Jeff Yan on Hyperliquid: Hoping to become the AWS of the finance industry

Author: VALR; Editor: Wu Shuo Blockchain

In VALR’s interview on July 9, 2026, Hyperliquid co-founder Jeff Yan sat down with VALR CEO Farzam Ehsani for a conversation. Jeff said that Hyperliquid should not be viewed only as a decentralized exchange, but more like “AWS for the financial world,” providing shared liquidity, ledgers, and asset-deployment infrastructure. He believes the goal of on-chain finance is not simply to replace traditional financial institutions, but to retain existing services and gradually replace inefficient underlying financial rails. He also said that a major challenge currently facing the crypto and fintech industries—especially how to attract more outstanding young talent from hot areas like AI to participate in building—is particularly important.

From an immigrant family to becoming a creator: Jeff Yan’s growth and the formation of his values

Farzam Ehsani: Today, we invited Jeff to the show to talk about what he is doing right now, and to help everyone get to know him more deeply. Jeff, the impression you give is that you attach great importance to values and integrity. Where do you think these values in your life come from? How did they take shape?

Jeff Yan: To be honest, it’s hard to say clearly, because sometimes values are just like they have always been there since you remember things—you seem to be born that way.

My mother was an immigrant, and later came to the United States. So during my upbringing, I was no stranger to the idea of working hard and living by relying on honest labor. She was a single mother, raising two children on her own, while also doing full-time accounting work and often working overtime. I think it was precisely seeing these experiences with my own eyes that gradually shaped a set of values in me: this world doesn’t owe you anything, and the starting point of your life may not always be fair.

She worked extremely hard, just so her children could get opportunities as close as possible to those of their peers. We have always been very grateful for that. I think this is also a very typical story of an immigrant family. No one owes you anything by default—at least no one owed her anything. Over the past decades, she had to keep fighting, making her way step by step through difficult times. Her experiences have always been a huge inspiration to me.

Farzam Ehsani: So, in your childhood, what key moments made you feel that they ultimately brought you to where you are today? You just talked about your mother, and how she taught you to stay humble. Beyond that, were there any other specific experiences that had an important impact on you?

I’m also a father of two children myself, so I’m really curious: when you were young, what did you see and experience—what ultimately made you who you are today? Was there anything in particular that left a deep impression on you?

Jeff Yan: In the Colossus article, I mentioned a turning point that had a big impact on me. Back then, I suddenly realized that a person can earn the world’s recognition because of their achievements—especially achievements in intelligence and in the realm of creation.

It may sound a bit silly, but during the first ten or twelve years of my life, I truly didn’t realize that. Later, that idea suddenly became very clear in my head, and I felt it was a really cool thing. Before that, I had been trying to make myself good at sports, but it wasn’t easy for me. My performance was “okay”—for example, when I practiced track and field with friends, I might run pretty fast. But when I joined local track and field competitions, I would often be left far behind by others, who even looked like they weren’t really trying.

So when I realized that people can also create value for the world by creating things and using their own mind, I felt very energized. That must have been a very critical moment in my childhood.

Hyperliquid has taken up almost all of my life

Farzam Ehsani: Very good. From childhood to now, and then looking to the future—we’ll talk about Hyperliquid in detail later—what personal pursuits do you have in your own life? What values have continued to drive you, or what do you hope to truly achieve in the world?

Jeff Yan: For who I am right now, the answer is Hyperliquid. There’s just too much to do—it almost takes over my entire life. From the very beginning, it’s been like this.

I feel like things probably have to be this way. Anyone who is in the early stages of building a company, trying to create something in the world, and truly believes in their vision—most likely will be in a similar state. That might be the only commonality among them: you develop an almost obsessive focus on what you’re building, and that obsession can’t disappear.

Once that passion goes away, I think the product itself will decline as well. So this attitude is actually very common, but it also really doesn’t leave much room for other things. Right now, I can barely feel the difference between days—life is basically just this one thing left.

Farzam Ehsani: Do you still only have 11 team members right now?

Jeff Yan: If you look only at Hyperliquid Labs, then yes. But I’d rather treat the participants across the whole ecosystem as part of the team. Comparing the size of personnel strictly within one company isn’t really fair.

As you mentioned just now, the team needs to build customer support systems—I’d also include departments like marketing and compliance. And on our side, aside from the core engineering team, almost every function can find corresponding builders, deployers, or other participants in the ecosystem to take on those roles.

So if you want to do a fair comparison, those ecosystem participants should also be considered part of the team.

Farzam Ehsani: Thank you. I previously knew we might be one of the earliest centralized exchanges to integrate with Hyperliquid, but now it sounds like we might even be the first centralized exchange to connect Hyperliquid directly as DeFi backend infrastructure.

The first real convergence of CeFi and DeFi

Farzam Ehsani: Actually, I still have a lot of questions I want to ask you, but maybe we can follow this topic and talk directly about CeFi and DeFi.

When people ask me how I see the future—especially when I talk with investors—they often ask about Hyperliquid, decentralized exchanges, and how I personally think this industry will evolve. We’ve received venture capital, while you’re known for never accepting VC funding. Every time I talk with investors, they pay very close attention to Hyperliquid and the future direction of decentralized exchanges.

I usually answer like this, and I’d also really like to hear your take on my view, and how you think the world will develop. Over the past 20 years, the world has changed a great deal. For the first time, people can hold digital assets in a self-directed, self-custodied way in the crypto world without having to rely on intermediaries. But VALR itself is an intermediary. So why do we still exist?

My answer is that many people still want someone to provide some help along the way. They want to be able to call customer service when problems arise, reset passwords, and they don’t want to custody private keys on their own. The best part of the world we live in now is that people have choices. If someone wants to use DeFi fully, they can. If someone wants other institutions to custody their private keys, they can also choose that option.

I think one thing hasn’t been sufficiently or correctly discussed: all of these models carry risks. What really matters is to understand what risks each model specifically has, and to confirm whether those risks match your own risk tolerance. I’m very excited about the entire ecosystem. The ecosystem here includes both CeFi and DeFi. They’re all pushing the world forward in their own ways.

That said, I’d also really like to hear how you view DeFi and CeFi, and how you think they will evolve in the future.

Jeff Yan: That’s a great question, and it can be answered from many angles. I think the point you just mentioned is extremely key: freedom of money and personal self-directed control do not mean that users must take on very high risks.

Of course, you can also take the purest Bitcoin OG approach: write your private keys on paper, or memorize them entirely in your head—even if you eventually bring them into the grave. That approach does exist, but I think there are very few people in the world who are truly willing to do that.

Between these two, there is actually a whole set of different solutions. For example, you can still hold your private keys yourself, but also set up some kind of recovery mechanism, such as social recovery. That way, even if you lose your private keys, it doesn’t mean all assets will permanently disappear. You can find a few people you trust, and a group of distributed trusted contacts can help you restore access together.

And as long as you haven’t forgotten or lost your private keys, you can still fully transfer your funds on your own. So in a sense, these two needs aren’t in conflict—you can have both self-directed control and a certain level of security assurance. I believe these kinds of solutions will only get better over time.

Beyond that, there are some equally interesting things, but they haven’t been discussed with as many dimensions. VALR integrating Hyperliquid’s underlying network is a good example, and it also represents the direction I think the industry may move toward in the future. I believe that in many cases, on-chain finance shouldn’t be treated as something intended to replace the existing financial system. Of course, the existing financial system has areas that need improvement—every system does. But the reason the problems in the financial system appear especially obvious is that there are some deeply rooted inefficiencies within it.

As you mentioned earlier, in Africa, even completing a single transaction might cost 20%—which is obviously absurd. Anyone who has used crypto would find that unacceptable. No matter which bridge you use, which token you use, or what exactly the asset is that you transfer, a 20% cost is just too high.

But this situation still exists to this day, which shows just how deeply entrenched the problem is.

I think the solution isn’t simply to say, “Everyone should completely move over to these brand-new technologies.” A more realistic approach is to retain the interfaces and APIs that traditional merchants and existing systems are already accustomed to, and replace only the underlying financial rails.

The real world is complex—you can’t force everyone to completely switch overnight. A better way is to keep the existing user-facing interfaces, but replace the underlying infrastructure. In essence, this is upgrading the entire financial system.

I think the on-chain finance rails are a product improvement from 0 to 1. In the past, people would stand in trading halls shouting bids at each other, and the tallest person might even get the best execution price simply because they were easier to see and hear.

This isn’t that far back in history. About 20 or 30 years ago, a large portion of trading globally was still happening this way. Looking back today, it’s almost unimaginable, because the market is now fully electronic.

And I think the next true improvement from 0 to 1 is shifting from a centralized electronic backend to a decentralized, user self-custodied backend. Centralized electronic systems still have some efficiency issues, while decentralized, self-custodied backends can, as you said, give individuals more freedom and choice in their own financial lives. This process is unfolding slowly and it does take time. Crypto has existed for more than a decade, but changes like this were never going to happen quickly.

Finance is too important to people. For most people, money is one of the most core components of life, and people usually don’t want to experiment with it lightly. Because it relates to people’s basic living and survival, the relevant protocols must be thoroughly battle-tested before the whole system can truly make that transition.

But I do believe that once this transition begins, the market will reach an inflection point and enter an exponential growth phase. Because for billions of people around the world, it will unlock tremendous value.

Farzam Ehsani: You just mentioned an inflection point. Could you explain it more specifically? Do you mean more users moving to DeFi, or do you believe the inflection point you envision will appear in other forms?

Jeff Yan: I think that inflection point will happen when the existing financial system realizes that connecting to this kind of backend infrastructure is actually very simple. Your experience might be a good example. When you integrate a perpetual contract backend, you can still have full control over your own product system. You can decide fees, control the front-end interface and user flow, and almost everything at the product layer is in your hands. The underlying system only needs to run reliably and provide liquidity in the form of infrastructure.

When brokers, front ends, applications, and exchanges around the world truly understand this, I think that “a flash of insight” moment will lead everyone to start adopting this model.

Once people recognize the value of doing this, integrating it in practice isn’t that difficult. What it really means is that as a builder, merchant, or exchange, you can focus your energy on what you’re best at—understanding users, providing the best experience for them, and continuously expanding the user base.

As for the other underlying work, why should everyone keep reinventing the wheel? And it’s a very hard wheel to make. As you said, bootstrapping liquidity from zero is extremely difficult. We can share a neutral protocol that provides this infrastructure at lower cost, so everyone can focus on the more interesting parts—those that we’re better at. The exponential growth I mentioned refers to exactly this kind of change.

Hyperliquid is not just an exchange—it’s AWS for the financial world

Farzam Ehsani: In your own words, can you briefly explain what Hyperliquid actually is? What do Hyperliquid Labs and the broader community build, respectively?

Jeff Yan: Our slogan is “infrastructure that carries all finance.” In light of VALR’s historically significant integration this time, I especially want to emphasize the “infrastructure” part. I don’t want to keep repeating it, but I do think it’s extremely important, and I’m excited to introduce it to the world.

Many people will see Hyperliquid as an exchange, and of course it’s part of it. Users typically use Hyperliquid through some kind of front end, and to them that front end indeed has many characteristics of an exchange. They may have originally used other exchanges, but then started using a specific Hyperliquid front end because they felt it offered a better product experience.

But if you ask what Hyperliquid itself actually is, it’s far more than just the front end or application users see. At its core, it’s a set of liquidity infrastructure. I often use AWS as an analogy. This analogy isn’t perfect, but it contains many similarities and helps people quickly form a clear picture.

Before AWS existed, many startups were repeatedly reinventing the wheel. They needed to buy their own server racks, manage power costs, and replace equipment themselves when computers failed. Everyone kept building the same things again and again, and the process was extremely difficult.

After AWS came along, it told everyone: “Leave these things to us.” These tasks are hard and aren’t directly aimed at users. And frankly, for most people who truly want to build products, they aren’t that interesting either. AWS focuses on doing that one thing better than anyone else—serving users around the world and achieving extremely high availability. And as a result, the whole world becomes better.

AWS created huge value and helped startups thrive. Even a small team consisting only of product managers and engineers could join hackathons, develop an end-to-end product in a very short time, and deliver it directly to users. That was a very important capability unlock.

I think Hyperliquid’s vision is similar. What AWS does for computing, servers, and today’s GPU resources, Hyperliquid can do for financial activities such as liquidity, ledgers, asset deployment, and tokenization of real-world assets. It’s essentially AWS for the financial world.

Hyperliquid is a liquidity layer on which anyone can build products. Beyond that, it has an advantage that AWS doesn’t have, which is also why I think the analogy isn’t fully accurate: liquidity itself creates more liquidity.

So there’s a compounding effect here. Even though different projects integrate Hyperliquid separately, in the end they share the same liquidity.

When VALR integrates Hyperliquid—or take Phantom as an example. Phantom is also one of the earliest projects to integrate Hyperliquid in the consumer wallet category. Last year—these different products that integrated into Hyperliquid all shared the same liquidity. When order flow from different channels enters the same market, all users benefit: the market price spread becomes smaller, and liquidity depth increases.

As you said, Hyperliquid currently has the deepest liquidity Bitcoin perpetual contract order book. At least when I last checked, that was indeed the case. The reason is that a large number of users and applications keep integrating. I think that’s a wonderful thing. As the scale continues to grow, it will ultimately benefit everyone involved.

“Carrying all finance” doesn’t mean winner-takes-all

Farzam Ehsani: You often talk about “carrying all finance,” which is clearly a very grand goal. In the future you envision, will Hyperliquid become one of several platforms that carry finance, or is this going to be a winner-takes-all market? What does this mean for other projects building similar infrastructure? For example, some people might argue that Ethereum has been trying to build something similar, even though it currently doesn’t have a perpetual contract market and on-chain order book infrastructure like Hyperliquid.

Jeff Yan: Maybe we need to further clarify the word “carry.” My understanding is that it’s a very open and inclusive house. We build the house so that financial activities can come in, and use this technology.

But the real question is: what will people build on top of it? Who are its customers? Who creates value, and builds their own business and commercial landscape on top of this infrastructure? The answer is still the people who are doing these things today.

So Hyperliquid isn’t meant to take business away from any specific company or force them out of the market. That’s also what’s interesting about it. Typically, when a startup raises money from VC, investors might first ask: “Who’s your competitor? Who is your biggest competitor?”

But what we’re building is somewhat different. You can certainly point to some businesses that might feel threatened by Hyperliquid, but I don’t think it must be that kind of relationship. I don’t see it that way. To me, Hyperliquid is a piece of technology that anyone can integrate. For example, VALR is a centralized exchange. Many centralized exchanges might think: “Hyperliquid is terrible—it’s competing with us and taking away our market share.” That’s one way of looking at it.

But you can also look at it another way: Hyperliquid can serve as a liquidity layer, enabling many exchanges to build products on top of it and connect into it. Those exchanges don’t lose their users because of this—in fact, they might very well provide users with a better experience. So I think it’s more like a story of collaboration with each other, rather than a war of mutual conflict.

Farzam Ehsani: I completely agree with this. However, I think it will inevitably impact other centralized companies and blockchains too. Right now, of course, many other blockchains are trying to catch up with Hyperliquid. Stepping back, it’s actually a very good thing that so many projects are emerging in this industry. But when we look back on today in the future, I think many of those projects may have completely disappeared.

The reason, as you mentioned, is liquidity. In the future, only a few major liquidity pools may form. I think it’s healthy for an ecosystem to have several liquidity pools, but the number can’t be too high. Once there are too many pools, liquidity gets fragmented across a large number of different trading venues.

It’s the same for blockchains. Right now, many chains compete to attract more activity and builders into their own ecosystems. So I think in the future, many blockchains and tokens will gradually exit the market. I completely understand what you said—Hyperliquid isn’t aiming to compete against or eliminate other participants—but losers will still appear in the process, whether in the CeFi or DeFi space.

Jeff Yan: Yes. In any genuinely competitive capitalist economy, global market, or economic system, people will try different things, and some of those attempts will inevitably fail. I think that’s a healthy phenomenon, and I don’t have any disagreement with it.

Not optimizing based on metrics all the time, but building products from 0 to 1

Farzam Ehsani: Besides trading volume and liquidity, what metrics do you look at every day to judge how the Hyperliquid ecosystem is evolving?

I also hope you can share some specific data—for example, what information you check every day to gauge the growth of the network, the platform, and the entire ecosystem.

Jeff Yan: My answer might disappoint you, but in reality I don’t look at various metrics very often.

I think metrics are certainly important, but there are many people in the ecosystem who are better at this than I am. They spend a lot of time researching these data. So I personally end up looking at some very good third-party data dashboards instead. I can share some of them with you later.

As far as I can think of right now, Hydromancer has made some very solid data tools. And every time I go check, it seems like I find something new in there, which is very interesting. People can research for themselves. Almost any metric you can think of will have a community member building a cool data panel for it.

That said, what I primarily focus on isn’t these quantitative metrics. Trading and markets themselves are obviously highly quantifiable, but in daily work, I think more about qualitative things. Most of what we’re trying to build are products that previously didn’t exist. You might have noticed that every time Hyperliquid launches a feature, even when it’s built on past ideas, it usually also includes a relatively novel way of implementing it. We want it to bring about some kind of improvement from 0 to 1.

If other people have already done something, then Hyperliquid might also provide a similar feature—at least to ensure users get basic feature parity. But these kinds of things aren’t as exciting, and they’re not the kind of problems we’re willing to spend all our effort thinking about.

HIP-3 is an example. It was the first to introduce a permissionless market deployment architecture—this concept didn’t exist before. As VALR continues to scale in the future, I think you’ll likely gradually connect more markets created by different deployers. This can form a very interesting synergy among different participants—protocols, deployers, front ends, exchanges, and so on.

When you think about what you need to build next, if that thing didn’t exist at all, it’s hard to get answers from existing metrics. That’s what I’m truly fascinated by. Of course, ultimately these innovations will also show up in metrics. Whether it’s trading volume, rolling trading volume, market share, the share of total perpetual contract trading volume, the trading volume share of a particular asset, spot trading volume share, or liquidity comparisons across different platforms—everything will benefit from that.

But I think if you only do local optimization around these metrics, you actually can’t achieve a real breakthrough. Even if you care a lot about metrics, the right approach is to keep searching for innovations from 0 to 1.

HIP-4 isn’t just about predicting markets—it may also redefine on-chain options

Farzam Ehsani: Then let’s talk about HIP-4. HIP-4 is actually driving the growth of result markets on Hyperliquid. Result markets have many great use cases; they can further develop financial markets through tools such as risk hedging and options.

Jeff Yan: I’d like to answer from a few perspectives. First, the primitive of result markets itself isn’t inherently tied to any particular subjective interpretation. In my view, if understood at the protocol level, it’s essentially just a set of different margin systems and settlement mechanisms.

Positions are fully collateralized, so there’s no liquidation. In a sense, it could be the most well-structured derivative you can design, with the clearest risk boundaries. Both trading parties’ gains and losses have caps. Both sides deposit in advance the maximum possible loss amount, and then settlement is carried out based on the result from some off-chain oracle. With that, the entire mechanism can work properly.

Second, I think markets and speculation are naturally intertwined to some degree and can’t be completely separated. You can’t enjoy the benefits of a free market while completely banning speculation, because the two can’t be clearly defined. There will always be a spectrum in the market, including different levels of outcome volatility, different risk levels, and the gap between expected value and the final result.

Farzam Ehsani: When you think about HIP-4, besides prediction markets—what you call result markets—what other applications do you think about? What other products in your vision could truly advance the financial system and create value for humankind?

Jeff Yan: If we’re talking about result markets, beyond binary markets, the most obvious application is options.

Options are huge in traditional financial markets and play a very important role, because they allow people to hedge risk in different ways. For example, you might not want to do a Delta One hedge; you might only want protection against some extreme downside risk, and options are the standard tool to achieve that.

But on-chain options haven’t truly achieved a breakthrough. I think the main reason is that, technically, options are a product that’s very hard to build using pre-funded mechanisms.

Take on-chain perpetual contracts as an example. At least on Hyperliquid, all positions are pre-funded. I think this is an important innovation brought by crypto. People in the crypto industry have already gotten used to it: when opening a perpetual contract position, you must submit collateral first. Traditional futures don’t necessarily work this way. In periods of extreme volatility, pre-funded positions can significantly increase system resilience—this is a very important advantage.

But options are difficult to construct in the same way, because market makers need to provide quotes for a large set of different strike prices and expiration dates at the same time. If you impose constraints on market makers’ collateral similar to those in perpetual contracts—even if they’re only somewhat similar—it’s hard to expect the market to obtain reasonable liquidity.

Therefore, I think result markets provide some exploration space to address this problem. We can try to combine the advantages from both sides: on one hand, provide payoff curves similar to options; on the other hand, maintain resilience through pre-funded positions. What you end up with might not be “options” in the traditional sense, but perhaps it can form a product that people gradually accept and say: “This is the on-chain equivalent of the kind of payoff structure we need.”

The greatest value of on-chain finance may reach the people who need it most, at the latest

Farzam Ehsani: Hyperliquid is building a perpetual contract market, as well as an open, permissionless, credibly neutral financial system. Do you think this system will play a unique role in emerging markets? Or is it originally meant for the whole world?

Jeff Yan: I think it’s indeed meant for the whole world, but my judgment is that the impact it brings may be especially evident in emerging markets. Sometimes it even makes me a bit sad, because on-chain finance innovations often end up starting in developed countries first. They usually appear in the form of tech startups, so the people who first get exposed to and push these innovations are often from developed markets.

This is somewhat ironic, because the people who ultimately benefit the most from these technologies might be those who adopt them relatively later. But at a larger scale, maybe it’s not such a serious issue. Perhaps in another parallel world, the first and deepest users of this system are exactly the ones who benefit the most from it.

In this new layer of liquidity infrastructure, the global distribution of ownership is already more dispersed than in the existing financial system. In the traditional financial system, ownership is highly concentrated in developed countries, while on-chain finance has already improved this point. Still, I hope it can become even more equal and more inclusive. If you have any thoughts on this, I’d be very happy to hear them. Of course, I believe VALR will also play a very important role in this process in the future.

Farzam Ehsani: I think the system we’re building will enable many regions to leapfrog forward. Similar situations have happened in many technology fields in the past. For example, in Africa: on this vast and beautiful continent there are about 54 countries, with many different currencies and financial systems, and cross-border flows face a great deal of friction.

I’m excited about what we’re building—by “we,” I mean not only you and the entire ecosystem, but also because we’re pulling a large amount of infrastructure out from political barriers. For a long time, many political barriers created by humans have led to more division rather than unity. I believe there will be a lot of similar discussions in the future too. But there’s a line that has always inspired me greatly, and I think you’ll likely like it as well. Let me find it.

This is a quote proposed by the Bahá’í International Community in 1999:

“Existing monetary systems are in a tangle, and for many people, they are the final stronghold of national pride. In the future, these systems may be replaced by a single world currency that relies mainly on electronic impulses. The psychological and social impacts resulting from this would be immeasurable.”

I really like this quote. It’s essentially saying that the world needs a better financial system. This is especially evident for Africa. We see a lot of friction in the current systems, and it comes with extremely high costs. So I’m very eager to see what this new system can bring to all of humanity—especially those who are paying the high costs caused by the huge frictions in the existing financial system.

Stablecoins are not a failure of idealism—they are votes cast by users

Farzam Ehsani: Speaking of this, I also want to talk about stablecoins. How do you see the role of stablecoins in the overall ecosystem? In the vision of “carrying all finance,” what role will stablecoins play?

Jeff Yan: Yes. But first, going back to the point we just discussed, I think it’s very forward-looking. What’s unbelievable is that this statement was proposed a full decade before cryptocurrencies even appeared.

Farzam Ehsani: That’s truly crazy. Every time I read it, I think, “It’s amazing.” That was ten years before the birth of cryptocurrencies.

Jeff Yan: Very interesting. By the way, you just mentioned “leapfrog development,” and I think that’s a great analogy. I also hope things will eventually develop in that way. I think what you’re referring to might be a “move-first” development path in countries like India. In a sense, they skipped the fixed-line telephone stage and went straight into the mobile communications era—even directly into 4G and 5G.

If Africa could also see similar development, I think it would be very exciting. Sometimes, when a region doesn’t have too many legacy technologies to accommodate and doesn’t need to maintain many old systems and backward compatibility, it can make more decisive infrastructure-layer choices based on first principles.

If this kind of change could happen first in Africa, I think it would inspire the entire world. As you said, Africa currently has a lot of friction and too many issues to improve. If Africa can achieve leapfrog development and move to the very front line of decentralized ledgers supporting the financial system, that would be an extraordinary thing.

Of course, this process may not be easy. Going back to stablecoins, I think this is interesting because I don’t believe Satoshi considered stablecoins at all. My feeling is that if he had seen stablecoins, he might have thought: “Isn’t this a compromise? It’s not pure enough.” Maybe he would have had a similar reaction.

But the truth is, this is exactly the product users want. I don’t think this is a failure of the system. Ultimately, the financial system and any other system must reflect users’ real needs. When users trade, they are more willing to use stablecoins issued by governments as the unit of account and for settlement. I think this is something people didn’t fully understand in the past, but it has now been validated.

In the foreseeable future, this situation may still continue. Maybe not forever, but at least as long as users truly want this, upgrading the underlying infrastructure of fiat currencies—like the dollar, the South African rand, or others—into a foundation that can run all day and settle instantly is clearly an improvement for users. So I think stablecoins are very important at this stage.

The biggest problem in the crypto industry is that it can’t attract high-quality startup talent

Farzam Ehsani: What do you think is the biggest risk Hyperliquid faces? Maybe we can put it another way: what are the most reasonable criticisms from the outside that deserve the community’s serious attention?

Jeff Yan: I think there’s a criticism that isn’t unique to Hyperliquid, but might be more visible with Hyperliquid—namely that the crypto, fintech, and finance industries need to find a way to attract more of the best entrepreneurial talent.

At least the feeling I have right now is that if you are a newly graduated student, you essentially have access to almost all choices in the world. You might have studied computer science, or you might not have finished school at all—you might have dropped out and started building your own product.

But among these people, very few seem to care about crypto or fintech and think: “This is the field where I hope to have an impact on the world.” I think that’s extremely unfortunate, because fundamentally, this talent is the key to the entire industry’s success.

Farzam Ehsani: Do you think this is mainly because of AI, or are there other reasons too?

Jeff Yan: Right now it’s mainly AI, but even before AI showed up, there were always other things drawing people’s attention. Ironically, maybe in what is arguably the worst phase in the crypto industry—when it’s full of scams and projects without moral boundaries—this industry actually attracted the most attention.

Unfortunately, the smartest people don’t always know what they should do to make the biggest impact. So if there are young listeners tuning in right now, whether you’re a boy or a girl, what I want to say is this: the coolest things that look valuable certainly have some value, but they may not be the direction you should put your effort into most.

You should really look at the world, think about what problems interest you, and also judge what the most important problems really are in reality—and what you’re most suited to build. Don’t decide based only on how things appear on the surface. People often face a lot of social pressure, feeling like they should do whatever is most prestigious in everyone else’s eyes.

But if you’re interested in high-performance systems, distributed systems—or if you want to rebuild the financial system and financial engineering from first principles and think about how economics should work—then this field actually has a lot of very worthy problems to solve. You can start from academia and first principles, design markets that can run at scale, and then take these concepts step by step into real production environments.

Many people have spent their entire lives researching these questions and writing related papers. I think if they were to see the on-chain financial renaissance happening today, they would likely really appreciate this era. But I feel that many young people today still haven’t truly realized how much credibility and development potential this field already has.

This is both a critique of the industry and also a mission we should take on: to spread this information more broadly, attract the best and smartest talent into this field, and get them involved in building.

Farzam Ehsani: I think in the future, there may be a few more crises in the world of finance. At that time, people will become even more clearly aware of why we must keep building and provide humanity with a better system.

Last question: Looking ahead, what’s the one thing that excites you most?

Jeff Yan: What I’m most excited about is seeing what Hyperliquid Labs, our team, and the entire community will ultimately build.

I personally know how much effort each team member puts into building products. They put a lot of heart and soul into it, and it’s inherently very difficult. In a competitive world, it’s not easy to deliver something truly valuable to users. So I’m really looking forward to seeing teams like yours put a lot of effort into integration and ultimately make the product real. For end users, the complex work behind it may be completely invisible.

I really like a quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

That’s the product standard we want to achieve. I think many teams in the ecosystem are pursuing the same goal. Seeing these “magics” finally become real is what excites me most.