爆肝 10000 字穿透 Hyperliquid ，11 人团队、零 VC，如何主导链上永续市场？

Disclaimer: This article was not paid for.

One of the most surprising stories in the crypto industry over the past two years originates from a small team based in Singapore, which for a long time consisted of just over a dozen people.

This company, founded only three years ago and valued at tens of billions of dollars, never took a single dollar from VCs. Last year, its 11 employees generated over $900 million in profit, making it one of the companies with the highest profit per capita on Earth.

The Founder Who Doesn't Network, Tweet, or Speak Out

The Hyperliquid story almost entirely revolves around one person—Jeff Yan (X handle: @chameleon_jeff).

Jeff's parents are Chinese immigrants. His parents divorced when he was in third grade, and he was raised by his mother, an accountant who often worked overtime during tax season and frequently reminded him that "there is always someone stronger than you." Jeff represented the US in the International Physics Olympiad, winning a silver medal in Estonia in 2012 and a gold medal in Denmark in 2013.

He graduated from Harvard in 2017 with a degree in Computer Science, then joined high-frequency trading firm Hudson River Trading as an algorithm developer. In early 2020, he shifted to the crypto space, founding market maker Chameleon Trading, and eventually partnering with others to build Hyperliquid.

The name Chameleon came from his high school gaming ID and his fascination with the animal itself. He genuinely appreciates chameleons, explaining in a podcast that their eyes can move independently in different directions, their toes are arranged with two pointing forward and three backward, and they have powerful ballistic tongues, making them seem like "aliens on Earth."

Before Hyperliquid, Jeff lived in Puerto Rico, running one of the largest anonymous trading operations in crypto, Chameleon Trading, almost single-handedly. He moved to Puerto Rico in late 2019, starting market making with $10,000. Over two and a half years, the fund grew by thousands of percent annually, allowing him to achieve financial freedom by age 27.

The founder's personal style is quite extreme. Jeff is not driven by money, lives a minimalist lifestyle, wears the same clothes every day, cuts his own hair to save time, works at least 14 hours daily, sometimes reaching 100 hours a week, and believes most people are "generally too soft." Due to increased public exposure as Hyperliquid's founder, after being followed into his apartment elevator, he implemented strict security measures, including moving, hiring bodyguards, and being accompanied by two private security personnel when going out.

According to a senior crypto executive who knows both Jeff and SBF, Yan's image is more refined, professional, and sincere—"Jeff gets haircuts, SBF didn't," "SBF's shorts were too long and ill-fitting, Jeff looks clean-cut." This contrast in appearance and conduct compared to the FTX era has become part of the Hyperliquid narrative.

Hyperliquid founder Jeff

Predecessor

Jeff's earliest foray was into prediction markets. In April 2018, influenced by the rise of crypto and Ethereum, he co-founded the blockchain-based prediction market Deaux within the Binance Labs incubator. The project attempted an off-chain matching and on-chain settlement design, but ultimately failed to gain traction, attracting only about 100 users before shutting down.

His real first fortune came from Chameleon. In May 2023, Yan put the strategies Chameleon had validated over the years into an on-chain vault called HLP (Hyperliquidity Provider). Users could deposit $10 or $10 million, with no management fees or performance fees. The vault runs automated strategies, with every dollar of profit belonging entirely to depositors. All accounts are on-chain—if FTX had been built this way, Alameda's hole would have been visible to the world.

HLP is key to understanding Hyperliquid. It provides liquidity to the exchange on one hand and offers ordinary users a zero-fee "high-frequency strategy gateway" on the other.

One early user described it as the first time in history ordinary people could invest in a high-frequency trading strategy at zero cost.

"I would have been willing to pay Jeff a 2% management fee plus 50% performance fee just to get into this strategy."

Starting in the second half of 2023, users traded on the platform and accumulated points weekly. The point calculation rules remained confidential, announced weekly on Fridays by iliensinc. The community gathered on Discord around this time each week to compare yields.

Jeff later stated that "rewarding real users is key" and the points program "may have reduced bot ratios from 99% to 20%."

In January 2024, Yan published a four-line manifesto:

No investors. 

No paid market makers.

No fees to the dev team. 

No insiders.

This formally established the project's stance of neutrality. The HYPE token airdrop was completed on November 29, with the team's portion unlocking over time, and no allocation was given to investors.

"No VC" became a product strategy.

Hyperliquid's rejection of VCs was a deliberate strategy. Yan and the team decided against VC funding. They had already earned a substantial sum from their crypto trading business, and Yan bore the costs himself. He believed, "If you want to build a truly credible neutral platform where everyone can build, an important principle is that there can be no insiders."

"We are self-funded and didn't need financing at all, so the decision was simple."

This choice had a consequential effect: without reserving shares for VCs, the team could allocate 31% of the genesis supply almost entirely to real users. When the platform launched HYPE, 31% of the supply was directly distributed to users based on trading activity, making it one of the most user-centric distributions in crypto history. The remaining allocation was for future community rewards (38.88%), core contributors (23.8%), the foundation (6%), community grants (0.3%), and a very small portion for protocol upgrades.

Jeff decided not to sell equity to VCs, so VCs naturally couldn't demand preferential shares, thus ensuring this distribution structure was realized.

CEX Experience × DEX Transparency (The Boring Technical Part)

Hyperliquid is an independent Layer 1 specifically designed for trading, independent of ecosystems like Ethereum or Solana.

The network is secured by HyperBFT. This is a BFT consensus protocol designed from scratch for low latency and high throughput, capable of tolerating malicious nodes representing up to one-third of the staked share.

HyperBFT supports approximately 200,000 transactions per second with a block time of 0.07 seconds. Holders delegate HYPE to validators, and the system selects 24 active validators based on stake amount. Each round of transactions requires achieving more than 2/3 of the staked quorum, and a 7-day unbonding queue prevents large-scale consensus attacks.

The chain itself is divided into two layers. The complete execution state, including HyperCore and HyperEVM, is protected by HyperBFT. Every order placement, cancellation, trade, and liquidation occurs on-chain with single-block finality. Hyperliquid uses a non-custodial model; the platform does not take control of user funds. It is best known for perpetual and spot trading of cryptocurrencies, stocks, commodities, and forex. Users can also lend, borrow, issue, and transfer assets. HyperEVM is an EVM-compatible execution layer that allows users and developers to build applications using smart contracts.

HyperEVM allows DeFi applications deployed by external developers to directly connect to Hyperliquid's on-chain liquidity and order book, transforming the exchange into foundational infrastructure upon which other projects can build, creating an open ecosystem platform. HyperEVM launched on February 18, 2025, allowing EVM smart contracts to directly access native trading liquidity without the need for cross-chain bridges.

The matching mechanism itself was designed to be anti-frontrunning.

Jeff identified a common problem: high-frequency traders using bots to quickly take orders right after market makers post them, forcing market makers to widen spreads to protect themselves, ultimately resulting in higher costs for ordinary users.

Hyperliquid solved this by reducing the priority of quick order-taking, giving market makers a fair chance to update their quotes, leading to tighter spreads.

The matching engine uses a price-time priority principle and allows special orders like cancel-or-flip or post-only to take precedence over regular orders under specific conditions, ensuring market makers can adjust quotes without being front-run by faster traders.

Hyperliquid Deep Dive: Understand HYPE and HLP Model

The Most Discussed Airdrop

HYPE's circulating supply is 222 million tokens, with a total supply of 1 billion. At the current price, its FDV is approximately $60.27 billion. The allocation is: future releases and community rewards 38.89%, genesis distribution 31.00%, core contributors 23.80%, Hyper Foundation budget 6.00%, community grants 0.30%, and HIP-2 Hyperliquidity 0.01%.

The November 2024 airdrop distributed approximately 310 million HYPE, equivalent to 31% of the total supply, making it one of the largest in crypto history both in absolute quantity and the dollar value given to real users.

The airdrop was completed on November 29, 2024, distributing HYPE to over 90,000 eligible users, starkly contrasting with many projects that allocate a large portion of tokens to VCs.

The core contributor portion has a lock-up arrangement. Over 61% of the HYPE supply remains locked. The genesis distribution immediately released approximately 310 million HYPE to early protocol participants and community members, with approximately 237 million reserved for core contributors, subject to a one-year cliff followed by 24 months of unlocking.

Most allocations use a cliff-based release mechanism. The entire unlocking schedule extends to 2027, with the next unlock scheduled for June 6, 2026, for core contributors.

The most critical design is the buyback. Hyperliquid uses 99% of its fees to buy back HYPE, propelling the token past $62. This buyback is an on-chain mechanism executed automatically by the protocol block by block, converting transaction fees into HYPE purchases regardless of market conditions. Since its launch, the protocol has generated over $1.16 billion in revenue, almost entirely used to buy back its own token. In the third quarter of 2025 alone, it bought back $316.8 million worth of HYPE.

This structure creates continuous buying pressure under the token. The underlying business remains strong; Hyperliquid has become one of the dominant players in decentralized perpetual exchanges, supported by real transaction fees without relying on inflationary token incentives. However, this also carries risk—HYPE's price is becoming increasingly tightly linked to the trading volume of a single exchange.

With a fixed total supply of 1 billion HYPE, over 70% allocated to the community, and 97% of transaction fees used for token buybacks, the protocol has generated $1.24 billion in cumulative fees, with an annualized revenue of $800 million to $1 billion, placing it among DeFi's top fee generators.

The buyback flywheel also has its fragile side.

This relationship is bidirectional. As crypto activity cools, buybacks decline along with revenue. Hyperliquid's quarterly buybacks have dropped from $316.8 million in Q3 2025 to $192.3 million in Q1 2026, a decrease of about 40% over two quarters. Meanwhile, more locked tokens will enter circulation, bringing potential selling pressure that the Assistance Fund needs to absorb.

From Developer Sandbox to Trillion-Dollar Volume

Hyperliquid's growth wasn't linear; it exploded upon launch. In 2023, Yan launched Hyperliquid on its self-developed L1. The early version looked like a developer sandbox but offered sub-second finality, an on-chain order book, and a user experience close to Binance. Within months, daily trading volume surpassed $1 billion, and monthly volume soon exceeded $10 billion.

By mid-2025, it was directly competing with CEX giants.

In mid-2025, Hyperliquid's monthly trading volume reached $2.48 trillion, putting it in the same league as Binance and Coinbase. It took two years to go from zero to 545,000 users. Jeff himself said:

"We don't have a marketing department. The community does a better job than all the CEX marketing departments combined."

By early 2026, its market cap reached another level.

HYPE is one of the top ten crypto assets by market capitalization, hovering around $11 billion, less than two years after it started trading. On May 15, 2026, Bitwise launched BHYP, the first US spot Hyperliquid ETF with native staking.

On-chain growth came not just from trading. In early 2025, the platform launched HyperEVM, allowing developers to build financial applications directly on the Hyperliquid chain. The ecosystem expanded rapidly. CDP protocol Felix manages over $400 million in assets, and lending protocol HyperLend manages $380 million.

Over the past 12 months, Hyperliquid handled $1.8 trillion in trading volume, accounting for over 10% of global perpetual contract volume and over 70% of DEX perpetual volume. After its launch in 2023, daily volume reached $1 billion within 100 days. By mid-2025, monthly volume hit $2.48 trillion, ranking alongside Binance and Coinbase. In two years, the platform accumulated over 545,000 users from scratch.

Jeff Yan rarely speaks publicly, doesn't use social media, and has never taken VC funding, yet he was listed as one of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2025.

The Hyperliquid he founded processes about $10 billion in daily trading volume. DefiLlama shows that in October alone, monthly volume reached $308 billion. The platform has over 570,000 users, and