user identity verification. It was precisely this anonymity that caused a stir during the market volatility on October 10th. Minutes before Trump's significant tariff announcement, which triggered market volatility, two anonymous accounts made precise short bets that yielded huge returns. Matt Zhang, founder of the cryptocurrency fund management company Hivemind, noted, "Hyperliquid benefited from the fact that there was a large population seeking anonymous transactions." In the subsequent market crash, high leverage became an accelerator of the sell-off. According to CoinGlass data, the crypto industry experienced its largest-ever liquidation that day, totaling at least $19 billion. Hyperliquid alone was responsible for forced liquidations of over $10 billion. While forced liquidations are a standard risk control measure for exchanges, their sheer scale undoubtedly exacerbated market panic. Because Hyperliquid is globally unregulated, users have very limited recourse. "The Exchange of Everything": The Ambition from Crypto to Traditional Finance Jeff Yan's vision extends far beyond cryptocurrency. He hopes Hyperliquid will "accommodate all finance," allowing people to launch a variety of investment products on its blockchain. Alvin Hsia, co-founder of Ventures, said this reflects their vision of "becoming the exchange for everything." In the future, users may be able to trade not only crypto perpetual contracts, but also public stocks, indices, private equity, and even interest rates. This vision appears to be gradually becoming a reality. A company called Trade.XYZ recently launched a perpetual contract for a stock index on Hyperliquid. The platform is also beginning to attract attention from traditional financial markets.