This article comes from: Colossos; original author: Dom Cooke (@domcooke)

Translation｜Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina); translator｜Azuma (@azuma_eth)

On a Friday in January, before dawn, a 43-year-old man was taken from his home in Saint-Léger-sous-Cholet, western France. He was driven to the small town of Basse-Goulaine about 30 miles away, brutally beaten, bound, and abandoned. Twelve hours later, as night descended in the suburbs of Paris, three men armed only with a handgun broke into a house in Verneuil-sur-Seine, beating a couple in front of their children, binding the entire family with tape, and leaving after rummaging through the house, heading to the train station.

This was the 70th similar attack worldwide in less than a year. Two days later, I boarded a flight to Singapore.

The purpose of my trip was to visit a team of just 11 people, but the first person I encountered in their office did not belong to this team. He was a stocky American with short hair and stubble, sitting at a small table in the corner of the lounge, in front of a MacBook. His physique indicated that he was not there to write code, but to serve as a bodyguard.

One of the company's co-founders (online name iliensinc, short for Aliens Incorporated) accompanied me from my hotel to the office. As we walked through the rain-drenched streets, she explained that they had not always stayed in this area of Singapore. The company was originally based in a shared office space in the financial district, but her other co-founder—the only one in the team not using a pseudonym—began to attract public attention. It started with some curious glances, then strangers began to approach him for conversation, and eventually someone followed him into the elevator of his apartment. Thus, the company moved to a quieter place, a building no one would think to search for them.

Even the office cleaner did not know their real business. To her, they were simply a company producing plush cat toys. There were indeed 34 stuffed animals in the office, so this misunderstanding isn’t hard to comprehend. The company’s mascot is a cat named Hypurr, with 12 plush toys displayed in a cabinet, but there are also sharks, lizards, koalas, penguins, and dragons, some perched like fluffy gargoyles on the monitors. Most of the toys came from an engineer—his wife wouldn't let him bring them home anymore, so he brought them to the office. The team did not correct the cleaner's misunderstanding.

This is because Hyperliquid—a cryptocurrency exchange platform—is one of the most profitable companies globally by per capita metrics. Last year, the company’s mere 11 employees generated over $900 million in profit. Founded just three years ago, it is valued at $10 billion and has never taken a single dollar in venture capital. The core figure behind it, 31-year-old Jeffrey Yan, has unwittingly become an increasingly prominent face in an industry where success often carries a higher risk of kidnapping.

Before founding Hyperliquid, Jeff lived in Puerto Rico, nearly single-handedly running one of the largest anonymous trading teams in the cryptocurrency sector. This team was called Chameleon Trading—“Chameleon” was his gaming nickname from high school. He started with his savings of $10,000 and achieved a growth of thousands of percentage points over two and a half years. When he mentioned his earnings to me, he immediately tried to convince me not to think it was something extraordinary. I noticed his resistance, and I also noticed that Chameleon had made him extremely wealthy. He was 27 years old at that time and financially free. To surfers, bartenders, and waitresses in San Juan, he was just an ordinary young man wearing surfer shorts.

And now, sitting cross-legged in a gray armchair in a secure office in Singapore, clad in black shorts and a dark blue T-shirt, Jeff explained to me why the entire financial system needs to be rebuilt from scratch. What I really wanted to know was, why he would trade in his first life for the second life he currently leads?

“It’s not about the money,” Jeff said. Jeff does not come from a wealthy family, and there is little indication that he has any interest in the “rich lifestyle.” He wears the same Lululemon shorts and T-shirt every day—15 pairs of shorts, 10 shirts, each in three colors. Looking around his office, there are almost no signs of wealth. The furniture was left by the previous tenant, and the only additions the team made were two game sets in the lounge area, NFTs on the walls, and those plush cat toys.

This was reaffirmed when I saw four books on a shelf, one of which was "Amp It Up" by Frank Slootman, a management book which asserts that most people don't work hard enough. I mentioned the book to iliensinc, and she just shrugged—this whole “work hard” mentality was originally their own idea, not something they derived from the book. The three bottles of Grey Goose and Macallan in the kitchen were similarly untouched since a community event two years ago that failed to meet the minimum spend. The team prefers tea.

This is not out of a love for the cryptocurrency industry. Bitcoin, the bellwether of the industry, has dropped significantly since its peak in early October; gold, which should have been “replaced” by it, has risen 7% during the same period; and most other tokens have performed even worse. When I asked Jeff how he views the negative sentiment surrounding the entire industry, he didn’t defend it. “There are indeed many unsavory behaviors in this field,” he said, “and people are gradually realizing that these things aren’t quite as they claim, which could be a good thing to some extent.”

Jeff doesn’t believe Hyperliquid is a “cryptocurrency company.” “No one calls a company an ‘internet company’ anymore,” he said, “we use cryptographic technology, but that doesn’t define us.”

Before joining Hyperliquid, only two people in the team (including Jeff) had experience in the cryptocurrency industry. This was somewhat intentional. According to him, early cryptocurrency practitioners were mostly more focused on quick profits; what he was building was a long-term project, thus better suited for those whose thinking aligns more with technicians than traders. But it is also a supply issue. Hyperliquid recruits candidates mostly from the top ranks of international math Olympiads. Jeff won a gold medal in physics when he was 18, and among his engineers, some have won silver in informatics while others have received training with the U.S. national team. Jeff hopes to recruit more talents like this—factually, since I visited them earlier this year, he has added two more members—but the talent pool willing to dive into the cryptocurrency industry and possesses such levels has been shrinking due to years of scams, distrust, and the recent allure of the AI field.

So why does Jeff, having already earned enough wealth to live freely, choose to stay here?

At least from the outside, the answer is becoming increasingly clear.

Hyperliquid is essentially a blockchain that builds its own exchange. In traditional exchanges, the companies control your funds and manage the infrastructure; but on Hyperliquid, users manage their own assets, and the platform is transparent. Jeff's vision for it—he says this without irony—is to support the entire financial system. You might see this as ambition, or absurdity, depending on whether you are looking at those plush cats or the platform's data. Because in the months following my visit, some trading markets that have been around for over a century began to experience subtle yet quantifiable deviations.

Hyperliquid started with perpetual contracts in 2023, which is a type of derivative also known to be the largest market in the cryptocurrency sector. The so-called “perpetual contracts” are bets on the price of a certain asset; traders don’t actually hold the asset. Unlike traditional futures, they have no expiration date. The market size for such trades is 6 to 8 times that of spot trading, with a monthly trading volume of around $7 trillion. Until recently, it was almost entirely supported by centralized exchanges, with Binance being the largest by far. Previously, no decentralized platform had posed a significant challenge to this, and Hyperliquid was the first to do so, at one point growing its market share to roughly 14% of Binance.

Then, in October 2025, Hyperliquid did something that a centralized exchange couldn’t: it allowed anyone on the platform to create a new perpetual market for any asset that had price oracle data. An independent team called Trade.xyz became one of the most active builders. Initially, it launched a silver market, and by January of the next year, its 24-hour trading volume reached about 2% of the corresponding market on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (the largest derivatives exchange in the world, established in 1898). Subsequently, Trade.xyz launched a crude oil market. Oil trading had long relied on traditional markets, which closed on weekends, but on a Saturday in late February, the U.S. began airstrikes on Iran. At that time, the CME was shut down, while Hyperliquid continued to operate. The daily trading volume for oil surged from $21 million to $3.7 billion. A month later, Trade.xyz launched perpetual contracts for the S&P 500 index, which received official authorization from S&P Dow Jones Indices and enabled 7×24-hour trading, including weekends.

Today, Hyperliquid’s most influential products are being built by developers who neither work for Jeff nor ever will.

The founder of Trade.xyz (who asked to remain anonymous) bought his first Bitcoin in 2013 for $66 and has since remained active as an investor rather than a builder. He never intended to start a business. He told me that if it weren't for Jeff, he might have already left the cryptocurrency industry. “Hyperliquid has a chance to save the cryptocurrency industry,” he said.

However, all of this still doesn't fully explain why Hyperliquid could genuinely become what Jeff envisions—especially in an industry filled with “appearances of imminent success that can vanish in an instant”—nor does it explain why he would give up the lifestyle in Puerto Rico to pursue all of this. With these questions in mind, on the first afternoon I arrived at the office, I sat down to talk with iliensinc in the lounge area, where a plush cat sat on the table, and the scent of ginger and sesame lingered from lunch. She told me that three years ago, when Jeff announced the closure of Chameleon, the team had asked him the same question. And her answer did not start with the cryptocurrency industry but with Jeff as a person.

“You should ask his mother,” she said.

Jeff prefers to arrange meetings outdoors. We sat on a covered terrace where four gray loungers and a coffee table were placed. Vehicles occasionally passed on the street below. Every few minutes, a gardener would fire up a lawnmower. The pedestrian crosswalk signals beeped intermittently.

Jeff tucked his feet beneath him as he sat. When I inquired about his mother, he was silent for a moment. He said she often spoke a phrase—a Chinese idiom: “There are people outside of people, and there are heavens beyond the heavens.” The meaning is that no matter how excellent you think you are, there are always stronger people and more unknown worlds outside. She was not the type of mother who strongly pushed her children, but she wanted him to understand that what he saw was just a small part of this world.

He and his sister were raised by their mother alone in the center of one of the most valuable geographic areas in American business history—between San Francisco and Palo Alto in Redwood Shores. The headquarters of Oracle, with its mirrored glass facade, towers over the community, surrounded by neighbors who are mostly engineers and product managers, whose children are groomed from a young age to walk the path that Jeff later chose. Both of Jeff’s parents were Chinese immigrants, and they divorced when he was in third grade. His father left the family, and his mother worked as an accountant, often needing to put in extra hours during tax season. Jeff took it all in, “I could sense that others were wealthier than us,” he said, “but I never resented that. Going out to play doesn’t need to cost a lot.”

His school did not have a strong academic competitive atmosphere. Although his mother often repeated the idiom, she did not place pressure on Jeff. Before he reached puberty, no one really “forced” him to do anything. He played outside, went to school, returned home, and continued playing. By the standards of his zip code area, he was an extremely rare being—a “free-range” child.

In eighth grade, a friend who had just transferred from a private school took him to a math competition—his friend was just looking for someone to accompany him. Jeff had never seen such a thing; the math at school was completely different. There were no formulas to memorize, nor tedious calculation processes; you received a problem, sometimes in just a sentence, and then needed to find your path into the problem. The answer was not a number, but a proof—a complete justification of why something was necessarily true. Eventually, they ranked participants like a sprint race. For Jeff, it was an experience that perfectly fused “the joy of sport” with “the joy of understanding the world.”

That summer, he got up every morning at five, downloaded past competition questions from the internet, and studied them alone in his room. He had no tutor and could not afford any summer training programs; no one asked him to do so. “I later realized that I was actually quite competitive,” he said, “like there was a race I had no idea existed, while other kids had prepared their whole lives, and I was falling behind.”

A year after he started competing, in ninth grade, he was selected for the U.S. Math Olympiad training camp, which brought together the top 50 high school students in the country, and he was one of the youngest members. He didn’t make it to the national team—he said he didn’t mind. During those three weeks, he sat with a group of teenagers who could stare at three sentences for five hours, excavating truths that were invisible to most. Jeff told me that the mathematics community didn’t have superstars like Roger Federer, but at the highest levels, there was indeed a realm similar to what Federer represented: a style, an elegance—reflected in the construction of proofs. And in the training camp, he saw this up close for the first time. “It felt like being able to play with Tom Brady,” he said, “just a more nerdy version of the experience. Most people won’t ever feel that.”

The following year, he lost in a medium-level selection round of the math competitions. At that time, he was 16 years old and needed to wait another whole year to try again. I asked him if that was his first experience of failure. “Failure is actually a very common experience,” he said, “most people are losers. Usually, there is only one winner.”

The problem wasn’t failure itself, but the emptiness that comes with it. “It felt like there was a void,” he said, “I should learn something.” So, he picked up physics textbooks used by upperclassmen. Although his school would not offer the course until his senior year, he had just learned calculus and understood its purpose for the first time. He discovered Feynman's lectures. “I zipped through them like I was binge-watching a series,” he said. Within a year, through complete self-study, he became one of the top five young physics competitors in the nation.

He was selected for the U.S. Physics Olympiad national team and traveled to Estonia—his first trip to Europe—and earned a silver medal. The following summer in Copenhagen, he won a gold medal, ranking 24th in the world. At 18, when he returned to the Bay Area, he had grasped the true meaning of his mother’s words: indeed, there were others above him, and at least 23 of them.

Harvard covered all his tuition. In his freshman spring semester, Jeff took Computer Science 124—Data Structures and Algorithms. This course is usually taken by sophomores and juniors and is notorious for being “painful.” In evaluations of courses at Harvard, some students labeled it a “necessary evil.” One review even stated: “Without a social life, you’ll be doomed in dating.” The class had 150 students, and as a freshman, Jeff took first place, with a significant margin.

At Harvard, students are assigned to upperclassman housing after the first year. Jeff was placed in Pforzheimer House, where he became friends with Scott Wu, who was two years younger than him. The two first met at a summer camp for Olympiad participants. Wu had represented the U.S. at the International Olympiad in Informatics for three consecutive years, winning gold, with his last performance being perfect; they later co-founded Cognition AI. When Wu was assigned to Pforzheimer in his sophomore year, he texted Jeff: “Yo, I’m in Pfoho.” Jeff replied, “Let’s go!”

Wu would often find Jeff in the common room by the grand piano—he was self-learning jazz, practicing bit by bit until he mastered it. They played chess, Go, poker together, and spent a lot of time discussing what it means to excel in a field. Jeff would talk about Faker, the greatest player in League of Legends history, as well as top Go players and elite high-frequency traders. “He was always pondering what makes someone special,” Wu told me, “what’s the essence of this field? And what does it actually mean to be at the top?”

Wu remembered Jeff's thought process was exceptionally “contrarian.” At Harvard, most students would often come to similar conclusions under similar information and environmental influences, but Jeff never did so. Additionally, Wu noted that he was very humorous. “That deadpan humor. He would say completely unexpected things, but in an extremely understated tone.”

During summer vacations, Jeff was always working. He interned at Google X, developing tools for the self-driving project—which later evolved into Waymo. He also interned at Tower Research Capital, a trading company. In his senior year, he worked part-time at another self-driving company, Nuro, largely because he felt that his four years at university had added at least an extra year.

In the winter of his junior year, he and Wu participated in Hudson River Trading's first internship program. There were 10 interns selected, and Hudson River Trading is one of the most successful quantitative trading firms globally. Among those ten were Alexandr Wang, who later founded Scale AI, and Jesse Zhang, who went on to establish Decagon. This internship was conducted in a three-week competition format, and in each round, Wu and Jeff took the first and second places.

Jeff graduated with a bachelor's in mathematics and a master's in computer science and joined Hudson River Trading full-time at the end of 2017. He was assigned to the U.S. equities algorithmic team. Each week, he would have a one-on-one meeting with his manager. That manager had mentored several newcomers, and these types of meetings usually followed a set rhythm: the newcomers would hit a bottleneck in their code, and the two would solve it together, then the newcomers would return to encounter the next bottleneck. But Jeff never “hit a wall”; his manager recalled that he often brought new ideas to the table. The meetings were efficient and smooth, but the manager always felt something was off. It took a while before he realized what it was: while Jeff did everything well, these tasks seemed to mean little to him. When Jeff announced his resignation eight months later, the manager was not surprised. His resignation email was considered exceptionally warm within the company.

Jeff enjoyed Hudson River Trading. He saw trading as the purest “game” in the real world—you are either right or wrong, and the market tells you the answer. The smartest group of people in the world competes against one another, and in this brutal game, they create extremely important products for the world: liquid and efficient markets. But he realized that he spent eight months optimizing an already excellent system, and this system would still work well without him. This left him with an unshakeable question— what value are you really creating for the world?

In December 2017, this question seemed to answer itself. At that point, Bitcoin was nearing $20,000; Coinbase became the most downloaded app in the U.S.; billions of dollars were flowing into various ICO projects like Jesus Coin—it was the peak moment of “cryptocurrency Christmas.” Jeff first heard about Bitcoin during his internship at Hudson River Trading, when two former partners introduced the concept to the interns, but it didn't resonate. However, during his time at Hudson River Trading, he read the Ethereum white paper, which described a “computing machine recognized by the entire world that no single individual can turn off.” He was interacting with the financial system every day and knew its operating foundation, while this paper described a way to replace trust with code. “I felt I could build something that would completely reshape finance.”

He left Hudson River Trading around April 2018 to start a prediction market that would allow users to bet on any event with an outcome, such as the weather, elections, or sports events. This system would run on a blockchain, with no single entity controlling the funds. Its architecture was based on an idea he believed he and his co-founders proposed first: off-chain matching, on-chain settlement—because Ethereum’s speed was far from adequate to support a proper exchange. Funds would be stored in smart contracts controlled by code, but the user experience would remain fast and smooth—retaining the decentralized promise of crypto while avoiding its frictional costs. He and his college roommate Brian Wong (who also left Hudson River Trading) built this product in the initial incubation project by Binance Labs in San Francisco, naming it Deaux.

Kalshi was founded in 2019 with a similar concept, and Polymarket followed in 2020. Today, these two companies combined are valued at over $40 billion, while Deaux had only 100 users.

When Jeff reached this point in his story, heavy rain suddenly fell from the Singapore sky. The dense, heavy raindrops filled the gutters within minutes. From the terrace, we could hear the rain pounding the street, tires sliding through the water, making louder hissing sounds.

“This project was never supposed to succeed,” he continued. By the time Deaux launched, Bitcoin had already dropped over 80% from its peak; Jesus Coin had long faded from view and did not “come back.” No one wanted to bet on tomorrow’s weather. More importantly, Jeff and Wong had hardly considered the regulatory issues. Kalshi fought for three years to obtain regulatory approval before launching their product.

When Deaux shut down, Scott Wu was one of the few in the world who truly felt sorry— he was one of the only five stable users. Jeff refunded over half of the $450,000 investment. He remained bound by a non-compete clause from Hudson River Trading, so he went skiing at Lake Tahoe in California with a friend also under a non-compete, skiing until the season ended. Then, he traveled on a limited budget through China, Japan, and Peru. He tried to convince me that being a tourist requires considerable “skill”—and he did not possess that ability.

By the end of 2019, when the non-compete clause expired, Jeff moved to Puerto Rico—where people legally can reduce capital gains tax to nearly zero. He had just $10,000 to his name, but he sensed that a great opportunity was approaching.

His partner moved to Puerto Rico with him. They rented a one-bedroom apartment by the seaside for under $2,000 a month. But “co-renting” implied a certain shared living condition, and Jeff did not make time for that. He didn’t even have a monitor, so he took over the living room TV and set up his workspace there. For the first year or so, he gave his partner about 30 minutes every day, the rest of the time belonged entirely to the trading algorithms scrolling on the TV.

Jeff worked at least 14 hours a day, easily reaching 100 hours a week. He started with Python scripts, writing code to connect various cryptocurrency exchanges so that his program could trade around the clock automatically. He closely monitored these systems, optimized the logic, tracked the data, and whenever results were not as expected, he would tear it down and start from scratch.

He could do this because the openness of the cryptocurrency market is something traditional finance has never possessed. In stock markets (like those where he traded at Hudson River Trading), placing an order at a single exchange requires connecting to 13 “lit exchanges” located in three colocated data centers in New Jersey, and adhering to complex SEC regulations (Reg NMS), obtaining futures data from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange through microwave links, and spending tens of millions of dollars on infrastructure. In the cryptocurrency markets, whether you are an employee at Hudson River Trading or an individual working in front of a TV, the access is the same crude HTTP infrastructure—originally designed for web development. You just rent a server on Amazon Web Services.

For almost two years, his partner was completely unaware of what happened on the other side of the TV. Their lifestyle seemed unchanged: the same rent, the same diet. She knew he was very committed and motivated and felt he “should be doing quite well,” but there was no tangible evidence of his success. Until a Friday night in the summer of 2021, when she tried to pull him out of the house for a dinner reservation made a week in advance—he refused to leave.

“You don’t understand,” he told her, “if I don’t fix this bug now, I’m going to lose $100,000.”

After that night, Jeff decided to actually turn this into a business. He needed someone “who can do anything but write code.” At Harvard, he had met such a person in Pforzheimer House—she seemed to have the rare ability to manage everything in life, which was almost an “alien capability” to him. However, he later heard that iliensinc was in Asia, working as a chief of staff at a VC, shuttling between Tokyo, Seoul, and Hong Kong.

When he contacted her, he found that she had returned to San Francisco. The pandemic halted cross-border travel, and the job that required her to travel around Asia became a series of late-night calls from her apartment. Jeff described his needs to her. He didn’t provide a clear job description, title, nor did he even specify exactly what she would do. But she had spent the last three years evaluating entrepreneurs, and regardless of what Jeff was saying, she intuitively felt he was someone worth “reverse betting” on.

The company officially had a name—Chameleon Trading, and iliensinc began representing the team in Zoom meetings with business development teams at major exchanges, adding a layer of professional veneer to this organization which was just “a man living by the beach in San Juan.” Beneath those giant market makers—like Jump Trading, Tower Research Capital, Hudson River Trading, and Jane Street—there was another layer of anonymous trading firms whose scale eludes accurate measurement by outsiders, and Chameleon was one of the considerable players among them.

By 2022, Jeff began to feel uneasy. He had been in the cryptocurrency industry for four years, particip...

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