Jeff says Hyperliquid is trying to build infrastructure for all financial activity
Jeff, co-founder and CEO of Hyperliquid Labs, said the project’s core strategy is to build tools that can eventually support all financial activity. He made the remarks in an interview on Blockworks’ Empire podcast, hosted in this episode by BlockWorks research analyst Shaun Da Devens. The episode, titled Hyperliquid: Building the House of All Finance, aired on Oct. 7, 2026.
Jeff said the goal is not to stack feature upon feature. Instead, Hyperliquid is trying to refine a small number of primitives that can combine cleanly with one another. He cited portfolio margin as an example, saying it allows lending primitives to connect naturally with trading primitives such as perpetuals and spot markets.
The host noted that Hyperliquid has shipped a series of products this year, including HIP-4 for outcomes-style payoff structures, portfolio margin, native lending built on top of that framework, and write priority fees, while HIP-3 Star is already running on testnet. Jeff said those pieces fit into the same broader plan: if builders want to create something and cannot do it on Hyperliquid, they will build somewhere else.
From perpetuals to spot, lending, and a broader set of primitives
Jeff described Hyperliquid’s path as starting with a high-performance Layer 1 focused on perps, then expanding into spot, outcomes, and native lending. He said that process does not really have an endpoint. Performance constraints will always exist, in his view, but he called that a good problem to have because each order-of-magnitude increase in usage unlocks new possibilities while creating new engineering challenges.
Shaun Da Devens said the market often takes time to understand the significance of what Hyperliquid ships. He used HIP-3 as an example, saying people in crypto could already see during the testnet phase that it could permissionlessly list any asset through price oracles, but broader recognition only came after Tradex.xyz and Shoku showed what execution could look like. Jeff said many of Hyperliquid’s primitives are similar in that they contain larger stories that have not yet been written, with the missing piece being execution by builders. He pointed to HIP-4 as one such case, saying options-like products can ultimately be built and scaled on top of it.
The host also said HIP-3 has taken open interest in real-world assets from $300 million at the start of the year to $3.9 billion now, a 13x increase. Comparisons from outsiders have shifted from AVO and DYDX toward CME and Nasdaq. Jeff said no analogy is perfect because there is nothing else in the market doing exactly the same thing, and he sees that as a positive sign. He said Hyperliquid is closer to public infrastructure such as the internet or Linux than to a conventional competitor. “We’re not here to replace anyone. We’re here to empower them,” he said.
HIP-3 Star adds optional controls, with Payward publicly signaling interest
On HIP-3 Star, the host said it allows deployers to list their own markets, as HIP-3 does, but adds permission controls such as whitelists. Kraken parent company Payward has publicly said it wants to use the framework to open Hyperliquid to U.S. users once it receives regulatory approval.
Jeff said HIP-3 Star is essentially a distilled set of changes based on builder feedback, adding optional switches on top of an already solid base. He argued that transparency, self-custody, and redundancy are positive properties under any regulatory framework. In his view, the feature does not remove anything. It adds options for institutions and individuals that want to build on top of the system.
He also repeated a broader point about market structure: “There is no real distinction between decentralized finance and traditional finance. There is only finance itself. HIP-3 Star just gives institutions and people a choice. It doesn’t take anything away. It is purely additive.”
Priority fees and the attempt to internalize the costs of latency races
Shaun Da Devens said one underappreciated update has been Hyperliquid’s priority fee system. It has two parts: read priority fees, which let traders stream unconfirmed order flow from the mempool, and write priority fees, which let orders attach HYPE to move ahead in queue. About 180,000 HYPE has been burned so far, according to the interview.
Jeff said he would not describe the mechanism as a bribe. He compared it instead to the way Ethereum later turned priority fees into a protocol-level burn, arguing that “bribe” is a label inherited from an older system and that the old framework is toxic. The point, he said, is to help markets clear more efficiently. A trader’s real alpha should not be overwhelmed by an advantage in microwave towers or transoceanic fiber.
His argument was that Hyperliquid is internalizing what would otherwise be zero-sum, or even negative-sum, externalities from latency competition, while allowing anyone to trade on more equal terms with minimal infrastructure.
Jeff defends transparent order books and public market data
The host raised the current debate around privacy and transparency and cited research comparing hidden and publicly broadcast TWAP execution on Hyperliquid. The result, he said, was counterintuitive: public TWAP execution performed better because market makers had time to absorb the flow. He asked whether a private layer should be built on top.
Jeff said his view may be controversial. Before electronic trading, he said, participants in trading pits competed on who could shout louder or physically dominate the space. Electronic markets changed that by making the full book visible to everyone. In his view, when everyone can see the order book, the order book itself becomes more liquid. He called that a clear win for transparency and openness.
He said order books should not be run by a privileged centralized intermediary, and that a globally neutral financial system should not place that power in one set of hands. Hyperliquid, he said, has kept its order book onchain from day one, even exposing the address behind each resting order. He added that the data already exists in traditional markets as well; the real difference is who can access it and who gets privileged treatment. That is why, in his view, making the data public is the fairer approach.
“When everyone can see the order book, the order book itself becomes more liquid. This is a clear victory for transparency and openness,” Jeff said. He added: “The order book should not be run by some privileged centralized intermediary. A truly globally neutral financial system should not concentrate that power in one hand.”
If he had to start again, Jeff says he would look at options
When asked what he would build if he were a builder rather than an infrastructure founder, Jeff said he would focus on areas that have not yet been built out but still have large potential. His answer was options.
He said perpetuals already satisfy many users, but some traders want to express more complex market views. HIP-4, in his telling, offers a clear route for building options protocols because it inherits the spot order book and portfolio margin while also allowing delta hedging through perp venues.
Jeff said convex payoff products reached escape velocity long ago in traditional finance, but crypto still has not seen that category truly take off. That is why he sees options as the next major unlock.
The host noted that HIP-4 is often framed as a way to bring prediction-market style products onto Hyperliquid, but Jeff said its value goes beyond that. The real unlock comes from composability inside one ecosystem, where perps, spot, and outcomes sit together.
Spot markets, asset issuance, and the ceiling for portfolio margin
Jeff said the next obvious step is to complete the trio of spot, perps, and options. Spot, he said, would be a major unlock, but its network effects are harder to bootstrap because simply holding an asset is not itself an economic activity. Tokenizing real-world assets is also harder than tokenizing only the price exposure through perps.
He added that the upper bound for portfolio margin depends on the quality of assets supported onchain, which makes a high-quality asset issuance layer necessary. One year ago, he said, HIP-3 barely existed and now it dominates discussion. By the same logic, spot and options could become central topics a year from now.
How Jeff measures success
Asked how he measures success as an infrastructure builder, Jeff said he looks more at qualitative signals than at raw metrics. What matters to him is whether something genuinely new, something that did not exist before, is being built and then used by real people because they prefer it.
He said infrastructure exists to be used and built on. His advice to the community was to stay humble and remember that the original purpose is to help end users rather than get trapped in the mindset of defeating rivals.
Jeff also used a Go analogy to describe building Hyperliquid: “Working on Hyperliquid is a lot like playing Go. You can’t calculate every outcome. You can only look one, two, maybe three moves ahead with high conviction, then keep going on instinct.” Speaking about the community, he added: “Three years ago, it was just an idea and a small group of people working day and night.”
The interview summary and translation were credited to TechFlow, and the podcast source was Empire by Blockworks.