How a Harvard Genius Built Hyperliquid: The $5.9B Crypto Juggernaut That's Beating Binance

The 5 AM Wake-Up Call That Proved Hyperliquid's Dominance

Jeff Yan was jolted awake at 5:00 a.m. by an alarm designed to blare when something abnormal occurs on Hyperliquid, the decentralized crypto exchange he cofounded. On that October morning, things were indeed very abnormal.

That day, crypto traders saw more than $19 billion in leveraged positions evaporate after President Donald Trump threatened China with another round of tariffs. "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 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 refer to the wipe-out of Oct. 10 as a flash crash, one that was the largest liquidation event ever tracked by CoinGlass. It was also one of the clearest signs yet that Hyperliquid had grown to become a crypto juggernaut.

Hyperliquid's Stunning Market Performance

According to CoinGlass, the platform liquidated more than $10 billion worth of positions that day, far outstripping the $4.6 billion and $2.4 billion liquidations on Bybit and Binance respectively. (The $10 billion figure refers to the total amount of leveraged positions liquidated; actual trader losses were lower).

Big exchanges like Binance and Coinbase have thousands of employees. By contrast, Hyperliquid Labs had just 11. Yet in just over two years, Hyperliquid is competing with the industry's biggest names, posting about $140 billion in derivatives volume in the past month according to DefiLlama. This has translated into more than $616 million in annualized revenue, while the cryptocurrency linked to its blockchain (HYPE) has grown to a market capitalization of almost $5.9 billion.

But 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."

The Anti-SBF: Jeff Yan's Unlikely Rise

The crypto world has long been defined by flamboyant figures. Yan doesn't fit that mold. Sporting black-rimmed glasses and crisp shorts, he said he's uneasy in the limelight. "This sort of celebrity is foreign to me," he said, referring to being mobbed at a recent crypto conference in South Korea.

Despite his professed modesty, Yan has been integral to the protocol's rise. Born in the Bay Area, he's your prototypical whiz kid. In high school, he won gold and silver medals at the International Physics Olympiad, then attended Harvard University where he studied mathematics and computer science.

Around the time Yan graduated from Harvard, Sam Bankman-Fried was making a name for himself with FTX. Even as Bankman-Fried captivated the crypto industry, Yan and his team stayed away, 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."

Building After FTX's Collapse

FTX was a black box. Only after bankruptcy did customers see how much capital Bankman-Fried had gambled away. Yan wanted to create a more transparent trading platform for crypto perpetuals. He and his team had thought about building their own decentralized exchange prior to FTX's collapse, but the "FTX thing solidified my conviction that it was the right time to build this thing," he said.

Unlike Bankman-Fried, Yan cut an image that was more polished, professional, and sincere, according to a longtime crypto executive who's met both founders. "Jeff has cut his hair. SBF did not," they said. "SBF's shorts were too long and didn't fit. Jeff's look crisp and together."

And, as opposed to Bankman-Fried and countless other crypto founders, Yan and his team decided to eschew raising money from venture capitalists. They were already making a sizable amount from their crypto trading operation, and Yan decided to front the cost himself. "If we're going to build something that's really going to be a credibly neutral platform on which everyone else can build, then a really important principle is to sort of not have insiders," he said.

The Speed Advantage

In 2023, Yan and his team launched Hyperliquid and the blockchain on which the decentralized exchange is built. For months, volume grew steadily, but interest exploded in early 2025.

Hyperliquid is optimized for speed. For many traders, seconds mean the difference between profit or loss. "I'm the one user who keeps bugging the team to add more features, and they keep rejecting every feature that I ask for because they want to keep it extremely fast and extremely nimble," said Thanos Alpha, a pseudonymous Hyperliquid power user.

This speed, combined with engineering solutions that allowed Hyperliquid to accommodate larger trades than competitors, set it up for success.

Mainstream Adoption and Regulatory Challenges

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

Yan views Hyperliquid as the Amazon Web Services of financial infrastructure. Developers are independently deploying different assets to trade on the blockchain, including listings tied to the prices of stocks of major corporations like NVIDIA and Google.

Still, there's no guarantee that Hyperliquid will continue to expand, especially as competitors look to challenge its newfound dominance. That includes Vladimir Novakovski, who has since launched Lighter, his own competing crypto derivatives platform backed by Founders Fund, Ribbit Capital, and David Sacks' Craft Ventures. And then there's Aster, a Hyperliquid copycat closely aligned with Binance.

Moreover, Hyperliquid—like many crypto projects in DeFi—operates in ambiguous legal territory. Its users are all anonymous, and no one has to submit documentation to verify their identity. In fact, users linked to North Korea, which has an infamous crypto hacking operation, have traded on Hyperliquid, alleges Taylor Monahan, lead security researcher at MetaMask.

A spokesperson for Hyperliquid Labs said that the website screens traders for risky behavior and enforces sanctions compliance, adding that "any confirmed high risk activity on the application is immediately flagged and the addresses blocked."

And, if Hyperliquid continues to grow, the ecosystem may attract more regulatory scrutiny. "It's a big question about how long they will be allowed to operate in this non-KYC way," said a crypto market maker, referring to know-your-customer laws.

"We are proactively engaging with regulators and policy stakeholders to support greater clarity for decentralized finance," a Hyperliquid spokesperson said in response.

As Hyperliquid wrestles with the evolving competitive landscape, regulatory environment, and making good on Yan's ambitions to reinvent 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.