Jeff Yan rarely speaks publicly, avoids social media, and has never accepted venture capital money. But in 2025, few people have had greater influence on the shape of decentralized finance (DeFi) and the crypto space itself.
This feature is part of CoinDesk List of the most influential of 2025.
Yan is the founder of Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange (DEX) for perpetual futures that processes around $10 billion in trades per day, and DefiLlama showed a volume of $308 billion in October. With over 570,000 users and a custom blockchain that matches the speed and reliability of centralized platforms, Hyperliquid has quietly become a dominant player in crypto derivatives.
He’s done it without hype, investor backing, or a large team: just 11 core contributors, a vision based on technical precision, and a relentless focus on the product led by Yan.
To understand Yan’s rise, it helps to know where he comes from. Raised in Palo Alto, California, by Chinese immigrant parents, Yan was a physics prodigy and 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 brief stint at Google, he left to start his own cryptocurrency trading company, Chameleon Trading, during the 2020-2021 bull run.
Even then, Yan stayed out of the spotlight. Their robots ran the markets; he managed the infrastructure. But the collapse of FTX at the end of 2022 changed things. As traders fled the ruins of centralized exchanges, Yan saw an opportunity as the preferred alternative: decentralized finance where users custody their own funds did not 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: fast, decentralized derivatives. The first version seemed like a developer sandbox that simply showed raw performance, with no financial incentives to attract users. But it worked. Hyperliquid offered sub-second finality, on-chain order books, and a user experience close to that of Binance.
Within months, it was processing more than $1 billion a day. Now he sees more than $10 billion a month.
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 making (HIP-3) and support for Ethereum (via HyperEVM) made Hyperliquid a modular financial layer, not just a trading venue. Protocols like Felix and HyperLend have since built on it, attracted by its speed and shared incentives.
What makes this more notable is what Hyperliquid No do. He never raised outside capital as Yan started the entire project using profits from Chameleon Trading. There were no flashy airdrop announcements, no venture capital allocations or influencer campaigns. The platform grew through word of mouth, organic liquidity competitions, and performance.
When Hyperliquid finally launched its token, HYPE, in late 2024, it did so on its own terms. About 31% of the supply went to early adopters and no venture funds received allocations. The remaining supply, more than two-thirds, was reserved for future ecosystem growth, airdrops, or long-term team incentives. By mid-2025, HYPE had reached a market capitalization close to $20 billion, although the cryptocurrency crash has since dragged that figure down.
The model sparked imitators across DeFi. It became a new norm as Hyperliquid funneled hundreds of millions in protocol fees to users through buybacks and burns. HYPE even has its own digital asset treasury company, Hyperliquid Strategies, which has taken steps to raise up to $1 billion to accumulate the token.
The silent disturbance
Yan is an unlikely example of the DeFi boom in 2025. He doesn’t attract attention: He rarely appears on podcasts, he doesn’t talk much on social media, and his published interviews are few. When he speaks, like at TOKEN2049 in Singapore, he speaks clearly and avoids exaggeration.
But its influence is tangible. Hyperliquid has forced competitors like dYdX to accelerate their infrastructure and challenged the idea that it takes big teams and a lot of capital to build at scale.
Even controversies, such as criticism of Hyperliquid’s settlement system during the October 10 crash, have led to well-thought-out 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. It seems that iterative updates are preferred to milestone-driven hype cycles. But if HIP-3 is any indication, Hyperliquid is expanding beyond its roots and looking to host the entire financial system, on-chain.
Through it all, Yan seems unfazed. He still doesn’t talk much. But in a market that is often loud and erratic, its quiet approach has proven magnetic. The attitude is comparable to that of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who prefers to focus on creating long-term solutions rather than chasing short-term trends.
“Our core philosophy is: Cryptocurrencies will change the way finance works. Traditional finance will eventually migrate to cryptocurrencies. Hyperliquid will become the basic platform for these financial activities,” Yan said in an interview last year.
To builders, he has become the performance-obsessed founder who codes more than he tweets. For users, you have created a system where results determine value.
