Jeff Yan rarely speaks publicly, avoids social media and has never taken venture capital money. But in 2025, few individuals have had a greater impact on the shape of decentralized finance (DeFi) and the crypto space itself.
This feature is part of CoinDesk’s The list of most influential 2025.
Yan is the founder of Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange (DEX) for perpetual futures that processes about $10 billion in trades per day, with DefiLlama showing $308 billion in volume in October. With more than 570,000 users and a purpose-built blockchain that matches the speed and reliability of centralized platforms, Hyperliquid has quietly become a dominant player in crypto derivatives.
It has done so without hype, investor backing or a large team – just 11 core contributors, a vision rooted in technical precision and a relentless focus on product led by Yan.
To understand Yan’s rise, it helps to know where he came from. Raised in Palo Alto, California by Chinese immigrant parents, Yan was a physics prodigy who took home gold at the 2013 International Physics Olympiad.
He studied mathematics and computer science at Harvard and then joined Hudson River Trading (HRT), a high-frequency trading firm known for its ultra-low latency strategies. After a short stint at Google, he left to start his own crypto trading company, Chameleon Trading, during 2020-2021.
Even then, Yan stayed out of the limelight. His bots handled the markets; he took care of the infrastructure. But the collapse of FTX in late 2022 changed things. As traders fled the ruins of centralized exchanges, Yan saw an opening as the preferred alternative, decentralized finance, where users manage their own funds and did not compete with centralized alternatives. So he set off 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 for one purpose: fast, decentralized derivatives. The early version looked like a developer sandbox that just showed raw performance with no financial incentives to pick up users. But it worked. Hyperliquid offered sub-second finality, on-chain order books and a user experience close to Binance.
Within months, it was processing over $1 billion a day. It now sees well over $10 billion a month.
The secret behind 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) made Hyperliquid a modular financial layer, not just a trading platform. Protocols like Felix and HyperLend have since built on it, drawing on its speed and shared incentives.
What makes this more remarkable is what Hyperliquid did not do. It never raised outside capital as Yan strapped the entire project using profits from Chameleon Trading. There was no flashy airdrop announcement, no VC allocations and no influencer campaigns. The platform grew through word of mouth, organic cash competitions and achievements.
When Hyperliquid finally launched its token, HYPE, in late 2024, it did so on its own terms. About 31% of the offering went to early adopters, and no venture funds received allocations. The remaining supply, over two-thirds, was reserved for future ecosystem growth, airdrops, or long-term team incentives. By mid-2025, HYPE had reached a market cap of nearly $20 billion, although the crypto drawdown has since pulled that figure down.
The model sparked copycats across DeFi. It became a new norm as Hyperliquid sent hundreds of millions in protocol fees back to users through buybacks and burns. HYPE even has its own digital asset treasury company Hyperliquid Strategies, which has moved to raise up to $1 billion to accumulate the token.
The quiet disturbance
Yan is an unlikely poster child for the DeFi boom of 2025. He doesn’t attract attention: he rarely appears on podcasts, isn’t extremely vocal on social media, and his published interviews are sparse. When he speaks up, as at TOKEN2049 in Singapore, he speaks plainly and avoids hype.
But his influence is tangible. Hyperliquid has forced competitors like dYdX to accelerate their infrastructure, challenging the idea that building at scale requires large teams and capital.
Even controversies, such as criticism of Hyperliquid’s liquidation system during the October 10 crash, have led to thoughtful technical defenses. Yan has argued that his models protect users by minimizing systemic risk, not by maximizing protocol revenue.
Looking ahead, the roadmap remains vague. Iterative upgrades seem preferable to milestone-driven hype cycles. But if HIP-3 is any indication, Hyperliquid is expanding beyond its roots and looking to house the entire financial system, onchain.
Through it all, Yan seems unfazed. He still doesn’t talk much. But in a market that is often loud and erratic, his quiet focus has proven magnetic. The attitude is comparable 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 works. Traditional finance will eventually migrate to cryptocurrency. Hyperliquid will become the fundamental platform for these financial activities,” Yan said in an interview last year.
For builders, he has become the performance-obsessed founder who codes more than he tweets. For the users, he has created a system where results determine value.
