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Harvard grad Jeff Yan’s trading platform is thriving on crypto fans’ love for anonymity and leverage.

When a crypto crash ricocheted across markets earlier this month, the spotlight landed on Hyperliquid, an exchange that handles more than $13 billion in trades a day with around 11 employees based largely in Singapore.

The two-year-old exchange is little known outside crypto markets but wildly popular among traders for offering anonymity, high leverage and giving away a token that has soared in value. Hyperliquid has no outside investors and generates more than $1 billion in annualized revenue, based on the trading volume and fees it discloses.

The platform drew unprecedented attention after the crash because it liquidated more than $10 billion in trades that day, potentially exacerbating the sell-off. Hyperliquid also came under scrutiny after two of its user accounts placed massive bets against the market just minutes before President Donald Trump announced a big increase in tariffs on China.

“Hyperliquid is extremely unique,” said Ash Egan, founder of Archetype, a crypto venture fund. “You don’t see it that often where successful founders make the decision to entirely self-fund” a startup before launching a token, said Egan, whose fund owns Hyperliquid tokens.

Jeff Yan, a 2017 Harvard graduate who grew up in Silicon Valley, created Hyperliquid in response to the collapse of FTX, a centralized exchange that held users’ assets. Hyperliquid is decentralized, meaning its algorithms match buyers and sellers, and its customers maintain custody of their own assets. Yan has grand ambitions for Hyperliquid, hoping it can trade all kinds of assets.

The exchange, developed by a team based in Singapore, doesn’t allow U.S. traders, but they can access it using virtual private networks. Nevertheless, Hyperliquid is growing fast–its trading volume is now equal to 10% that of a comparable product on Binance–the world’s biggest crypto exchange. Its growing size and use of derivatives is causing concerns it could accelerate a meltdown in the market.

Yan, a son of Chinese immigrants, went to math camps growing up and attended Palo Alto High School in the heart of Silicon Valley. He won silver and gold medals at the International Physics Olympiad, the most prestigious annual physics competition for high school students around the world. After attending Harvard University, he joined Hudson River Trading, a high-frequency trading firm in New York, as an algorithm developer but left after less than a year.

Yan is deeply technical and ambitious, people who know him say, and has attracted talented people to his projects.

His first startup, founded in 2018, was a prediction market that failed. He then set up a trading shop called Chameleon Trading in Puerto Rico, where he hired Denis Yarats, later a co-founder of artificial intelligence search engine Perplexity AI, and Jacob Jackson, now a researcher at coding assistant Cursor. The firm soon became a major trader. It never transacted on FTX because Yan didn’t trust the platform, Yan previously said.

When FTX collapsed at the end of 2022, Yan started building Hyperliquid. Instead of raising venture funding, Hyperliquid bootstrapped its growth by issuing its own token, HYPE. Major venture firms including Paradigm and Founders Fund expressed interest in investing in Hyperliquid, but it turned them all down, according to people familiar with the matter. Instead, it gave away 31% of the total supply of tokens to users based on their trading volume. Known as an airdrop, the giveaway attracted more users.

“When Hyperliquid started, the standard thing to do was raise big rounds from VCs and generate a lot of excitement — raising one round after another,” Yan said in a podcast interview on Wu Blockchain in August. “But that always felt kind of fake to me. That’s not real progress.”

The firm made HYPE even more attractive by directing most of the fees generated by the trading platform to buy outstanding tokens, reducing the supply and boosting its price. HYPE’s price jumped from $3.90 per token when it was issued last November to $38 currently. The value of HYPE tokens in circulation is about $10 billion, making it one of the most successful token launches in history.

The 310 million tokens Hyperliquid gave customers were worth $1.2 billion immediately after the airdrop. “It’s inspiring to see tens of thousands of community members secure life-changing wealth,” Yan tweeted a day after the token launch. Nearly all the prominent crypto funds—Paradigm, a16z, Pantera, Galaxy Digital, Hivemind, CoinFund—now own HYPE tokens, according to their disclosures and The Information’s reporting.

And Hyperliquid is attracting capital from U.S. stock market investors. A Nasdaq-listed U.S. company, Hyperliquid Strategies, in July announced plans to accumulate $888 million HYPE tokens, allowing investors to effectively buy the token like a stock. Bob Diamond, former CEO of Barclays, will be the company’s chair. The transaction hasn’t closed, however, and the stock has fallen 64% since the announcement. Another Nasdaq-listed stock, Hyperion DeFi, has bought 1.7 million HYPE tokens, worth $59 million based on the current token price.

Hyperliquid has attracted traders by offering them anonymity and high leverage. Most of the platform’s trading volume is in perpetual futures, highly leveraged derivatives with no expiration dates, which are not available on U.S. platforms.

Since Hyperliquid just provides trading software but doesn’t act as a broker, it’s not responsible for verifying users’ identities. Trading by anonymous users created a storm of speculation on Oct. 10 when two accounts bet the market would fall just minutes before Trump’s surprise announcement of 100% tariffs on Chinese goods. Traders speculated that whoever made the bets must have been tipped off by someone at the White House.

“Hyperliquid is benefiting from the fact that there’s a lot of people who want to get anonymous trading,” said Matt Zhang, founder of crypto fund manager Hivemind.

Those two bets paid off dramatically when the crypto market tumbled following Trump’s announcement. High leverage accelerated the sell-off. Hyperliquid’s algorithms forced traders to close out their positions to protect the exchange from big losses. More than $10 billion worth of trades were liquidated on Hyperliquid that day, out of a total of at least $19 billion that day, the largest in the industry’s history, according to CoinGlass, exacerbating the market sell-off.

Traders who use leverage always risk potential liquidation when markets fall. Like other crypto exchanges, Hyperliquid forcibly closed trades during the market turmoil, leaving many traders surprised and disrupting their hedging strategy. Hyperliquid is not regulated globally, which means users have little recourse if anything goes wrong.

Hyperliquid discloses little information about its core team. Besides Yan, most members are anonymous or use pseudonyms, including another co-founder listed as “iliensinc” who also went to Harvard. A core contributor who goes by the name Xulian is responsible for go-to-market strategy. Hyperliquid employees came from California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and previously worked at Citadel, Hudson River Trading and Airtable, a maker of productivity apps, according to Hyperliquid’s website.

Yan spends most of his time working on improving Hyperliquid’s blockchain and encouraging companies to launch products on it. He often responds to developers’ questions on Telegram within 24 hours.

“He doesn’t have a board of directors. He doesn’t have investors calling him up and yelling at him and telling him he needs to do this or do that,” said David Schamis, founding partner of private equity firm Atlas Merchant Capital, who will be the CEO of Hyperliquid Strategies, the public company that plans to hold Hyperliquid tokens. “It’s great because he can keep his mind totally focused on the mission.”

Hyperliquid’s mission goes beyond crypto. It says it wants to “house all finance” by letting people launch a range of investment products on its blockchain. “The idea is that today on Hyperliquid, you really only can trade crypto perpetuals, but eventually you might be able to trade public equities, indexes, private companies, commodities and maybe even interest rates,” said Alvin Hsia, co-founder of Ventuals, which is developing a way for investors to bet on valuations of private companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. It’s “manifesting their vision of becoming the everything exchange,” he said.

For instance, another company, Trade.XYZ, recently launched the perpetual trading of an equity index on Hyperliquid, which allows traders to bet on prices of stocks using leverage without having to own the actual shares.

For Yan, Hyperliquid will not have succeeded until it breaks out of crypto and reinvents how people interact with finance. “If Hyperliquid fails, I think by and large it will likely be because we as a community didn’t build something of real value for the world,” Yan said on a panel at a Singapore conference this month.

That also means Hyperliquid will be pushing regulatory boundaries. While it operates offshore, Hyperliquid has shown some interest in U.S. crypto policymaking. In May, it advocated for the role of decentralized exchanges in a letter submitted to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The letter was in response to the agency’s request for comment on perpetual-style derivatives.

If Hyperliquid wants to enter the U.S. market, it could consider buying a licensed entity or start its own, although it would likely have to reduce the leverage it offers.

Hivemind’s Zhang said much of what Hyperliquid does will eventually be allowed in the U.S. “I think people are still having the Biden administration hangover—people haven’t really realized how much has changed in the last 10 months,” he said.