On a Friday in January, before dawn, a 43-year-old was taken from his home in Saint-Léger-sous-Cholet, in western France. He was driven 30 miles to the small commune of Basse-Goulaine, where he was beaten, bound, and abandoned. Twelve hours later, once the sun had set in the suburbs of Paris, three men armed with a single handgun kicked in the door of a family home in Verneuil-sur-Seine. They beat a husband and his wife in front of their children, cable-tied all four of them, turned the house over, and left for the train station. It was the 70th such attack worldwide in under a year.
Two days later, I boarded a flight to Singapore.
I’d flown to visit a team of 11, but the first person I met at their office was not one of them. He was a solid American with close-cropped hair and stubble, sitting behind an Apple laptop at a small desk in the corner of the lounge, with a frame that suggested he was not there to write code. He was a bodyguard.
One of the firm’s co-founders, who goes by iliensinc, short for Aliens Incorporated, had walked me from my hotel to their office, and as we made our way through streets canopied by rain trees, she told me they had not always been in this part of Singapore. The business had started in a co-working space in the financial district, but her co-founder—the only person on the team who does not work under a pseudonym—had begun to attract attention. First it was just glances, people straining to place his face. Then strangers started approaching him. Then someone followed him into the elevator of his apartment. So the firm moved somewhere quieter, to a building where nobody would think to look for them.
Even their cleaner does not know what they do. In her mind, she dusts for a merchandising company that makes stuffed cats. There are 34 cuddly toys in the office, so the confusion is understandable. The firm’s mascot is a cat named Hypurr, and 12 of them are perched on a cabinet, but there are also sharks, lizards, koalas, penguins, and dragons, several of which are draped over Dell monitors like furry gargoyles. One engineer is responsible for most of the creatures. His wife won’t let him bring any more home, so he takes them to work. The team has not corrected the cleaner’s assumption.
That is because Hyperliquid, a blockchain and cryptocurrency trading exchange, is one of the most profitable enterprises per employee on earth. Last year, its 11 employees generated over $900 million in profit. It is three years old, has a market capitalization of $10 billion, and has never taken a dollar of venture capital. The main figure behind it, Jeffrey Yan, is 31 years old and has become, not entirely by choice, one of the more recognizable faces in an industry where success increasingly gets you kidnapped.
Before Hyperliquid, Yan lived in Puerto Rico and ran, more or less alone, one of the largest anonymous trading operations in crypto. It was called Chameleon Trading—Chameleon had been his handle for video games in middle school. He started it with $10,000 of his own savings, and for two and a half years, it grew at thousands of percent a year. When he told me his returns, he immediately tried to talk me out of finding them impressive. I noted his objection. I also noted that Chameleon had made him very rich. He was 27 and he was free. To every surfer and bartender and waitress in San Juan, he was just another kid in board shorts.
Now he sat cross-legged on a gray armchair in a guarded office in Singapore, barefoot in black shorts and a dark blue T-shirt, explaining to me why all of finance needed to be rebuilt from scratch. The question I wanted to know was why he had traded the first life for the second.
It was not money, he said. Yan did not grow up wealthy, and nothing about his life suggests he is interested in living as a wealthy adult. He wears the same Lululemon shorts and T-shirt every day. He owns 15 pairs of the shorts and 10 of the shirts, in three colors each. The office around him offered no evidence of wealth. The furniture belonged to the previous tenant. The team’s only additions were two board games in the lounge, NFTs on the walls, and the stuffed cats. I confirmed this when I found four books on a shelf and recognized one as Frank Slootman’s Amp It Up, a management book whose thesis is that most people do not work hard enough. I mentioned it to iliensinc. She shrugged. The mantra was theirs; the book was not. Nor were the three bottles of Grey Goose and Macallan I found in the kitchen, untouched since a community event two years ago that failed to meet the minimum spend. This team drinks tea.
Nor was it a love of crypto. Bitcoin, still the industry’s bellwether, had fallen roughly 30% from its peak in early October. Gold, whose job Bitcoin was supposed to take, was up 7% over the same three months. Most tokens had fared worse. When I asked Yan about the negativity surrounding the industry, he did not defend it. “There is a lot of sketchy behavior in the space,” he said. “It may be healthy that people are realizing these things are not what they’re advertised to be.” He does not consider Hyperliquid a crypto company. “People don’t say we’re internet companies these days,” he told me. “We use crypto, but that doesn’t define us.”
Only two of the team, including Yan, worked in crypto previous to Hyperliquid. This is partly by design. The early crypto crowd, as he described them, were primarily interested in making money quickly. He is building for the long run, he said, and that aligns with people who think more like technologists than like traders. But it is also a supply problem. Hyperliquid recruits from international math and science olympiad podiums. Yan won gold in physics at 18. One of his engineers holds a silver in informatics. Another trained with the U.S. national team. Yan would like to hire more, and since my visit earlier this year he has added two, but the pool of people at this level who are willing to build in crypto has been thinned by years of scams and broken promises and, lately, by artificial intelligence.
What, then, was Yan, who had already made enough money to do anything, doing here?
The answer, at least to the outside world, is becoming clearer.
Hyperliquid is a blockchain with its own trading exchange built on top. On a traditional exchange, a company holds your money and controls the infrastructure. On Hyperliquid, you keep custody of your own money and the platform is public. Yan’s vision for it, stated without irony, is to house all of finance. That is a mark of ambition or absurdity, depending on whether you are looking at the cats or the platform’s numbers. Because in the months since my visit, markets that have traded the same way for over 100 years have started, in small and measurable ways, to bend.
Hyperliquid began in 2023 with perpetual futures, a type of derivative and the single largest market in crypto. A perp is a bet on the price of an asset you never own, and unlike a traditional future, it never expires. The market for these bets is six to eight times larger than the one for buying and selling the assets themselves, roughly $7 trillion a month, and until recently, virtually all of it ran through centralized exchanges. The biggest, by far, was Binance. No decentralized platform had made a dent. Hyperliquid was the first, growing to roughly 14% of Binance’s market share.