Hyperliquid, a decentralized crypto platform launched in late 2024 by former Hudson River Trading quantitative trader Jeff Yan, has become a 24/7 trading venue where Wall Street traders place leveraged bets on perpetual futures for assets ranging from crude oil and the S&P 500 to pre-IPO companies such as SpaceX, according to a Wall Street Journal report published Tuesday. The exchange and its associated blockchain generated roughly $800 million in total revenue last year, a figure cited by Blockworks Research, and have attracted a growing user base seeking access to derivatives markets that conventional brokerages cannot offer outside regular trading hours.
Perpetual futures are derivative contracts that never expire, allowing users to trade at any time with leverage that amplifies both gains and losses based on the paper value of their positions. The platform’s high-leverage products carry significant risk; on Oct. 10, President Trump’s surprise announcement of 100% tariffs against China triggered a selloff that erased more than $19 billion in leveraged positions across crypto markets, including $10 billion on Hyperliquid alone, according to the Journal.
Yan said in an interview that Hyperliquid’s design drew inspiration from the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange, which convinced him the market needed a platform where users safeguard their own assets rather than the exchange holding them. “The main thing was that self-custody is not just some academic concept, but rather some essential feature that users will demand,” Yan told the Journal. “I’m surprised that users don’t demand it more after FTX, but it’s as simple as having control of your money.”
The platform’s native token, HYPE, has gained more than 100% over the past year and commands a market capitalization of roughly $16 billion, according to CoinGecko. Hyperliquid Labs, the developer behind the exchange and blockchain, has 11 employees.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Friday laid out a framework for registered U.S. platforms to launch perpetual futures, and approved a bitcoin perpetual futures contract at Kalshi while allowing Coinbase’s U.S. customers to access its global perpetuals through an affiliate. Hyperliquid remains inaccessible to U.S. residents through its terms of use, which explicitly bar any circumvention including by VPN, but traders in restricted regions say they use virtual private networks to access the platform because it does not require identity verification or standard background checks.
Benjamin Schiffrin, director of securities policy for Better Markets, a group that pushes for tighter financial regulation, warned about the products’ danger to retail investors. “Perpetual futures are a complex financial product that is hard for even sophisticated financial professionals to necessarily understand, and I don’t believe that the risks of perpetual futures are being adequately disclosed to retail investors,” Schiffrin said. “I think that’s a very dangerous combination.”
Hedge-fund commodities trader Vala Zeinali described using the platform during a weekend in February when news broke that President Trump had announced airstrikes against Iran. Zeinali had already placed a four-figure bet on oil derivatives in anticipation of a Middle East conflict, and when crude prices rocketed he logged on to Hyperliquid and closed his position, locking in a 243% gain. “At the time, I’m, like, ‘awesome’ because normally these types of moves fade by the open on Sunday for crude,” Zeinali told the Journal. “And so at the time I’m, like, ‘OK, I can actually get out of my position’ and so I did.”
Pascal Lin, a trader based in Geneva, Switzerland, said he discovered Hyperliquid in late 2023 and became a power user, trading the HYPE token and oil-linked perpetual futures. Lin said he set up real-time price alerts for HYPE on his Apple watch, a habit he described as “toxic.” “In one click, I have access to Hyperliquid,” he told the Journal. “Whenever I wake up in the middle of the night, in one click I can check the HYPE price.”
Lawrence Wu, co-founder of Hyperdash, a data-analytics platform for Hyperliquid, said the ecosystem’s culture draws on the platform’s decentralized ideals. “I think the reason why there’s such a big community around it is because it’s trying to fulfill crypto’s original vision of a meritocratic, permissionless system,” Wu said. “It’s very idealistic.”
Yan said Hyperliquid’s ultimate goal is to house all of finance. The platform’s next moves include prediction markets and options trading, and its first outcome contracts tracking bitcoin’s price have generated millions of dollars in derivatives volume since rolling out in early May, the Journal reported.