A Company of 11 People is Disrupting Wall Street?

On June 16, 2026, CZ was asked about Hyperliquid during an interview with Galaxy Digital. His response was, "I think the invention of Hyperliquid is really great. They occupy a niche that we cannot compete in. They have no KYC and claim to be decentralized. Based on what I have experienced, I would never do what they are doing. I assume they have good lawyers."

However, by the end of 2024, CZ invested in Aster DEX through YZi Labs, publicly promoted it multiple times on X, and proposed that on-chain perpetual contracts require dark pool privacy trading features in June 2025. Eighteen days later, when Aster launched its hidden order feature, CZ immediately retweeted it.

While guiding Aster on how to surpass Hyperliquid in product offerings, CZ publicly declared that he would never follow Hyperliquid's path.

Star Xu, the founder of OKX, pointed out this contradiction on X: Aster shares resources and team members with the Binance ecosystem, and its business model is highly similar to Hyperliquid. "If the business model, resources, personnel, and incentive mechanisms are largely the same, how different can it really be? Perhaps creating an independent shell is their way of being 'compliant.'"

This debate itself serves as the best footnote to Hyperliquid's influence.

The Most Profitable Startup Per Capita on Earth

In 2025, Hyperliquid's 11 employees generated approximately $900 million in profits, making it the most profitable startup per capita on Earth.

Founder Jeff Yan is extremely low-profile, rarely posts on social media, and seldom gives interviews.

His Harvard classmate, Scott Wu, who later founded Cognition AI, described Jeff as "very anti-mainstream," saying, "He says things that completely surprise you, but in the driest way possible." They spent a lot of time discussing the same question: "What makes a person special? What is the essence of this field? What does it really mean to get better?"

This way of thinking permeated every decision Jeff made thereafter.

After graduating from Harvard, he went to Hudson River Trading (HRT) to do quantitative trading. Eight months later, he chose to leave because he could not answer one question: "What value are you adding to the world?"

In 2019, he moved to Puerto Rico and founded the market-making company Chameleon Trading with $10,000. Two and a half years later, the company had accumulated enough funds to self-finance the construction of Hyperliquid.

The collapse of FTX in November 2022 shook the trust in centralized custody across the industry.

He dissolved Chameleon and started building Hyperliquid from scratch. As a trader who had done quantitative trading at HRT and operated market-making at Chameleon, he had firsthand experience of every flaw in the existing trading infrastructure.

He built an L1 blockchain from scratch, writing the consensus algorithm in Rust, and created a decentralized perpetual contract exchange that allows users to custody their own assets, with all trades publicly verifiable on-chain, and block times reduced to 0.07 seconds. Professional traders and market makers began to treat Hyperliquid as one of their trading venues.

He open-sourced Chameleon's own profit strategies into an on-chain treasury (HLP), allowing anyone to deposit money and share in the profits. This quantitative strategy provided the platform with foundational liquidity and remains the core market-making engine of Hyperliquid to this day.

In January 2024, he issued a four-line declaration: No investors. No paid market makers. No revenue sharing for the development team. No insiders.

These four "nos" determined the token distribution structure and were also the core reason for Hyperliquid's successful launch. Hyperliquid adopted an unprecedented project launch approach, which also reflected his core questions: "What makes a person special? What is the essence of this field? What does it really mean to get better?"

No VC means there is no need to allocate 20-30% for institutional distribution, and no revenue sharing means that 97% of the fees can be used for buybacks and burns. This is different from how all projects were handled at that stage.

On November 29, 2024, Hyperliquid airdropped 31% of its token supply to 94,000 users, with each receiving an average of about $28,500 in high-value airdrops. HYPE opened at $2, and due to the lack of institutional unlock expectations and user optimism about the platform, it rose to $9.8 just three days later.

Subsequently, 97% of the platform's fees were automatically used to buy back HYPE on the open market and burn it. As of June 2026, over $1.2 billion had been repurchased, and more than 41 million tokens had been burned. HYPE is currently priced at around $70, with a market cap of about $17.5 billion.

In 2025, Hyperliquid's 11 employees generated approximately $900 million in profits, beginning to disrupt Wall Street.

From Exchange to Financial Infrastructure

In October 2025, Hyperliquid launched the HIP-3 protocol, allowing anyone to stake 500,000 HYPE to deploy their own perpetual contract market on the platform. This step transformed it from an exchange into an infrastructure that allows third parties to open trading markets.

The core team of Hyperliquid does not directly operate stock and commodity markets. An independent team, Trade.xyz, launched perpetual contracts for Tesla, Nvidia, Apple, and other US stocks, and in March 2026, received official authorization from S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch the first S&P 500 perpetual contract. Aura launched contracts for crude oil, gold, and silver. This was an intentional structural choice: the core team does not operate stock derivatives, thus avoiding direct exposure to securities regulatory risks.

However, Hyperliquid extracts fees from every transaction. The fees from the native crypto market go 100% to the protocol, while the fees from HIP-3 markets are split 50% to the deployer and 50% to the protocol. 97% of these revenues are automatically used for buybacks and burns of HYPE, and this ratio is now 99%. The operational risks are borne by third-party deployers, and revenues flow back to the protocol through the token buyback mechanism.

The team holds 23.8% of the token distribution, which has been locked since November 2024 for one year, and will be unlocked linearly on a monthly basis from November 2025 until the end of 2027. The larger the platform's trading volume, the more buybacks occur, making this portion of holdings more valuable. The growth in trading volume relies on better products and stronger infrastructure to support it. This is also the fundamental reason Jeff chose to build L1 himself and open HIP-3 for third parties to expand categories.

The proportion of crypto assets in the platform's total trading volume has decreased from 90% in the early days to about 65%, with the remainder contributed by HIP-3 third-party markets. A year ago, this proportion was zero. Among the top 30 contracts ranked by open interest, 23 are not cryptocurrencies.

During the escalation of the situation in Iran in February 2026, traditional markets were closed, and the real-time pricing source for crude oil cited by Bloomberg was not the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, but Hyperliquid. The 24/7 uninterrupted trading feature allowed Hyperliquid to capture weekend liquidity and pricing power that traditional exchanges could not reach.

On June 12, SpaceX went public on NASDAQ, becoming the largest IPO in history, with its market cap quickly surpassing $2 trillion after opening. Three crypto platforms' tokenized SpaceX IPO activities were collectively canceled due to the issuer's inability to deliver sufficient shares, while Hyperliquid's SpaceX perpetual contracts recorded a trading volume of $1.4 billion that day.

On May 1, 2026, Trade.xyz launched the Pre-IPO perpetual contracts for AI chip company Cerebras on Hyperliquid. Thirteen days later, Cerebras went public on NASDAQ, with underwriters pricing it at $185 and an opening price of $350. An hour before the opening, the average transaction price of the CBRS contracts on Hyperliquid was about $354, only 1.3% different from NASDAQ's opening price. Reports indicated that the underwriting bank was monitoring Hyperliquid's trading interface before the opening. A decentralized exchange began to possess IPO-level price discovery capabilities.

Grayscale provided a definition in its research report: "Hyperliquid is more like AWS than an exchange." If this definition holds, its competitors are not Binance, but the traditional financial infrastructure industry.

CZ: Hope They Have Good Lawyers

CZ's statement "hope they have good lawyers" is not a joke. He himself pleaded guilty in 2023 for failing to maintain effective anti-money laundering procedures and served four months in prison in 2024, with Binance paying a $4 billion fine.

Hyperliquid faces legal risks similar to those CZ encountered back then. The platform does not conduct identity verification and relies solely on IP blocking to restrict access from US users, which cannot effectively eliminate access from sanctioned countries. In December 2024, wallets associated with the North Korean hacker group Lazarus Group were found conducting test trades on Hyperliquid, and MetaMask security experts publicly warned that the platform faces serious security threats. Additionally, trading valuation derivatives of Pre-IPO perpetual contracts without the company's authorization poses the risk of being classified as unregistered securities.

Jeff's response path is entirely opposite to CZ's. CZ expanded first and complied later, pleading guilty and facing penalties after violating regulations. Jeff chose to proactively establish regulatory relationships during the rapid growth phase of the business. In 2024, he moved the team to Singapore, blocked US IPs, and actively distanced himself from the biggest regulatory risks.

In February 2026, he invested $29 million to establish the Hyperliquid Policy Center (HPC) in Washington, hiring Jake Chervinsky, one of the most experienced policy lawyers in the crypto industry, as CEO. Chervinsky previously served as the Chief Policy Officer of the Blockchain Association and has testified before the US Congress, being one of the few professionals capable of translating technical complexities into language understandable by regulatory agencies. In Jeff's words: "Democratizing finance requires education and lobbying to promote laws that protect users and builders."

The regulatory environment is evolving in a direction favorable to Hyperliquid.

On March 17, 2026, the SEC and CFTC jointly released a framework for classifying crypto assets, categorizing most crypto assets as non-securities. On April 21, the SEC officially announced the launch of an "innovation exemption" framework for tokenized securities. On May 29, the CFTC approved the first compliant Bitcoin perpetual contract product in the US. On June 19, CFTC Chairman Mike Selig publicly stated that a dedicated regulatory framework is being developed for on-chain perpetual contract platforms like Hyperliquid, and that the 1934 exchange rules should not be used to manage blockchain trading systems. If this framework is implemented, Hyperliquid's operations in the US may gain a formal compliance path.

However, traditional financial institutions are also fighting back. CME and ICE (the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange) are lobbying federal regulators and Congress to impose regulations on Hyperliquid, arguing that the anonymous trading environment could affect global oil price benchmarks. Notably, CME itself is also expanding its 24/7 crypto trading capabilities, having just launched Bitcoin volatility futures and NASDAQ crypto index futures in early June, presenting a clear conflict of interest.

Regardless of the motives, the fact that the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange is specifically lobbying Congress to regulate a product developed by an 11-person team already demonstrates Hyperliquid's industry influence.

When traditional financial institutions start demanding regulation of a project, that project has already posed a substantial threat. However, how far the threat can go depends on whether Hyperliquid can complete its compliance layout before the regulatory framework is implemented.

In May 2026, three HYPE spot ETFs were launched in the US, with a net inflow of $161 million in the first month. 21Shares directly used CME's price-to-sales ratio model to value HYPE, pricing it as an exchange stock rather than a crypto token.

Goldman Sachs disclosed its holdings, and the CEO of ICE publicly stated that Hyperliquid is "bigger than NASDAQ."

Traditional finance is simultaneously demanding regulation of Hyperliquid while queuing to buy HYPE.

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