Jeff Yan

Yan grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. In eighth grade, after a friend took him along to a math competition, he began teaching himself competition problems, and by ninth grade he had qualified for the U.S. Math Olympiad training camp. He then taught himself physics, made the U.S. Physics Olympiad team, won a silver medal at the International Physics Olympiad in Estonia, and the following year won gold in Copenhagen, ranking 24th in the world, at the age of 18.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

Yan entered Harvard University, and in the spring of his freshman year he took CS 124, a data structures and algorithms course taken mainly by sophomores and juniors, finishing first among 150 students; he lived in Pforzheimer House, where he became close friends with Scott Wu, who would later co-found Cognition AI. During his summers he built tools for the self-driving car project at Google X and interned at the trading firm Tower Research Capital, and in his senior year he worked part-time at the self-driving car company Nuro; in the winter of his junior year, he and Wu were among the interns in Hudson River Trading’s (HRT) first internship program. He earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a master’s in computer science from Harvard.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

In late 2017, Yan joined the quantitative trading firm Hudson River Trading full-time, working for about eight months on the algorithms team in U.S. equities. While there, he read Ethereum’s yellow paper and came to believe that blockchains could “replace trust with code” and transform finance; he left around April 2018.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

After leaving HRT, Yan and his college roommate Brian Wong, who had also left HRT, founded the prediction market Deaux out of Binance Labs’ first startup incubation, using an architecture of off-chain matching and on-chain settlement that let users bet on events such as the weather, elections, and sports. By the time the project launched, Bitcoin had fallen more than 80%; it attracted only about 100 users and then shut down, and Yan returned more than half of the $450,000 investment.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

In late 2019, after his non-compete with HRT expired, Yan moved to Puerto Rico with $10,000 and wrote programs that connected to crypto exchanges and traded around the clock. The business grew at thousands of percent a year for two and a half years; in the summer of 2021, he decided to turn it into a real business, brought in a Harvard classmate and partner who goes by the pseudonym iliensinc, and named the firm Chameleon Trading, which became one of the largest anonymous trading operations in crypto. The team was already doing proprietary market making in crypto in 2020.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][2]

In the summer of 2022, the team began expanding into decentralized finance and concluded that existing platforms lagged behind centralized exchanges in market design, technology, and user experience; after FTX collapsed in November 2022, he decided to stop Chameleon’s trading business and instead build a blockchain capable of supporting a fully on-chain order book, along with a perpetual futures trading platform: Hyperliquid. Because existing blockchains could not meet the performance demands of an order book, the team built its own, and within about three months it could run an exchange on top of it.⁠[2][2][1][1][3][3][1]

Hyperliquid launched at the end of February 2023, starting with perpetual futures; Hyperliquid Labs, the company responsible for its development, was founded in 2023. The team refused to pay market makers; in May 2023, Yan put Chameleon’s market-making strategies into an on-chain vault called HLP (Hyperliquidity Provider), which anyone could deposit into with no management fee or performance fee and whose profits went to depositors, providing the platform with its initial liquidity. On November 1, 2023, the platform launched a points program with no published scoring formula.⁠[1][1][3][1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

In January 2024, several venture capital funds came to visit in person; Yan would consider only a term sheet at a $1 billion valuation, and after a fund offered around $100 million, he thought it over for a weekend and still declined, believing that Hyperliquid was a protocol, not a company, and that its neutrality was the point. On January 28, 2024, he posted on X: “No investors. No paid market makers. No fees to the dev team. No insiders.” As of 2026, Hyperliquid Labs remained self-funded and had not taken any external capital.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][4]

While attending Token2049 in Singapore in September 2023, Yan and iliensinc decided to move the team out of the United States, citing the uncertain regulatory outlook for crypto derivatives there; iliensinc compared Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Singapore and chose Singapore, and the team completed the move by the spring of 2024.⁠[1][1][1][1]

On November 8, 2024, Yan appeared as the founder of Hyperliquid Labs on When Shift Happens, the crypto interview podcast hosted by Kevin Follonier, discussing his philosophy of building DeFi for users rather than venture capitalists; on February 19, 2026, he returned to the show as CEO of Hyperliquid.⁠[5][5][5]

In October 2024, the Hyper Foundation, responsible for the network’s development and governance, was formed in the Cayman Islands. On November 29, 2024, Hyperliquid launched the HYPE token with a total supply of 1 billion, of which 31% was airdropped unconditionally to roughly 94,000 early users, 38.89% was allocated for future emissions and rewards, 23.8% went to core contributors (locked up until November 2025 and vesting over 24 months thereafter), and 6% went to the Hyper Foundation; venture capital firms received no allocation. Yan said it is rare that people who are early to something can all participate in the upside and gain meaningful ownership over a network.⁠[3][1][1][3][4][1][1]

In late March 2025, a trader simultaneously opened one large short and two long positions on the illiquid token Jelly Jelly and then pushed up its price on the open market, so that HLP, the community vault that had taken over the liquidated short, saw losses of more than $12 million at one point; the roughly two dozen validators securing the network quickly voted to delist the contract and settle it at the price that existed before the manipulation began, and users with legitimate positions suffered no losses. The episode prompted questions about the size of the validator set and the degree of decentralization; Yan said the validator set was kept small to preserve the speed of upgrades, and that the fix took a month.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

During the crypto market’s single-day liquidation of more than $19 billion on October 10, 2025, Hyperliquid had no downtime and halted no withdrawals. Three days later, the team shipped Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal HIP-3, which let anyone who staked 500,000 HYPE deploy new perpetual futures markets, set parameters and price feeds, and keep half of the trading fees; third parties subsequently launched perpetual futures on the platform for silver, crude oil, and the S&P 500. In 2025, Hyperliquid earned about $900 million in profit, 99% of which was automatically used to buy and burn HYPE, and the development team took none of the profits.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

As of early 2026, Hyperliquid Labs had only about 11 employees, with members from Caltech and MIT who previously worked at Airtable, Citadel, Hudson River Trading, and Nuro, and it recruits from international math and science olympiad medalists; Yan is the only person on the team who does not work under a pseudonym. Yan does not consider Hyperliquid a crypto company, and his goal is to house “all of finance” on-chain. In prospectuses for HYPE exchange-traded funds filed with the U.S. SEC, Yan is named as a key person whose departure could affect the pace of Hyperliquid’s development and the price of HYPE.⁠[1][4][1][1][1][1][3][4]

Hyperliquid: Official website: https://hyperliquid.xyz/ (opens in a new window).⁠[6]

X: Public account: https://x.com/chameleon_jeff (opens in a new window)⁠[2]