**How a Harvard Grad Helped Make Hyperliquid the Biggest New Player in Crypto—with Just 11 People and No Venture Funding**

The alarm jolted Jeff Yan awake at around 5:00 a.m. It was a ringtone designed to—among other scenarios—blare out when something abnormal occurs on Hyperliquid, the decentralized crypto exchange he had cofounded. And on this morning in early October, things were very abnormal indeed.

Crypto traders saw more than $19 billion in leveraged positions—or bets where investors wager more capital than they have on hand—evaporate after President Donald Trump threatened China with another round of tariffs, according to data from the crypto analytics site CoinGlass. “I’m just looking at it and praying that it’s good,” Yan said, referring to his exchange’s systems.

Within one hour, using his “every brain cell” to analyze the data, he was confident that the platform had worked as intended—surviving a stress test where thousands of traders lost money and others who were shorting the market cashed in. In coming weeks, the crypto industry would come to refer to the wipe-out of Oct. 10 as a flash crash, one that was the largest liquidation event ever tracked by CoinGlass and an episode whose fallout still reverberates throughout the industry two months later.

It was also one of the clearest signs yet that Hyperliquid had grown to become a crypto juggernaut. According to CoinGlass, the platform liquidated more than $10 billion worth of positions that day, a figure that far outstripped the $4.6 billion and $2.4 billion liquidations that took place on longtime crypto exchanges Bybit and Binance, respectively.

Big exchanges like Binance and Coinbase have thousands of employees. By contrast, Hyperliquid Labs—the company that supports the associated crypto exchange and blockchain of the same name—had just 11. Yet, in just over two years, Hyperliquid is competing with the industry’s very biggest names, posting about $140 billion in derivatives volume in the past month, according to data from the analytics site DefiLlama.

This has translated into more than $616 million in annualized revenue, while the cryptocurrency linked to its blockchain (known as HYPE) has grown to one of the largest in the industry with a market capitalization of almost $5.9 billion, according to data from the crypto analytics site DefiLlama.

Yan wants Hyperliquid to become even bigger. “It’s something that no one else is really trying to build exactly at this point in time,” he said, “which is something that can really upgrade the financial system.”

**A Quiet Leader**

The crypto world has long been defined by flamboyant and outspoken figures. Yan doesn’t fit that mold. Sporting black-rimmed glasses, trim black hair, and usually wearing crisp shorts, he said he is uneasy in the limelight.

“This sort of celebrity is foreign to me,” he said, referring to how it felt to be mobbed at a recent crypto conference in South Korea. While willing to chat about his background, he stressed repeatedly that Hyperliquid is an ecosystem, not a one-man operation.

**A Whiz Kid Turned Crypto Visionary**

Born in the Bay Area, Yan’s is your prototypical whiz kid. In high school, he won gold and silver medals at the International Physics Olympiad and then attended Harvard University, where he studied mathematics and computer science.

“He was always just very calm and very thoughtful,” said Vladimir Novakovski, a fellow Harvard graduate who interviewed Yan for an internship at Addepar, a wealth management software company. (Novakovski would later go on to create a competing exchange to Hyperliquid.)

**No Venture Funding, Just Vision**

Around the time Yan graduated from Harvard, the notorious crypto conman Sam Bankman-Fried was making a name for himself. Bankman-Fried had spun up his own crypto trading firm Alameda Research and was simultaneously growing FTX, his own crypto exchange that specialized in perpetuals, or derivatives that let traders bet on the future price of assets without holding the assets themselves.

Yan and his team stayed away from FTX, preferring to trade on platforms like Coinbase. “Alameda and FTX, their relationship was not clear to me,” he said. “And it felt like it wasn’t worth the risk of exposing any part of our funds or strategies to that kind of unclear relationship.”

FTX was a black box. Bankman-Fried plowed billions of dollars in customer funds into ostentatious real estate purchases, risky venture investments, and political lobbying campaigns. Only after FTX declared bankruptcy did customers see how much of their capital Bankman-Fried had gambled away.

**A New Era for Crypto Trading**

Yan wanted to create a more transparent trading platform for crypto perpetuals, or “perps.” He and his team had thought about building their own decentralized exchange prior to the collapse of FTX, but the “FTX thing solidified my conviction that it was the right time to build this thing,” he said.

He was far from the first founder to dream up a decentralized crypto trading platform. There are a handful of others, like dYdX, that offer crypto derivatives to risk-hungry traders who don’t want to venture onto centralized exchanges like Coinbase.

**Competition and Regulation Loom**

Now, the ecosystem is attracting interest beyond anonymous crypto traders. Large venture capital firms like Paradigm and Andreessen Horowitz have taken positions in Hyperliquid’s HYPE cryptocurrency, reported The Information.

And even Wall Street and large companies are taking notice. The fintech giant PayPal posted about Hyperliquid on social media as a crop of companies vied to launch a Hyperliquid-branded stablecoin on the blockchain.

As Hyperliquid wrestles with the evolving competitive landscape, regulatory environment, and making good on Yan’s ambitions to reinvent the foundations of finance, the DeFi founder will likely continue to build out his team. That’s why he announced in late October he was hiring to expand the staff at Hyperliquid Labs by almost 30%—from 11 to 14 employees.