Eleven people. Over $900 million in profit last year. Zero venture capital dollars ever taken. That's Hyperliquid's 2025 report card. Founder Jeffrey Yan, 31, is a physics Olympiad gold medalist, Harvard math grad, and former Hudson River Trading quant. He once ran Chameleon Trading from a San Juan apartment using the living room TV as a monitor, clocking thousands of percent annual returns. When FTX collapsed in November 2022, he told his six-person team: we stop trading. He saw the endpoint of centralized exchanges, but no existing blockchain could handle the order-book matching required for perpetual futures—each order modification needed gas and block confirmation. So they spent three months building a custom layer 1 from scratch. Hyperliquid went live in February 2023.
From a TV screen to a perpetuals juggernaut
After FTX's fall, Yan moved to Puerto Rico where he wrote Python bots connecting crypto exchanges with just $10,000 in capital and often 100-hour weeks. Chameleon Trading multiplied his net worth rapidly. But he saw a bigger problem: the original vision of Satoshi was being buried by the crypto industry itself. In late 2022, he and his team audited every blockchain and found none fit for high-frequency order books. They built their own. In May 2023, Yan launched HLP (Hyperliquidity Provider), a on-chain vault that paid out 100% of profits to depositors with zero fees. "For the first time in human history, anyone can access top-tier HFT strategies with zero fees," an early user told Colossus journalist Dom Cooke.
Rejecting $100 million: 'If Bitcoin took VC, it wouldn't be Bitcoin'
VC money came knocking in January 2024. After two weeks of talks, Yan set a condition: $1 billion valuation or nothing. A fund matched it, offering roughly $100 million. He asked friends and the VC himself: what's the point of financing? No answer convinced him. Monday morning he told co-founder iliensinc: "We're not taking it." She swore. He called the fund and declined. They thought he'd taken another offer. He hadn't. He posted on X: No investors. No paid market makers. No fees to the dev team. No insiders. "If Bitcoin had taken a VC round," Yan said, "I genuinely don't think it would be Bitcoin. The whole value proposition would be destroyed." He still pays many team expenses out of pocket.
Airdrop, Jelly Jelly attack, and the October stress test
On November 29, 2024, the HYPE token airdrop went live—31% of supply to 94,000 early users, no conditions, no vesting. Worth $1 billion at open, it peaked at $16 billion, the largest wealth transfer in crypto history. The team took 23.8%, linearly unlocked over years, and got zero on airdrop day. VCs who wanted HYPE had to buy it on market like everyone else.
In March 2025, an attacker exploited the obscure token Jelly Jelly: price surged 500% in an hour, HLP lost $12 million. Hyperliquid's ~24 independent validators voted to delist Jelly Jelly and settle all contracts at pre-attack prices. Every legitimate position was made whole; only the attacker lost. Critics asked: 24 validators overriding market price—is that decentralized? Yan doesn't dodge: the set is deliberately small for upgrade speed but will grow.
On October 10, 2025, Trump announced 100% tariffs on Chinese goods. A record $19 billion in leverage was liquidated, 1.6 million traders wiped out. Hyperliquid ran without downtime or withdrawal freezes; HLP handled billions in liquidations and earned $40 million. But because its chain is transparent, media reported Hyperliquid as having the highest liquidation volumes—only because it was the most honest.
Full year 2025 result: $900 million profit. Zero dollars to the team. 99% of it automatically converted to HYPE and burned.
Yan refuses to build an in-house policy team. In April 2026, the Hyperliquid Policy Center launched as an independent nonprofit, led by veteran crypto lawyer Jake Chervinsky, with $28 million in HYPE seed funding. The largest external deployer, Trade[XYZ], has grown 38% weekly since October 2025, now offering silver, crude oil, and S&P 500 futures (under official S&P Dow Jones license). When the US bombed Iran in February 2026, CME closed for the weekend; Hyperliquid's crude oil volume jumped from $21 million to $3.7 billion in a single day.
"Have strong confidence that you're on the right direction, then execute the current step well even if you don't know where the endpoint is." Yan compares it to Go, not chess: you don't try to read the entire tree; you build intuition for the next move. At 31, he's turned a three-month custom blockchain into a public financial rail doing $400 billion monthly volume, seamlessly absorbing the risk of global oil pricing when CME is closed. He knows he's not yet above the sky. But at some level, he's already looking down.