Jeff Yan rarely speaks in public, avoids social media, and has never taken venture capital money. But by 2025, few will have a greater impact on the shape of decentralized finance (DeFi) and the cryptocurrency space itself.
This feature is part of CoinDesk The Most Influential List of 2025.
Yan is the founder of Hyperliquid, a perpetual futures decentralized exchange (DEX) that handles about $10 billion in transactions every day, and DefiLlama’s trading volume reached $308 billion in October. With over 570,000 users and a custom blockchain that matches the speed and reliability of a centralized platform, Hyperliquid has quietly become a dominant player in the crypto derivatives space.
It did this without much fanfare, investor support, or a large team—just 11 core contributors, a vision rooted in technical precision, and a relentless focus on the product that Yan leads.
To understand Yan’s rise, one needs to understand his origins. Yan, who was raised by Chinese immigrant parents in Palo Alto, California, is a physics prodigy who won a gold medal at the 2013 International Physics Olympiad.
He studied mathematics and computer science at Harvard University before joining Hudson River Trading (HRT), a high-frequency trading firm known for its ultra-low-latency strategies. After a brief stint at Google, he left during the 2020-2021 bull market to start his own cryptocurrency trading company, Chameleon Trading.
Even so, Yan remains out of the spotlight. His robots control the market; he’s responsible for the infrastructure. But the collapse of FTX in late 2022 changed everything. As traders flee the ashes of centralized exchanges, Yan sees a preferred alternative in decentralized finance where users host their own funds rather than compete with centralized alternatives. So he set out to build something better.
From code to core infrastructure
In 2023, Yan launched Hyperliquid on a custom layer 1 blockchain designed from the ground up with one purpose in mind: fast, decentralized derivatives. Early versions looked like a developer sandbox, showing only raw performance and no financial incentives to attract users. But it worked. Hyperliquid offers sub-second finality, on-chain order books, and a user experience close to Binance.
Within a few months, its daily throughput exceeded $1 billion. Monthly revenue now exceeds well over $10 billion.
What’s the secret to the platform’s success? In Yan’s words: “Our philosophy is simple: create a product that users really like and are willing to use.”
New features like permissionless market creation (HIP-3) and Ethereum compatibility (via HyperEVM) transform Hyperliquid into a modular financial layer rather than just a trading venue. Since then, protocols such as Felix and HyperLend have been built on top of it, attracted by its speed and sharing incentives.
Even more compelling is Hyperliquid No Do. It has never raised outside funding because Yan used profits from Chameleon Trading to launch the entire project. There are no flashy airdrop announcements, no venture capital allocations, and no influencer campaigns. The platform grows through word of mouth, organic liquidity competition, and performance.
When Hyperliquid finally launches its token HYPE in late 2024, it does so on its own terms. Approximately 31% of the supply went to early adopters, and no venture funds received allocations. More than two-thirds of the remaining supply is reserved for future ecosystem growth, airdrops, or long-term vesting team incentives. By mid-2025, HYPE’s market capitalization had reached nearly $20 billion, although the shrinkage of cryptocurrencies has since dragged that number down.
The model sparked imitation in the DeFi space. This became the new normal, with Hyperliquid returning hundreds of millions of dollars in protocol fees to users through buybacks and burns. HYPE even has its own digital asset finance company, Hyperliquid Strategies, which has raised up to $1 billion to accumulate tokens.
quiet disturbance
Yan is unlikely to be the poster child for the 2025 DeFi craze. He doesn’t call attention to himself: He rarely appears on podcasts, isn’t very vocal on social media, and he publishes few interviews. When he does speak out, as he did with Singapore’s TOKEN2049, he speaks his mind and avoids the hype.
But his influence is real. Hyperliquid forces competitors like dYdX to build infrastructure faster and challenges the idea that large-scale construction requires big teams and big capital.
Even controversies, such as criticism of Hyperliquid’s liquidation system during the Oct. 10 crash, prompted thoughtful technical defenses. Yan believes that his model protects users by minimizing system risk rather than maximizing protocol revenue.
Looking ahead, the roadmap remains vague. Iterative upgrades seem to be favored over milestone-driven hype cycles. But if HIP-3 is any indication, Hyperliquid is moving beyond its roots and looking to accommodate all financial systems on-chain.
Through it all, Yan seems unfazed. He still doesn’t talk much. But in an often noisy and volatile market, his quiet focus has proven attractive. This attitude is similar to that of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who prefers to focus on building long-term solutions rather than chasing short-term trends.
“Our core philosophy is: Cryptocurrency will change the way finance operates. Traditional finance will eventually migrate to cryptocurrency. Superliquidity will become the basic platform for these financial activities,” Yan said in an interview last year.
For Builders, he has become a performance-obsessed founder who writes more code than he tweets. For users, he creates a system where results determine value.