The title of the world’s most profitable company per employee has changed hands—but it still belongs to a crypto project. Recently, HyperliquidFR announced that the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid achieved an annual average revenue of $102.4 million per employee, surpassing Tether, OnlyFans, Nvidia, and Apple, ranking first globally. Previously, stablecoin issuer Tether topped the list with over $90 million per employee. According to DefiLlama, the Hyperliquid team consists of only 11 core members, with estimated annual revenue of $1.127 billion.
The crypto industry is filled with get-rich-quick stories, where project founders often become overnight millionaires. Yet, cases like Jeff Yan and his creation Hyperliquid—where a small team delivers both massive scale and efficiency—remain rare. Looking into Jeff’s upbringing, education, and career reveals that Hyperliquid’s emergence was perhaps not an accident.
From Olympiad Medalist to DeFi Exchange Founder
Jeff Yan was born and raised in Palo Alto, California, to Chinese immigrant parents. From a young age, he showed exceptional aptitude in math and physics. In 2012, he won a silver medal at the 43rd International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) after only about a year of studying physics. In 2013, he returned to the 44th IPhO, winning a gold medal and ranking 24th globally—a first in his high school’s history.
As a top-tier “problem solver,” Jeff was admitted to Harvard University, where he majored in mathematics and computer science. After graduation, he joined Hudson River Trading (HRT) as a quantitative trader. There, he studied U.S. equity markets, built low-latency trading systems capable of thousands of trades per second, and developed deep insight into market making and liquidity provision.
In 2018, he turned to the emerging crypto industry, attempting to build an Ethereum Layer-2 prediction market. The project failed due to regulatory uncertainty and lack of users. Learning from that, Jeff founded Chameleon Trading in 2020, which quickly became one of the largest market makers on centralized exchanges during the bull run.
When FTX collapsed in November 2022, many lost faith in crypto. Billions evaporated overnight due to misplaced trust in centralized exchanges. While others fled, Jeff saw an opportunity: users would now demand self-custody and a decentralized, yet user-friendly, platform. Thus, the idea of Hyperliquid was born—a fully on-chain, high-performance perpetual DEX, capable of 200,000 trades per second with multi-market and high leverage support.
Bootstrapping & The Small Team Strategy
Unlike most startups chasing venture capital and rapid headcount growth, Hyperliquid was entirely self-funded, never accepting VC money. Jeff emphasized he wasn’t motivated by wealth—“money is just a number”—but by building valuable products. He believed real user value matters more than VC hype.
From inception, Hyperliquid upheld community-driven ownership: tokens were distributed to users via trading, never to investors. “Allowing VCs to own large portions of a decentralized network would scar it forever,” Jeff said. His vision is a financial system built and owned by users.
The team remains lean—only 11 members, about half engineers, the rest product and operations. No dedicated marketing department, no traditional BD. Jeff gives the team autonomy while staying deeply engaged in technical decisions. He hires with extreme selectivity: “Hiring the wrong person is worse than hiring no one.” Only exceptionally smart, ambitious, and passionate individuals are welcomed.
“We’re not like typical crypto teams raising big funds and writing long roadmaps,” Jeff explained. “We just focus on the next step.”
Why Hyperliquid Rose to the Top
Hyperliquid is unlike traditional DEXs. It built its own Layer-1 blockchain to enable fully on-chain order-book matching with CEX-like throughput. Orders, trades, cancellations, and liquidations all occur transparently on-chain, often within a single block. By June 2025, it captured 78% of the on-chain derivatives market, with daily volumes exceeding $5.5 billion.
Its engine deliberately deprioritizes aggressive high-frequency market orders, giving market makers time to update quotes—resulting in tighter spreads and better pricing. Liquidity is supported by the HLP pool, a protocol-owned hybrid fund accessible to all users, ensuring fairness and transparency.
The native token HYPE governs the network, reduces fees via staking, and has a buyback mechanism. In November 2024, 31% of HYPE tokens were airdropped to ~94,000 users, one of the largest user-focused distributions in recent years.
Without flashy marketing, Hyperliquid’s fully transparent, on-chain model attracted whales and top institutions. By 2023, within 100 days of launch, daily volumes surpassed $1 billion. In July 2025, perpetual trading volume hit $320 billion, generating $86.6 million in revenue. On August 15, it set a record $29 billion daily volume with $7.7 million in fees.
By 2025, Hyperliquid controlled over 80% of the decentralized perpetuals market, earning the nickname “On-chain Binance.” And all of this was achieved by a 11-member team, with zero marketing budget.
