Hyperliquid is Not a Company
Jeff gave an interview on the Kevin WSH pod today. Jeff was faithful to himself, laser-focused, hesitant about money matters, and lucid about the current state of crypto. They also discussed the imminent rise of AI overlords, sleepy devs and prediction markets.
We retained some key points for the future of Hyperliquid (and humanity at large…)
The Best Airdrop of all Time
Interestingly, the interview quickly veered to the airdrop question, which turned many average Joes into millionaires overnight. Jeff said, “Simply by being early and by providing a valuable service of participating in a network where the network effects are so important, you can become a sort of meaningful owner of the network.“
Early ChatGPT users got a product, whereas early Hyperliquid users got ownership. He didn’t engineer that to be generous; it was because no VCs participated in Hyperliquid’s funding, and the rewards went to retail stakeholders who devoted time and money to the DEX back in 2024. This is how the legend was born; outsiders and fairly ordinary people managed, against all odds, to become part of one of the greatest crypto businesses.
The “cult“ idea was addressed as well. Many see the Hyperliquid community as a sect. Jeff’s response is almost offended: “People just coming together to kind of build things in the right way with the right values and be fair to everyone and create an open financial system, to me, feels like it should be normal.”
Do Buybacks Work?
On the buyback question, which was recently raised in the context of PumpFun’s ineffective strategy, Jeff was clear. “Hyperliquid does not have a discretionary buyback program.” The fees are converted to HYPE and burned through the chain’s execution logic. “In the same way that when you place an onchain TWAP, there is no one sitting there deciding when to split your order, that is part of the execution, part of the state machine itself.”
Jeff reiterated: “Hyperliquid is not a company.”
One Seed Spawning an Entire Network
Users also keep asking why Hyperliquid Labs has barely a dozen people while every other protocol is hiring hundreds, with a relatively low human ROI. According to Jeff, a centralised exchange needs whole teams just to manage tokenisation, one team for crypto liquidity, one for TradFi feeds, one for multisigs, each with their own lead, their own overhead, their own coordination costs. “With Hyperliquid, the protocol doesn’t actually do any of these things. Hyperliquid is more like a set of primitives by which anyone can tokenise anything in different ways.“ Unlike CEXs or bigger DEXs,
Hyperliquid is manned by a small team of obsessed people. “Maybe you get there faster if you do it in a fully centralised way, but you build a much more resilient and robust and ultimately globally scalable system if you build it the hard way.”
Tokenise It All
Permissionless perps on any liquid instrument, metals, equities, commodities, anything with futures and options. The logic is simple: “There is nothing unique about crypto when it comes to perps. So there should be perps on most liquid instruments.”
TradeXYZ, the first deployer, has already accounted for roughly 2% of global silver volume in a few months of existence (as a reminder, silver’s market cap is above $4 trillion). Jeff is honest about the odds: “Most people probably thought it just wouldn’t work. And honestly, we couldn’t say for sure that it was going to be a success either.”
Another killer application for HyperEVM is HIP-4. Spot and perps let users express linear beliefs, which limits the range of outcomes and strategies certain sophisticated users would like to be able to leverage: “There are people who actually do want convexity, nonlinear outcomes. They want something that is either worth one or zero dollars, depending on something that happens.” Jeff tried building this in 2018, but his triumph came with an adjacent product. Spot completed the picture.
The Unit team (not the core team) made Hyperliquid the leading source of spot price discovery for the XRP launch in 2025. Jeff called it going full circle: “finally, after so many years, transact in a way, without sacrificing UX, that is still consistent with the technological underpinnings of the asset you’re holding itself.”
The House of all Finance, for Everyone, Everywhere
Jeff’s vision was poles apart from Binance’s or Coinbase’s: “What the internet did for information, Hyperliquid as an ecosystem, as a network, as a protocol is trying to do for finance.” The crypto part of housing all of finance is that the platform on which people do this should also not be controlled by a “central corporation”, as he calls it.
And the reason it has to be built the hard way is that “finance is too big for one team to build.”
In one sentence, why is it so important to bring all of finance onchain? “It’s important because if you don’t, then the financial system is going to fall behind the pace of technological development. It’s not going to keep up. The world is changing too quickly. The legacy financial system is not going to be adequate to serve users’ needs in a rapidly developing world.“
Why Crypto Still Matters
Why stay in crypto when AI is pulling all the talent?
The following lines are quite different from the rest of the interview, but it provides a genuine insight into Jeff’s mindset: “We have one very important job as a species. There’s a ticking time bomb because AI is going to come and basically supplant human intelligence in the near future.” And when that happens, value transfer will be “machine-driven” too.
The legacy financial system can’t serve that world. “Code and value are not on the same playing field in the legacy financial system.” So if humans don’t build programmable, open, accessible financial infrastructure “before AI hits escape velocity,” they get cut out of the system that replaces it entirely. “When the AI overlords come, they will adopt it because it’s been built well and is autonomous and fair and open and permissionless.”
Recently, LLMs were caught teaching themselves without human input, so we can speculate about the future of finance without human control.
Do You Really Want to Live Forever?
“I don’t want it to be remembered for anything. I just want it to be used forever.”
That romantic way of putting things was probably the last time you heard Jeff being candid, a man obsessed with his work.
He almost singlehandedly built the king of perps, handling billions of dollars of volume per day.
Despite the competition, which comes with new VCs, new marketing, new products, and new tricks, Hyperliquid still reigns supreme, perhaps forever indeed.
written by Vincent ✍️
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great summary!
Hyperliquid is not a company