By: Dom Cooke

Compiled by: TechFlow

TechFlow Introduction: Colossus Magazine conducted an in-depth visit to Hyperliquid's Singapore office, producing the most detailed profile to date of founder Jeff Yan. Eleven people, zero VC funding, over $900 million in annual profit—how did this three-year-old protocol capture 37% of the decentralized perpetual contracts market in just two years?

Starting from Yan running quantitative strategies on a TV monitor in Puerto Rico, to rejecting a VC check at a $1 billion valuation, airdropping $16 billion worth of tokens to users, to an independent team now deploying crude oil, gold, and S&P 500 perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid, this ten-thousand-word article answers one question: Why did a physics Olympiad gold medalist abandon a life of financial freedom to rebuild the entire financial system?

Main Text:

In the early hours of a Friday in January this year, in Saint-Léger-sous-Cholet, western France, a 43-year-old man was taken from his home. He was driven 30 miles to Basse-Goulaine, beaten, bound, and left by the roadside. Twelve hours later, in Verneuil-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, three armed men kicked down the door of a house, beat a couple in front of their children, zip-tied the family of four, ransacked the entire house, and left by train.

This was the 70th similar attack globally in less than a year.

Two days later, I boarded a flight to Singapore.

Bodyguards and Plush Cats in the Office

I came here to visit an 11-person team, but the first person I saw in the office wasn't part of it. He was a solidly built American with a buzz cut and stubble, sitting behind a small table in the corner of the lounge area, an Apple laptop in front of him. His physique made it clear he wasn't here to write code.

He was a bodyguard.

One of Hyperliquid's co-founders walked me from the hotel to the office. Her alias is iliensinc, short for Aliens Incorporated. As we walked through streets shaded by rain trees, she told me they hadn't always been in this part of Singapore. The company started in a co-working space in the financial district, but her co-founder—the only person on the team not using a pseudonym—began attracting attention. At first, it was just passersby doing double-takes, trying to recognize his face. Then strangers started approaching him. Later, someone followed him into his apartment elevator. So the company moved to a quieter place, a building no one would think to look for them in.

Even their cleaning lady doesn't know what they do. In her mind, she cleans for a company that makes plush cat toy merchandise. With 34 plush toys in the office, the misunderstanding is somewhat reasonable. The company mascot is a cat named Hypurr, twelve of which sit on a shelf. But there are also sharks, lizards, koalas, penguins, and dragons, several perched on Dell monitors like furry gargoyles. Most of the toys were brought in by one engineer—his wife wouldn't let him bring more home, so he brought them to work. The team hasn't corrected the cleaning lady's misconception.

Because Hyperliquid is one of the most profitable companies per capita on Earth. Last year, 11 employees generated over $9 billion in profit. It's only three years old, with a $10 billion valuation, and has never taken a single cent of venture capital. The central figure behind it, Jeffrey Yan, is 31 years old. In an industry where "the more successful you are, the more likely you are to be kidnapped," he has somewhat involuntarily become one of the most recognizable faces.

The TV Trader in Puerto Rico

Before Hyperliquid, Yan lived in Puerto Rico, running one of crypto's largest anonymous trading operations almost single-handedly, called Chameleon Trading—Chameleon was his gaming ID from middle school. He started with $10,000 of his own savings, growing at thousands of percent per year for two and a half years. After telling me the returns, he immediately tried to downplay it. I noted his humility. I also noted that Chameleon made him a lot of money. At 27, financially free. To the surfers, bartenders, and waiters in San Juan, he was just another young guy in board shorts.

Now he sits cross-legged in a gray armchair in a Singapore office with a bodyguard, barefoot, in black shorts and a dark blue T-shirt, explaining to me why the entire financial system needs to be torn down and rebuilt. What I want to know is: why did he trade his first life for this second one?

Not for money, he says. Yan didn't come from a wealthy family, and his lifestyle shows no interest in the trappings of wealth. He wears the same Lululemon shorts and T-shirt every day. He has 15 pairs of shorts and 10 T-shirts, in three colors each. There are no signs of wealth in the office either. The furniture was left by the previous tenant. The only things the team added are two board games in the lounge, NFTs on the wall, and those plush cats. I found four books on a shelf, recognizing one as Frank Slootman's *Amp It Up*, a management book whose core idea is "most people don't work hard enough." I mentioned it to iliensinc. She shrugged. That book isn't theirs, but the philosophy is. The three unopened bottles of Grey Goose and Macallan in the kitchen aren't theirs either—they're leftovers from a community event two years ago that didn't meet the minimum spend. This team drinks tea.

Nor is it a love for crypto. Bitcoin is down about 30% from its October highs. Bitcoin, which was supposed to replace gold, is down 30%, while gold is up 7% over the same period. Most tokens have fared worse. When I asked Yan about the pervasive pessimism in the industry, he didn't defend it. "There's a lot of shady behavior in this industry," he said. "People are starting to realize a lot of things aren't what they were sold as, and that's probably a good thing." He doesn't consider Hyperliquid a crypto company. "Nobody calls themselves an internet company anymore," he told me. "We use crypto technology, but that doesn't define us."

Of the 11 team members, only two, including Yan, had crypto experience before. This was partly by design. The early crypto scene, in Yan's words, was mostly people looking to make quick money. He's building something long-term, which aligns better with technical minds than traders. But it's also a supply issue. Hyperliquid recruits from the podiums of international math and science Olympiads. Yan won a gold medal in physics at 18. One engineer won a silver in informatics, another was a US national team training camp selectee. Yan wants to hire more; he added two after my visit. But there are few people at this level who are also willing to work in crypto, a pool already depleted by scams and empty promises in recent years, and now further drained by AI.

So Yan—someone who has made enough money to do anything—what is he really doing here?

A World Beyond

The answer, at least to the outside world, is becoming increasingly clear.

Hyperliquid is a blockchain with its own exchange built on top. On a traditional exchange, a company holds your funds and controls the infrastructure. On Hyperliquid, you hold your own funds, and the platform is public. Yan's vision for it, stated without irony, is to host all finance. Whether that's ambition or absurdity depends on whether you're looking at the plush cats or the platform's data. Because in the months since my visit, markets that have traded the same way for over 100 years have begun to tilt, in small but measurable ways.

Hyperliquid started with perpetual contracts in 2023. Perpetual contracts are a type of derivative and the single largest market in crypto. They are essentially bets on the price of an asset you never own, and unlike traditional futures, they never expire. This market is 6 to 8 times larger than the spot buying and selling market, about $7 trillion per month. Until recently, almost all volume ran on centralized exchanges. The largest is Binance. No decentralized platform could touch it. Hyperliquid was the first, growing to about 14% of Binance's market share.

Then, in October 2025, Hyperliquid did something a centralized exchange couldn't: anyone could launch a new perpetual contract market for any asset with a price feed. An independent team called Trade[XYZ] was the most active deployer. They started with a silver market. By January, its 24-hour volume had reached about 2% of the CME's (Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the world's largest derivatives exchange, founded in 1898). Then Trade[XYZ] launched crude oil. Oil had been trading on markets closed on weekends. On a Saturday in late February, the US and Israel began bombing Iran. The CME was closed. Hyperliquid wasn't. Daily crude oil volume surged from $21 million to $3.7 billion. A month later, Trade[XYZ] launched an S&P 500 perpetual contract, officially licensed by S&P Dow Jones Indices, trading 24/7, including weekends.

The most impactful products on Hyperliquid are now being built by people not on Yan's team and who will never join it.

The founder of Trade[XYZ] requested anonymity. He bought his first Bitcoin for $66 in 2013, has been an investor rather than a builder since, and never intended to start a company. He told me that if not for Yan, he would have left crypto. "Hyperliquid has a chance to save crypto," he said.

But none of this explains why Hyperliquid became what Yan describes—in an industry that "looks like it's about to work, until suddenly it doesn't"—nor why he gave up his life in Puerto Rico to prove it. These questions followed me from my first afternoon in the office, when iliensinc and I chatted in the lounge with a plush cat on the table and the lingering smell of ginger and sesame from lunch. She told me that when Yan announced the end of Chameleon three years ago, the team asked him the same question. Her answer didn't start with crypto, but with what kind of person Yan is. She said, you should ask him about his mother.

Beyond People, Beyond the Sky

Yan likes to hold meetings outdoors. We sat on a covered terrace with four gray lounge chairs and a coffee table. Cars passed below. Every few minutes, a gardener started a lawnmower. The beeping of a pedestrian crossing signal came and went.

Yan tucked his feet under him. When I asked about his mother, he thought for a moment. She had a saying, he said, a Chinese idiom. *Rén wài yǒu rén, tiān wài yǒu tiān.* (Beyond people, there are people; beyond the sky, there is another sky.) She wasn't a pushy mother, but she wanted him to know that no matter how good you think you are, you're only seeing a tiny part of the world outside.

She raised him and his sister alone in the heart of one of the most lucrative stretches of commercial real estate in US history—Redwood Shores, between San Francisco and Palo Alto. Oracle's mirrored headquarters overlooks the neighborhood. The neighbors were engineers and product managers, their children already preparing for the kind of life Yan would later build. His parents were both Chinese immigrants who divorced when he was in third grade. His father left. His mother was an accountant who worked overtime every tax season, and he could feel it. "I could tell other families were wealthier than us," he said. "But I never resented it. Going out to play didn't cost anything."

His school had no culture of academic competition. Despite the saying, his mother didn't push him. Until he was a teenager, no one pushed him to do anything. He played outside, went to school, came home, kept playing. By the standards of his zip code, he was the rarest of things: a free-range child.

Photo: Yan and his dog Max in Redwood Shores

In eighth grade, a friend who had just transferred from a private school dragged him to a math competition. The friend wanted company. Yan had never seen anything like it. School math was nothing like this. No formulas to memorize, no calculations to grind through. You were given a problem, sometimes just a sentence, and left to find your way in. The answer wasn't a number but a proof—a complete argument for why something must be true. In the end, they ranked you, like sprinters. For Yan, it was the best part of sports fused with the best part of understanding the world.

That summer, he woke up at 5 a.m. every morning, downloaded past competition papers from the internet, and worked on them alone in his room. No tutor, no summer programs he could afford, no one asking him to do it. "Turns out, I'm super competitive," he said. "There was this race I didn't even know existed, other kids had been running it their whole lives, and I was behind."

A year after starting, in ninth grade, he made the US Mathematical Olympiad summer program—the top 50 high school students in the country. He was one of the youngest in the room. He didn't make the national team. He said he didn't care. For three weeks, he sat with kids who could stare at three sentences for five hours and find truths invisible to most. Math doesn't have a Federer, Yan told me, but at the highest level, there's something like what Federer has. There's a style to the work, an elegance to the construction of a proof, which he saw up close for the first time at the camp. "Like being able to play football with Tom Brady," he said, "but the nerd version. Most people don't get to feel that."

The next year, he was eliminated in an intermediate selection round for math. He was 16, with a full year to wait before trying again. I asked if that was his first experience of failure. "Losing is a common experience," he said. "Most people are losers. Usually there's only one winner."

The problem wasn't losing; it was emptiness. "It felt like a void," he said. "I should be learning something." So he found some physics textbooks used by upperclassmen. His school didn't offer physics until junior year, but he had just learned calculus and understood for the first time what it was actually for. He discovered the Feynman Lectures. "I binge-watched them." Within a year, again self-taught, he was one of the top five young physicists in the country.

He made the US Physics Olympiad team, went to Estonia (his first time in Europe), and won a silver medal. The next summer in Copenhagen, he won gold, ranking 24th in the world. At 18, back in the Bay Area, he understood his mother was right about the sky. Above him, there were exactly 23 more people.

Harvard and Hudson River Trading

Harvard covered almost all of his tuition. In the spring of his freshman year, Yan took Computer Science 124, Data Structures and Algorithms. The course was mostly taken by sophomores and juniors and was notorious for being brutal. Students called it a "necessary evil" in course reviews. One review warned: "No social life. You will not have a girlfriend." 150 students. Yan, a freshman, came in first, and not by a small margin.

At Harvard, after freshman year, students are sorted into upperclassmen houses. Yan was placed in Pforzheimer, where he became close friends with Scott Wu. Wu was two years younger; Yan first met him at a summer program for Olympiad kids. Wu represented the US three times at the International Olympiad in Informatics, winning gold each time, the last time with a perfect score. He later co-founded Cognition AI. When Wu was also placed in Pforzheimer his sophomore year, he messaged Yan: "Yo, I'm in Pfoho." Yan replied: "Let's go!"

Wu often found Yan in the common room, sitting at a grand piano teaching himself jazz, repeating a phrase until it was perfect. They played chess, Go, and poker together, spending hours discussing what it meant to be "the best at something." Yan would talk about Faker—the greatest League of Legends player of all time—and great Go players and the best high-frequency traders. "He was always thinking about what makes a person special," Wu told me. "What is the essence of this field? What does it really mean to be good at it?"

Wu remembers Yan having an unusual contrarian streak. Most Harvard students, receiving the same information in the same environment, would reach roughly the same conclusions. Yan never did. Wu also said he was very funny. "Very deadpan. He'd say something completely unexpected but deliver it in the flattest way."

Yan worked every summer. He interned at Google X, building tools for the self-driving car project before it became Waymo. He interned at Tower Research Capital