A decentralized exchange with only about 11 employees, no external investors, and no board of directors is rapidly rising to become a crypto giant with a daily trading volume exceeding $13 billion, thanks to the anonymity and high leverage it provides to traders.

This platform, named Hyperliquid, has achieved over $1 billion in annualized revenue while being entirely self-funded. Its unique model and significant market influence are making it the latest center of controversy in the cryptocurrency space.

According to a recent report by The Information, during the recent crypto market crash, Hyperliquid came into focus for handling over $10 billion in forced liquidations. This event brought the exchange, which was little-known outside the crypto market, into the public eye.

What further drew market scrutiny was that just minutes before US President Trump's significant tariff remarks caused market volatility, two user accounts on the Hyperliquid platform precisely placed large-scale short bets on the market. This "coincidence" immediately sparked intense speculation about potential insider information behind anonymous trading, highlighting the potential risks of the platform operating in a regulatory gray area.

Despite the controversy, Hyperliquid's growth momentum remains strong. Its trading volume has reached 10% of that of similar products on Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange. Founded by Harvard graduate Jeff Yan, the platform is attracting attention from retail traders to large institutions through its unique token economic model and disruptive ambitions towards traditional finance.

Founder-Centric System with "No Board"

Hyperliquid's rise is closely tied to the technical background and personal vision of its founder, Jeff Yan. Growing up in Silicon Valley and a Harvard graduate, Yan was a gold and silver medalist in the International Physics Olympiad and briefly worked at the New York high-frequency trading firm Hudson River Trading. The collapse of the FTX exchange prompted him to create Hyperliquid, a decentralized platform where users custody their own assets.

According to people familiar with him, Jeff Yan is technically proficient and ambitious. He has built a lean but efficient team around himself. Information on Hyperliquid's website shows that most of its core members are anonymous or use pseudonyms, such as co-founder "iliensinc" and "Xulian" responsible for market strategy. Team members hail from top institutions like Caltech and MIT and have worked at renowned companies like Citadel and Airtable.

This structure gives Jeff Yan significant autonomy. "He has no board, no investors calling him telling him what to do," said David Schamis, the incoming CEO of the publicly listed company Hyperliquid Strategies, which plans to hold Hyperliquid tokens. "It's great because he can just focus purely on the mission."

HYPE Token: Rejecting VCs, a Growth Engine with a $10 Billion Market Cap

Hyperliquid's most distinctive feature is its growth model. It did not follow the traditional path of startups seeking venture capital; instead, it rejected investment interest from top VC firms including Paradigm and Founders Fund. Instead, the platform became "self-reliant" by issuing its own HYPE token.

"When Hyperliquid was getting started, the standard playbook was to raise big round after big round from VCs, drum up hype," Jeff Yan said in an August interview with the "Wu Blockchain" podcast. "But that always felt a little disingenuous to me. That's not real progress."

Hyperliquid airdropped 31% of the total token supply to users for free based on their trading volume, a move that successfully attracted a large number of users. The platform also uses most of its trading fee revenue to buy back HYPE tokens from the market, thereby reducing supply and pushing up the price.

This strategy has been remarkably successful: the price of the HYPE token has soared from $3.90 at its issuance last November to the current $38, with a circulating market capitalization of approximately $10 billion, making it one of the most successful token launches in history. Reportedly, almost all well-known crypto funds, such as Paradigm, a16z, and Pantera, now hold HYPE tokens.

Leverage and Anonymity: The Whirlpool of Controversy and Market Impact

The core attractions of Hyperliquid for traders are its two key features: anonymity and high leverage. Most of the platform's trading volume comes from perpetual contracts—a type of high-leverage derivative with no expiry date, which is unavailable on compliant platforms in the US. Since Hyperliquid provides only trading software and does not act as a broker, it does not need to verify user identities.

It was this anonymity that caused an uproar during the market anomaly on October 10th. Minutes before Trump's tariff remarks triggered market volatility, the precise short bets from two anonymous accounts yielded huge returns.

Matt Zhang, founder of cryptocurrency fund management firm Hivemind, pointed out: "Hyperliquid is benefiting from the fact that there is a large population of people that want to trade anonymously."

In the subsequent market crash, high leverage became an "accelerator" for selling. According to CoinGlass data, the entire crypto industry experienced its largest-ever liquidation that day, totaling at least $19 billion, of which Hyperliquid alone forced the liquidation of over $10 billion in trades. While forced liquidation is a standard risk control measure for exchanges to protect themselves, its enormous scale undoubtedly exacerbated market panic. As Hyperliquid is unregulated globally, users have very limited recourse.

"The Exchange for Everything": Ambitions from Crypto to Traditional Finance

Jeff Yan's vision extends far beyond cryptocurrency. He wants Hyperliquid to "hold all finance," allowing people to launch various investment products on its blockchain.

Alvin Hsia, co-founder of Ventuals, said this embodies their "vision of being the exchange for everything." In the future, users might not only trade crypto perpetual contracts but also public stocks, indices, private company equity, and even interest rates.

This vision seems to be gradually becoming reality. A company named Trade.XYZ recently launched perpetual contract trading for a stock index on Hyperliquid. Simultaneously, the platform is also beginning to attract attention from traditional financial markets.