Hyperliquid Labs

In late 2019, Jeff Yan moved to Puerto Rico and began trading automatically on crypto exchanges with code, starting with $10,000 of his own savings. In the summer of 2021 he decided to turn this into a real business and brought in iliensinc, an acquaintance from his HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry residential house who was then chief of staff at a venture capital firm, to handle everything but coding; the team was named Chameleon Trading (Chameleon had been Yan’s video game handle in middle school) and became one of the more substantial anonymous trading operations in crypto. By 2022, Chameleon had six members.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

The team did proprietary market making in crypto from 2020 and began expanding into decentralized finance (DeFi) in the summer of 2022.⁠[2]

After FTX collapsed in November 2022, Yan told his six-person team to stop trading and take on a new mission; several members disagreed and some left. Yan later recalled that he had been overly confident FTX would be the downfall of centralized exchanges, but that this gave him the conviction to go after the perpetual futures market. Believing existing DeFi platforms suffered from poor market design, bad technology and clunky user experience, the team set out to build a high-performance decentralized layer-one blockchain with an order book exchange built in, which became Hyperliquid.⁠[1][1][1][1][2][2]

The team built a custom blockchain capable of running an exchange in three months, and Hyperliquid launched at the end of February 2023. The company did not pay market makers; instead, in May it put Chameleon’s market-making strategies into an onchain vault, HLP, open to the public, to bootstrap liquidity for the exchange.⁠[1][1][1][1]

During the Token2049 conference in Singapore in September 2023, Yan and iliensinc decided to move the team out of the United States: Yan felt the U.S. regulatory picture for crypto derivatives was uncertain and the risk was unnecessary. iliensinc compared Hong Kong, Switzerland and Singapore and settled on Singapore, and the team completed the move by the spring of 2024.⁠[1][1][1][1]

Less than a year after Hyperliquid launched, venture capital firms came calling, and by January 2024 funds were visiting in person. Yan would consider only a term sheet at a billion-dollar valuation; when a fund met that number with an offer of around $100 million, he thought it over for a weekend and declined. He argued that Hyperliquid was a protocol, not a company, and that neutrality from day one was the point, saying, “If Bitcoin had raised VC rounds, I really don’t think it would be Bitcoin.” On January 28, 2024, he posted four principles: no investors, no paid market makers, no fees to the dev team and no insiders. Yan still pays many of the team’s costs himself.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

At the HYPE token genesis in November 2024, core contributors received 23.8% of the total supply, locked for one year with vesting extending beyond 2028; the team’s share was smaller than the 31% community airdrop, and neither the team nor venture capital firms received any tokens on genesis day.⁠[3][1][1]

In 2025, Hyperliquid Labs had just 11 employees. That summer, as many market makers onboarded, the API servers connecting them to the blockchain became congested, and the team rewrote the servers from the ground up. In late October 2025, Yan announced hiring to grow the staff from 11 to 14.⁠[4][5][1][1][4]

Responding to allegations that North Korea-linked wallets had traded on Hyperliquid, a Hyperliquid Labs spokesperson said the Hyperliquid website screens traders for risky behavior and enforces sanctions compliance, with confirmed high-risk activity immediately flagged and the addresses blocked; the spokesperson also said the company was proactively engaging with regulators and policy stakeholders to support greater clarity for decentralized finance.⁠[4][4][4]

Hyperliquid Labs did not build its own policy team. In February 2026, the Hyperliquid Policy Center was launched as an independent nonprofit led by lawyer Jake Chervinsky, funded with 1 million HYPE contributed by the Hyper Foundation.⁠[1][1][1]

On October 7, 2026, Jeff Yan appeared as founder and CEO of Hyperliquid Labs at Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit Asia (DAS Asia 2026) at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, in a session titled “Hyperliquid: In Conversation With Jeff Yan.”⁠[6][6][6]

Yan said he did not view Hyperliquid’s priority fee mechanism as “bribery,” and that its purpose was to reduce the advantages of low-latency infrastructure and make genuine trading skill more important. He argued that the latency race in traditional finance, built around microwave towers and transatlantic fiber cables, is fundamentally zero-sum and sometimes even negative-sum, creating little meaningful value; Hyperliquid aims to use priority fees to internalize these negative externalities so traders can compete more fairly without spending heavily on low-latency infrastructure.⁠[7][7][7][7][8]

Jeff Yan and iliensinc are Harvard classmates; other team members come from Caltech and MIT and previously worked at Airtable, Citadel, Hudson River TradingHudson River TradingHudson River Trading is a proprietary trading firm headquartered at 3 World Trade Center in New York. Through its broker-dealer HRT Financial LP it trades for its own account and makes markets in US equities, options and futures, and it also handles part of the customer order flow of the retail broker Robinhood.Open the full entry and Nuro. The team is between 24 and 31 years old and recruits largely from international math and science olympiad medalists; only two members had worked in crypto before joining, and everyone except Yan works under a pseudonym.⁠[2][2][1][1][1][1]

The company holds one meeting a day, a morning stand-up. The office has separate computers running the latest AI models, used only to explore ideas; Yan said AI is not yet good enough to write important code. The company is fully self-funded and has taken no outside capital, which it sees as allowing it to focus on the product without external pressure.⁠[1][1][1][2]

Besides Hyperliquid Labs, multiple other teams contribute to the Hyperliquid blockchain and ecosystem.⁠[9]

Hyperliquid: Official website: https://hyperliquid.xyz/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10][2]