Jeff Yan’s “Hyper Life”

Compiled by | Odaily (@OdailyChina); Translator | Azuma (@azuma_eth)

On a Friday in January, before dawn, a 43-year-old man was taken from his home in Saint-Léger-sous-Cholet in western France. He was driven about 30 miles to the small town of Basse-Goulaine, where he was beaten, tied up, and abandoned. Twelve hours later, as night fell in the Paris suburbs, three men armed only with a pistol broke into a house in Verneuil-sur-Seine. They beat a couple in front of their children, taped up the entire family of four, ransacked the house, and then left for the train station.

This was the 70th similar attack to occur globally in less than a year. Two days later, I boarded a flight to Singapore.

My original purpose for this trip was to visit a team of only 11 people, but the first person I saw in their office wasn’t part of that team. He was a solidly built American with short hair and stubble, sitting at a small table in the corner of the lounge area with an Apple laptop in front of him. His physique suggested he wasn’t there to write code; he was a bodyguard.

One of the company’s co-founders (online alias iliensinc, short for Aliens Incorporated) accompanied me from my hotel to the office. As we walked through streets shaded by rain trees, she told me they hadn’t always been in this part of Singapore. The company was initially based in a co-working space in the financial district, but her other co-founder — the only person on the team not using a pseudonym — started attracting attention. At first, it was just stares, people trying to recognize his face; then strangers began approaching him to chat; later, people followed him into the elevator of his apartment building. So, the company moved to a quieter place, a building no one would think to look for them in.

Even the company’s cleaning staff didn’t know their real business. To her, it was a merchandise company producing plush cat toys. There were indeed 34 plush toys in the office, so the misunderstanding was understandable. The company mascot is a cat named Hypurr, with 12 of them lined up on a shelf, but there were also sharks, lizards, koalas, penguins, and dragons, some perched on monitors like furry gargoyles. Most of the toys came from one engineer — his wife wouldn’t let him bring any more home, so he brought them to the office. The team didn’t correct the cleaner’s misconception.

This is because Hyperliquid — a 加密currency on-chain trading platform — is one of the most profitable companies per capita in the world. Last year, this company’s mere 11 employees generated over $900 million in profit. The company, only three years old, has reached a market cap of $10 billion, and has never taken a single dollar in venture capital. The central figure behind it, 31-year-old Jeffrey Yan, has become an increasingly visible face in an industry — not entirely by choice — where success often comes with a higher risk of kidnapping.

Before founding Hyperliquid, Jeff lived in Puerto Rico, running almost single-handedly one of the largest anonymous trading teams in the cryptocurrency industry. The team was called Chameleon Trading — “Chameleon” was his gaming nickname from middle school. He started with $10,000 of his own savings and achieved thousands of percent annual growth over two and a half years. When he mentioned his returns to me, he immediately tried to convince me it wasn’t a big deal. I noted his objection, and I also noted that Chameleon had made him extremely wealthy. He was 27 years old and financially free. To the surfers, bartenders, and waitresses in San Juan, he was just another young guy in board shorts.

Now, in a heavily secured office in Singapore, Jeff sits cross-legged and barefoot on a gray armchair, wearing black shorts and a dark blue T-shirt, explaining to me why the entire financial system needs to be rebuilt from scratch. The question I really wanted to know was: Why did he trade that first life for this second one?

“It’s not about the money,” Jeff says. Jeff didn’t come from a wealthy family, and his current life shows no interest in “rich people stuff.” He wears the same Lululemon shorts and T-shirts every day — 15 pairs of shorts, 10 T-shirts, each in three colors. Looking around his office, there are almost no signs of wealth. The furniture was left by the previous tenant; the only things the team added were two board games in the lounge, 非全日空 on the wall, and those plush cat toys.

This was confirmed again when I saw four books on a shelf, one of which was Frank Slootman’s “Amp It Up,” a management book whose core idea is that most people don’t work hard enough. When I mentioned the book to iliensinc, she just shrugged — that “work hard” ethos was their own, not from the book. The same goes for the three bottles of Grey Goose and Macallan in the kitchen, untouched since a community event two years ago that didn’t meet the minimum spend. This team is more accustomed to drinking tea.

It’s also not out of love for the cryptocurrency industry. Bitcoin, the industry bellwether, has fallen sharply since its peak in early October; gold, which it was supposed to “replace,” has risen 7% over the same period; most other tokens have performed even worse. When I asked Jeff about the negative sentiment surrounding the entire industry, he didn’t defend it. “There is a lot of shady stuff in this space,” he said. “It’s probably a good thing that people are realizing these things aren’t what they claim to be, in some sense.”

Jeff also doesn’t think of Hyperliquid as a “cryptocurrency company.” “Nobody calls a company an ‘internet company’ anymore,” he said. “We use crypto technology, but that doesn’t 定义ne us.”

Before joining Hyperliquid, only two people on the team (including Jeff) had experience in the cryptocurrency industry. This was partly by design. According to him, early crypto practitioners were mostly focused on making money quickly; what he was building was a long-term project, so it was more suitable for people whose mindset was closer to that of a technologist than a trader. But it was also a supply issue. Hyperliquid’s recruitment targets often come from the podiums of international math and science Olympiads. Jeff won a gold medal in physics at 18; among his engineers, one has a silver medal in informatics, another trained with the US national team. Jeff hopes to recruit more such talents — in fact, since my visit earlier this year, he has added two more members — but the talent pool willing to enter the crypto industry at this level has been shrinking for years due to scams, broken trust, and the recent allure of AI.

So why is Jeff, who has already made enough wealth to do whatever he wants, still here?

At least from the outside, the answer is becoming clearer.

Hyperliquid is essentially a blockchain with its own exchange built on top. In traditional exchanges, the company holds your funds and controls the infrastructure; on Hyperliquid, users control their own assets, and the platform is public. Jeff’s vision for it — he says this without irony — is to host the entire financial system. You can see this as ambition or absurdity, depending on whether you’re looking at the plush cats or the platform’s data. Because in the months since my visit, some trading markets that have existed for over a hundred years have begun to shift in small but quantifiable ways.

Hyperliquid started with perpetual contracts in 2023, a type of derivative and the largest market in the crypto industry. A “perpetual contract” is a bet on the price of an asset; traders don’t actually hold the asset, and unlike traditional futures, it has no expiry date. The market size for this type of trading is 6 to 8 times that of the spot buying and selling market, with monthly trading volume around $7 trillion, and until recently, almost entirely hosted by centralized exchanges, with Binance being the largest by a wide margin. No decentralized platform had made a substantial impact before, and Hyperliquid was the first to do so, growing its market share to about 14% of Binance’s at one point.

Then, in October 2025, Hyperliquid did something a centralized exchange couldn’t: it allowed anyone on the platform to create new perpetual markets for any data asset with a price oracle. An independent team called Trade.xyz became the most active builder. It initially launched a silver market; by January of the following year, its 24-hour trading volume had reached about 2% of the corresponding market on the Chicago Mercantile 交流 (CME, founded in 1898, the world’s largest derivatives exchange). Then, Trade.xyz launched a crude oil market. Oil trading has long relied on traditional markets that close on weekends, but on a Saturday in late February, the US and Israel began airstrikes on Iran. The CME was closed, but Hyperliquid was not. Daily oil trading volume jumped from $21 million to $3.7 billion. A month later, Trade.xyz launched a perpetual contract for the S&P 500 index. This product was officially licensed by S&P Dow Jones Indices and enabled 24/7 trading, including weekends.

Today, the most impactful products on Hyperliquid are being built by developers who neither work for Jeff nor ever will.

The founder of Trade.xyz (who requested anonymity) bought his first Bitcoin in 2013 for $66 and has been active as an investor since, not a builder. He had no plans to start a company. He told me that if it weren’t for Jeff, he might have left the crypto industry long ago. “Hyperliquid has a chance to save the crypto industry,” he said.

Yet, all of this still doesn’t fully explain why Hyperliquid really has the potential to become what Jeff envisions — especially in an industry full of “things that look like they’re about to succeed only to collapse instantly” — nor does it explain why he gave up his life in Puerto Rico to pursue this. With these questions, on my first afternoon at the office, I sat with iliensinc in the lounge area talking, a plush cat on the table, the air still carrying the scent of ginger and sesame from lunch. She told me that three years ago, when Jeff announced he was shutting down Chameleon, the team had asked him the same question. And her answer didn’t start with the crypto industry, but with Jeff himself.

“You should ask his mother,” she said.

Jeff prefers meetings outdoors. We sat on a covered terrace with four gray lounge chairs and a coffee table. Cars passed on the street below from time to time. Every few minutes, a gardener would start a lawnmower. Pedestrian crossing signals chimed intermittently.

Jeff sat with his feet tucked under him. When I asked about his mother, he was silent for a moment. He said she often said a phrase — a Chinese idiom: “rén wài yǒu rén, tiān wài yǒu tiān.” Roughly, no matter how good you think you are, there’s always someone better, more unknown worlds out there. She wasn’t the type of mother who pushed her children hard, but she wanted him to understand that what he saw was only a small part of the world.

He and his sister were raised by their mother alone, living in the heart of one of the most valuable geographic areas in US business history — Redwood Shores, between San Francisco and Palo Alto. Oracle’s mirrored-glass headquarters towered over the neighborhood, surrounded by neighbors who were engineers and product managers, their children groomed from a young age for the kind of life path Jeff later took. Jeff’s parents were both Chinese immigrants who divorced when he was in third grade. His father left the family; his mother was an accountant who had to work overtime during tax season. Jeff saw it all. “I could sense that other people were wealthier than us,” he said. “But I never resented it. Going out to play didn’t cost much money.”

His school didn’t have a strong culture of academic competition. Despite his mother’s saying, she didn’t put pressure on Jeff. Until he hit adolescence, no one really “pushed” him to do anything. He went out to play every day, went to school, came home, and played some more. By the standards of his zip code, he was an extremely rare creature — a “free-range” kid.

In eighth grade, a friend who had just transferred from a private school took him to a math competition — the friend just wanted company. Jeff had never seen anything like it; school math was completely different. There were no formulas to memorize, no tedious calculation processes. You were given a problem, sometimes just a sentence, and had to find your own path into it. The answer wasn’t a number but a proof — a complete argument for why something must be true. Finally, they ranked the contestants like a sprint race. For Jeff, it was a perfect fusion of “the fun of sports” and “the joy of understanding the world.”

That summer, he woke up at 5 a.m. every morning, downloaded past years’ competition problems from the internet, and worked on them alone in his room. He had no tutor, couldn’t afford any summer training programs, and no one asked him to do this. “I realized later that I’m actually very competitive,” he said. “It was like there was a race I didn’t even know existed, and other kids had been preparing their whole lives, and I was behind.”

A year after starting competitions, in his ninth-grade year, he had already been selected for the US Math Olympiad training camp, which brings together the top 50 high school students in the country; he was one of the youngest members. He didn’t make the national team — he said he didn’t care. For those three weeks, he sat with a group of teenagers who could stare at three sentences for five hours and mine truths from them invisible to most people. Jeff told me there aren’t “superstars” in math like Roger Federer, but at the highest levels, there is something akin to what Federer represents: a style, an elegance — in how a proof is constructed. And at the camp, he saw it up close for the first time. “It’s like being able to play with Tom Brady,” he said, “just a nerdier version of that. Most people don’t get to feel that.”

The following year, he failed at an intermediate selection round for the math competition. He was 16 and had to wait a full year to try again. I asked him if this was his first experience of failure. “Failure is actually a very common experience,” he said. “Most people are losers. Usually, there’s only one winner.”

The problem wasn’t the failure itself, but the emptiness. “It was like a hole appeared,” he said. “I should learn something.” So, he got the physics textbooks used by upperclassmen. Even though his school didn’t offer the subject until senior year, he had just learned calculus and understood its use for the first time. He discovered Feynman’s lectures. “I binged them like a TV series,” he said. In less than a year, entirely self-taught, he became one of the top five young physics competitors in the country.

He was selected for the US Physics Olympiad team, went to Estonia — his first time in Europe — and won a silver medal. The following summer, in Copenhagen, he won a gold medal, ranking 24th in the world. He was 18 that year, and when he returned to the Bay Area, he understood the true meaning of his mother’s words: above him, there were indeed people, at least 23 of them.

Harvard covered his entire tuition. In the spring semester of his freshman year, Jeff took Computer Science 124 — Data Structures and Algorithms. The course is typically taken by sophomores and juniors and is notorious for being “painful.” In Harvard course reviews, one student called it a “necessary evil.” One comment even read: “No social life, you will be dateless.” There were 150 students in the course, and as a freshman, Jeff placed first, and by a significant margin.

At Harvard, students are assigned to upperclassmen houses after freshman year. Jeff was placed in Pforzheimer House, where he became friends with Scott Wu, two years his junior. They had first met at a summer camp for Olympiad competitors. Wu had represented the US in the International Olympiad in Informatics, winning gold three years in a row, with a perfect score the last time, and later co-founded Cognition AI. When Wu was assigned to Pforzheimer in his sophomore year, he messaged Jeff: “Yo, I’m in Pfoho.” Jeff replied: “Let’s go!”

Wu would often find Jeff at the grand piano in the common room — where he taught himself jazz, repeating passages until he mastered them. They played chess, Go, poker together, and spent a lot of time discussing what it meant to “be the best at something.” Jeff

本文来源于互联网： Jeff Yan’s “Hyper Life”

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