Blockchain has no talent anymore! Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan reiterates: the best young people have all gone to AI

Hyperliquid co-founder and CEO Jeff Yan recently said on VALR’s podcast, a South African exchange, that one of the biggest problems facing the current crypto industry and fintech sector is that they cannot attract enough top-tier entrepreneurial talent. He pointed to the AI boom and social prestige, arguing that many of the most talented young people simply do not understand which area they should enter in order to create the greatest value—so very few choose to get into crypto.
（Background: 《Fallen from Heaven》Jeffrey Yan and Hyperliquid’s zero VC long-term主义）
（Context: A conversation with Hyperliquid founder Jeff: how a team of 11 built “the on-chain Binance”）

Table of contents

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• Two kinds of mismatched value
• He himself is the sample
• The matter of reputation is honest

Key takeaways

• On the VALR podcast, Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan said that one of the biggest problems for crypto and fintech is failing to attract top entrepreneurial talent, and that the main causes are the AI boom and social prestige.
• He highlighted a mismatch in the industry between “things that can be done” and “people who come to do the work,” rooted in the crypto sector’s negative reputation accumulated over years.
• Jeff Yan urged young entrepreneurs not to just look at surface-level value, but to focus on the world’s real problems and work on rebuilding the financial system from first principles.

The largest on-chain exchange Hyperliquid’s co-founder and CEO Jeff Yan recently appeared on VALR’s Podcast, a South African crypto exchange, in a conversation with the host, who is also VALR co-founder and CEO Farzam Ehsani. The title of that episode was put plainly: “Why crypto must fix finance before AI takes over the world.”

Jeff Yan’s assessment on the show was that one of the biggest problems currently facing the crypto industry and fintech is that it has not been able to attract enough top-tier entrepreneurial talent.

His explanation has two layers: the surface layer is the AI boom—smart, ambitious young people’s eyes are all on AI right now, and crypto cannot compete for attention. The deeper layer is social prestige: many great people do not know which field they should enter to create the most value, and in the outside world the image of the crypto industry has, for years, been stuck in the box of scams and empty promises.

He described this as a mismatch: the “things the crypto industry can truly build” do not line up with the “people who actually come in to do the work.” Lack of people is nothing new, but Jeff putting the reasons so bluntly really makes for hard-to-hear truths.

Two kinds of mismatched value

Jeff Yan has said similar things in other interviews before. People willing to invest at high levels in crypto are not many to begin with; over the past few years, various scams and missed deadlines have drained a batch of talent. And more recently, AI has taken away another batch. He also said that if you’re smart, young, and ambitious, AI and crypto are essentially the two most obvious options—it's just that the spotlight is currently entirely on AI.

There’s a detail that’s easy to skip: he specifically named “entrepreneurial talent,” not engineers. The crypto industry has never lacked people who can write contracts; what it lacks is people willing to redesign an entire financial system from zero, and who can endure five years without applause—these two kinds of scarcity are not the same.

His advice to young entrepreneurs is not to just focus on the surface value of things, but to look at what problems the world is truly facing, then throw themselves into the development and innovation of on-chain finance. In his description, it’s highly meaningful work to rebuild the entire financial system from first principles and turn academic theories into scalable market design.

He is the sample himself

The persuasiveness of this talk comes from the person speaking.

Jeff Yan is a Harvard graduate. He worked in high-frequency trading market making, and in 2023, with his team, he launched Hyperliquid. The core team is 11 people—about half engineering and half non-engineering—and they did not take any venture capital. A Fortune report this January turned it into a headline: how a Harvard graduate used 11 people and zero venture funding to push Hyperliquid into becoming the biggest new player in crypto.

11 people, zero fundraising, and they did $900 million in a year.

In other words, he isn’t complaining that he can’t get people so he can’t do things. He is looking back from a position where things have already been made to happen, and saying the industry could have had more teams like this all along.

In the same episode, he also positioned Hyperliquid as “AWS for finance,” arguing that blockchain should be used as a shared, general-purpose backend—different financial applications can just plug into it, without each one having to build its own set of infrastructure. That’s what VALR did this time: by integrating Hyperliquid’s infrastructure, it added nearly 200 perpetual contract markets at once.

Reputation is honest

Worth noting is the word choice Jeff Yan made. He didn’t say the issue is that salaries aren’t enough, or that the technology is too hard—he said it’s “social prestige.”

That framing is quite honest. After more than a decade trying to convince the world that crypto is not a scam, a lot of money has been burned, and its image has been patched together unevenly. Meanwhile AI took just three years to occupy the position of “changing the world.” When young people pick a track, what they often look at is not the technology, but how to explain to their parents and dating partners what they’re doing.

Common questions

What does Jeff Yan think is the biggest problem for the crypto industry?

On the VALR podcast, he said one of the biggest problems for crypto and fintech is failing to attract enough top-tier entrepreneurial talent. There are two main reasons: first, the AI boom is taking away the spotlight; second, the crypto industry’s negative reputation accumulated over the years has affected social prestige.

How large is Hyperliquid’s team?

The core team is about 11 people, roughly half engineering and half non-engineering, and it has not accepted venture capital. A Fortune report this January described it as the biggest new player in crypto, and the annual revenue figure quoted by PANews is about $900 million.

What is “AWS for finance”?

The positioning Jeff Yan proposed in the same podcast episode advocates treating blockchain as a shared general backend, so various financial applications can directly connect to it without having to rebuild infrastructure independently. VALR’s integration of Hyperliquid and the addition of nearly 200 perpetual contract markets is an example of this model.