ICYMI - Fireside Chat with Hyperliquid Founder Jeff Yan @ TOKEN2049, Hosted by @hal2001

Intern notes by @kirbyongeo

Why does Hyperliquid work so well? 🤔
@Hyperliquid's founder, Jeff, shares insights on how they built a frictionless, capital-efficient, and community-driven DeFi powerhouse.

🧵👇 1/ Jeff highlights that Hyperliquid succeeds by ensuring that the 'chain and application are not fighting each other.'

This means abstracting away complex crypto steps, creating a UX comparable to centralized exchanges.

HypurrCo Intern Key Notes from Hyperliquid’s Bold Vision for DeFi

Jeff shares some deep insights on why CEXs are broken and how Hyperliquid fixes them.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the key points 👇

1/ Why DEXs?
FTX’s collapse reminded the world: not your keys, not your coins.

Hyperliquid was built from the ground up to bring back the original DeFi ethos - ownership, transparency, and trust. 2/ From Perps to L1

Started as a perp DEX.
Now? A full-blown Layer 1 chain with its own custom infra.

Why? To own performance, reduce latency, and scale beyond what's possible on EVM chains.

Look at this guy.

- Won gold and silver at the International Physics Olympiad in 2013
- Graduated from Harvard in Mathematics and Computer Science
- Worked at Google and Hudson River Trading
- Founded Chameleon Trading, a top crypto market maker
- Built Hyperliquid, a high-speed decentralized exchange

Here’s the wild story of Jeff Yan, and how he quietly became one of the sharpest minds in crypto

A thread 👇 1. From Physics Prodigy to Harvard Graduate

In 2013, Jeff Yan clinched gold and silver medals at the International Physics Olympiad.
He then pursued an AB/SM in Mathematics and Computer Science at Harvard.

Reflections in crypto - Lessons learnt, advice that I would give myself/others

2017 - Bought ETH & BTC at the top. HODLed, and capitulated mid 2018. Down bad. Kept grinding, earned BTC & ETH and sold into USD. NGMI.

Long term, don't dump $BTC $ETH ALWAYS take profit

Got paid 50k in advance, for 6 months of future work - did not take profit when token 20x out the gate with fully liquid tokens, believed it was going for a 100x.

Dumped at 1x, after holding for 6 months.

ALWAYS take profit - 10-20% every leg up.