Decrypt’s 2025 Project of the Year: Hyperliquid

Jeff Yan had conscionable watched Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire illness successful a substance of days successful 2022. And it was then, amid the chaos of the collapsing FTX and the contagion it caused, that Yan decided to spell each successful connected gathering his ain cryptocurrency exchange—a decentralized alternate helium called Hyperliquid.

Now, 3 years later, Yan appears to person been vindicated. After co-founding Hyperliquid Labs successful 2023, Yan has helped make 1 of the astir impactful decentralized exchanges and layer-1 networks successful crypto’s 16-year history—all without task superior funding.

This year, Hyperliquid has generated implicit $2.73 trillion successful perpetual futures trading volume, $110.65 cardinal successful spot trading volume, and earned $1.22 cardinal successful annualized revenue, according to DefiLlama. To enactment this into perspective, the American audio institution Dolby, known for its tech successful cinema and high-end stereo systems, has earned $1.35 cardinal successful gross this year, according to the company's ain figures, and employs implicit 2,000 people. Hyperliquid Labs is conscionable an 11-person team, and Hyperliquid’s users share successful the company’s revenue.

But beyond the numbers, Hyperliquid’s interaction connected the manufacture tin besides beryllium measured by however it has helped popularize perpetual futures, different known arsenic perps, among crypto-native traders. Perps let traders to speculate connected assets utilizing derivative contracts that ne'er expire, and portion utilizing borrowed superior with varying amounts of leverage. The precocious trading instrumentality had antecedently been overmuch little accessible, mostly disposable to either accredited investors oregon traders connected a fewer centralized crypto exchanges who were consenting to supply personally identifiable information.

Hyperliquid changed that, lowering the obstruction to introduction much than ever before, and causing rival exchanges to vie with progressively risky leverage offerings.

As a result, Hyperliquid helped spawn a caller people of crypto companies known arsenic perp DEXs—short-hand for decentralized exchanges specializing successful perpetual futures. For amended oregon worse, perpetual futures person go the caller frontier for retail traders to gamble with life-changing sums of borrowed wealth successful the hopes of striking it rich.

For its critics, Hyperliquid, whose representatives declined to remark for this story, is the latest high-powered fiscal instrumentality engineered for the digitized epoch of fiscal nihilism—in a authorities of caput successful which the fiscal strategy is acknowledged arsenic meaningless, and which academics reason pervades some crypto and accepted concern today.

“This tin beryllium seen arsenic a caller dawn for fiscal nihilists,” Dr. Amin Samman, elder world successful planetary governmental system astatine City, University of London, and the writer of “Currency of Nihilism,” told Decrypt. “What we're dealing with is simply a benignant of rolling bubble, which is similar a simulated carnival mounted from wrong the fiscal void—the emptiness, the groundlessness of concern itself, which cannot beryllium avoided.”