Jeff Yan video archive

“We like to think of it as sort of uh the brand as like the people's DEX, so we try to bring the ethos of crypto to uh decentralized perps trading.” [01:16]

“Instead of DMMs and uh other market makers with special privileges, we let uh users come in and provide protocol liquidity um bootstrapping it.” [01:34]

“If you wanted to place and cancel an order and you needed to like sign something each time and like 10% of the time it like bugs out, like that's just like not acceptable behavior.” [06:27]

“We built an L1 that is um custom built for Hyperliquid, the Hyperliquid L1. So it doesn't, it's not general purpose, it doesn't support smart contracts. It really just runs this state machine that is the DEX.” [12:18]

“Because it's so custom built and optimized, it has the throughput uh you know 20,000 transactions per second, can easily be pushed by another factor of up to 10 I think if push comes to shove.” [12:31]

“We realized that basically all the infrastructure in crypto is kind of not production ready for this specific use case of a high throughput, low latency global exchange.” [07:30]

“I think MEV is an engineering problem, and we can mostly solve this problem.” [24:10]

“If a protocol can be set up in a way that it's well architected so that people can come in and actually express what they want to express... that's very powerful.” [41:15]

“The EVM is great for a lot of things, but if you want to build a highly performant order book, you really need to build it natively into the L1.” [52:20]

“We want to build a trusted financial layer for all of finance and kind of be built on top of.” [80:15]

“The first big difference is that making is more infrastructure heavy and taking is more stats math model heavy.” [06:33]

“If you don't think about this stuff correctly, if you really just ignore all the outliers, then your model is going to be screwed over when the sort of black swan tail events do happen.” [10:00]

“I'd say it's impossible to spend too much time looking at data. You're always going to learn something new.” [10:44]

“In some sense automated trading is the dumbest trading because it's some simple state machine that has no human discretion.” [30:33]

“We basically decided this was not acceptable. This will not actually let us scale to the vision we actually want... we need to build our own blockchain.” [54:00]

“It kind of feels like you can no longer pick what to do on a day-to-day basis. A lot of things are just kind of like... the world tells you, hey, you need to do this, do that.” [08:02]

“The whole point of a startup, I guess, is... you just do everything you can to get product-market fit, and then nobody really says what to do after because so few startups get there.” [08:51]

“We're trying to build something much bigger and we're trying to build something that no one else is really even trying to build currently, which is interesting.” [07:24]

“The purpose of HyperEVM is largely to make Hypercore programmable.” [23:33]

“You can't build something that scales to provide the world's liquidity for price discovery if it's just some smart contract competing with the gas of every other smart contract.” [26:50]

“There's just no way to run proof of stake without a native token. And that is like, in my view, that is sort of like the only thing you really need an L1 token for.” [00:13]

“On the surface building an exchange or a DEX is a very simple problem... but the devil is in the details. And I think it really takes a team with heavy background in quantitative trading.” [04:24]

“The vault primitive is like if I want to sign on behalf of an address... you can sign on behalf of it, but not have permission to move the funds.” [09:00]

“The end product is like people can see the bridge and at least it's open source and we got it audited twice... but it's just a custom bridge.” [11:18]

“The ultimate plan actually with the Hyperliquid EVM coming out, a big reason is to be able to support a more diverse and more sort of like institutional set of bridges.” [13:00]

“It was around then that FTX collapsed and we really saw the impact there and basically felt people were at that point going to understand the value of self custody.” [02:30]

“I think trading teaches you that money is really just a number and I'm not a super... I'm not very materialistic.” [05:36]

“Real progress is your users actually getting value from what you're building and users being able to benefit in the upside, not a bunch of investors who just like threw some money in at an early time.” [07:14]

“Our framework has always been focused on building and build what users want and don't care about what other people maybe like... just kind of stay focused, laser focused on what we're doing.” [08:13]

“We're 11 people... and it's about half half engineering and non-engineering.” [13:20]

“The main problem is that Hyperliquid does not have a discretionary buyback program. In the same way that Ethereum burns its priority fees, in that same way Hyperliquid burns its protocol fees.” [00:06]

“I hope Hyperliquid becomes the internet for money.” [00:44]

“I think finance is finance and crypto has the potential to upgrade the rails on which people conduct their financial lives.” [00:53]

“The crypto part of housing all of finance is that the platform on which people do this should not be controlled by a central corporation.” [01:08]

“It's rare that the people who are early to something can all participate in the upside and gain meaningful ownership over a network. I think that is very special.” [03:03]

“All of a sudden people had a real reason to not trust centralization exchanges.” [00:00]

“Crypto is like beautiful how inefficient the markets are.” [00:32]

“It really is humanity's only hope at reinventing the financial system.” [00:42]

“Working on something super hard is like suffering day to day. But I think you need to suffer, otherwise you have this much larger existential dread.” [01:02]

“I just don't think raising money... I don't think it's a negative signal, I just don't think it matters that much.” [03:53]

“People don't say we're internet companies these days. We use crypto, but that doesn't define us.” [06:03]

“There was this race I wasn't aware of, that other kids had been doing their whole lives, and I was behind.” [06:46]

“Losing is a pretty common experience. Most people are losers. There's usually only one winner.” [06:54]

“It felt like there was this void. I should be studying something.” [06:55]

“I consumed them like a TV show.” [06:56]

“the chain finally and the application really kind of are not fighting each other” [00:26]

“If you follow the capital it tells one story and if you follow the what's really going on like the product it tells a different story.” [01:53]

“There is often a clear line between the core developers of a protocol and the application developers on top. I do think that line is very fuzzy for Hyperliquid.” [03:10]

“markets are just a small set of rules and then everything that follows is a corollary of those rules.” [04:33]

“Ultimately like why a market exists is to take user A and user B and kind of connect them in the most efficient way possible.” [05:13]

“There will never be another Bitcoin then. Anything after Bitcoin needs to launch in a like very competitive market. There needs to be innovation and something needs to fund that.” [00:00]

“The sort of impetus for going all in and building Hyperliquid was when FTX collapsed. It felt like suddenly the previously very academic concerns in crypto around decentralization and self-custody... all of a sudden it was very viscerally important.” [01:18]

“Bitcoin would not be Bitcoin if he had raised a Series A. Even if best investors in the world, sickest cap table ever, still would not... Bitcoin would not be Bitcoin.” [04:11]

“When you're building something that needs to be credibly neutral in the long term and the history matters, I think we'd rather go slow and do it right.” [05:18]

“We just thought like okay like what's one really really big thing in crypto that we think could benefit from a fully permissionless platform and perps trading was the obvious one.” [07:31]

“Hyperliquid sort of represents what DeFi and crypto sought out to be.” [01:42]

“I think people in crypto are kind of tired of these insider-y, crypto in name but really just web2 companies under the hood kind of setups.” [05:12]

“We're a small tight-knit community, sort of a group of misfits not working at these big established protocols and companies, choosing to leave that behind and start from scratch.” [06:34]

“The core team actually is really just a technical team. Like we have no marketing department, we don't do sales, and the community kind of carries that.” [11:00]

“Anything that Labs doesn't need to do, I don't think it should. I think if something can be built by the community or by someone in the community, it should.” [11:26]

“I think we've taken pride in always being the first to do things and we're not super interested in like safe bets...” [00:00]

“...safe bets which are following quick, quick follows onto things that are successful.” [00:07]

“We think the best things have yet to be imagined and have yet to be built.” [00:13]

“It's not one thing, but I'd say going down the list the most important thing in my mind is that Hyperliquid sort of represents what DeFi and crypto sought out to be.” [00:00]