Jeff Yan not often speaks in public, avoids social media, and has by no means taken enterprise capital cash. However in 2025, few people have had a much bigger affect on the form of decentralized finance (DeFi) and the crypto area itself.
This characteristic is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2025 record.
Yan is the founding father of Hyperliquid, a decentralized change (DEX) for perpetual futures that processes round $10 billion in trades per day, with DefiLlama exhibiting $308 billion in quantity in October. With greater than 570,000 customers and a custom-built blockchain that matches the pace and reliability of centralized platforms, Hyperliquid has quietly turn out to be a dominant participant in crypto derivatives.
It has achieved so with out hype, investor backing, or a big crew — simply 11 core contributors, a imaginative and prescient rooted in technical precision, and a relentless concentrate on product led by Yan.
To grasp Yan’s rise, it helps to know the place he got here from. Raised in Palo Alto, California by Chinese language immigrant mother and father, Yan was a physics prodigy, taking residence gold on the 2013 Worldwide Physics Olympiad.
He studied arithmetic and pc science at Harvard, then joined Hudson River Buying and selling (HRT), a high-frequency buying and selling agency identified for its ultra-low-latency methods. After a brief stint at Google, he left to begin his personal crypto buying and selling agency, Chameleon Buying and selling, in the course of the bull run of 2020–2021.
Even then, Yan stayed out of the highlight. His bots dealt with the markets; he dealt with the infrastructure. However the collapse of FTX in late 2022 modified issues. As merchants fled the ruins of centralized exchanges, Yan noticed a gap as the popular different, decentralized finance the place customers custody their very own funds, weren’t competing with centralized options. So he set off to construct one thing higher.
From code to core infrastructure
In 2023, Yan launched Hyperliquid on a {custom} layer-1 blockchain, designed from scratch for one function: quick, decentralized derivatives. The early model seemed like a developer sandbox merely exhibiting uncooked efficiency, with out monetary incentives to usher in customers. Nevertheless it labored. Hyperliquid provided sub-second finality, on-chain order books, and a consumer expertise near that of Binance.
Inside months, it was processing over $1 billion a day. It now sees properly over $10 billion a month.
The key to the platform’s success? In Yan’s phrases: “Our philosophy is easy: create a product that customers genuinely like and are keen to make use of.”
New options like permissionless market creation (HIP-3) and Ethereum compatibility (through HyperEVM) turned Hyperliquid right into a modular monetary layer, not only a buying and selling venue. Protocols like Felix and HyperLend have since constructed on it, drawn by its pace and shared incentives.
What makes this extra outstanding is what Hyperliquid didn’t do. It by no means raised exterior capital as Yan bootstrapped your complete mission utilizing earnings from Chameleon Buying and selling. There was no flashy airdrop announcement, no VC allocations, and no influencer campaigns. The platform grew by way of word-of-mouth, natural liquidity competitions, and efficiency.
When Hyperliquid lastly launched its token, HYPE, in late 2024, it did so by itself phrases. Roughly 31% of the provision went to early customers, and no enterprise funds acquired allocations. The remaining provide, over two-thirds, was reserved for future ecosystem development, airdrops, or long-vesting crew incentives. By mid-2025, HYPE had reached a close to $20 billion market cap, although the crypto drawdown has since dragged that determine down.
The mannequin sparked copycats throughout DeFi. It turned a brand new norm, as Hyperliquid funneled a whole bunch of thousands and thousands in protocol charges again to customers by way of buybacks and burns. HYPE even has its personal digital asset treasury firm Hyperliquid Methods, which has moved to lift as much as $1 billion to build up the token.
The quiet disruption
Yan is an unlikely poster baby for the 2025 DeFi increase. He doesn’t courtroom consideration: he not often seems on podcasts, isn’t extraordinarily vocal on social media, and his printed interviews are sparse. When he does communicate up, like at TOKEN2049 in Singapore, he speaks plainly and avoids hype.
However his affect is tangible. Hyperliquid has compelled opponents like dYdX to hurry up their infrastructure and challenged the concept that large groups and large capital are required to construct at scale.
Even controversies, like criticism of Hyperliquid’s liquidation system in the course of the October 10 crash, have led to considerate technical defenses. Yan has argued that his fashions defend customers by minimizing systemic danger, not maximizing protocol income.
Wanting forward, the roadmap stays obscure. Iterative upgrades appear to be most popular to milestone-driven hype cycles. But when HIP-3 is any indication, Hyperliquid is increasing past its roots and is trying to home the entire monetary system, onchain.
Via all of it, Yan appears unfazed. He nonetheless doesn’t speak a lot. However in a market that’s typically loud and erratic, his quiet focus has confirmed magnetic. The angle is corresponding to that of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who prefers specializing in constructing long-term options moderately than chasing short-term tendencies.
“Our core philosophy is: cryptocurrency will change the way in which finance works. Conventional finance will ultimately migrate to cryptocurrency. Hyperliquid will turn out to be the fundamental platform for these monetary actions,” Yan mentioned in an interview final 12 months.
For builders, he’s turn out to be the performance-obsessed founder who codes greater than he tweets. For customers, he’s created a system the place outcomes decide worth.