Article reprinted from: Yuliya
Interview: When Shift Happens
Translation: Yuliya, PANews
(When Shift Happens) Previously interviewed Hyperliquid Labs founder Jeff. Hyperliquid is a decentralized perpetual contract trading platform and also a Layer 1 project. In an hour-long conversation, Jeff shared his entrepreneurial journey, project vision, and observations on the DeFi industry. PANews compiled the interview content, covering aspects such as technical innovations, operational models, and user experience improvements, while also discussing the trends and challenges in the cryptocurrency industry.
Entrepreneurial Journey
Host: Jeff, can you talk to us about how you got on the path of entrepreneurship?
Jeff: This goes back to early 2020. At that time, I started researching some simple trading scripts, mainly focusing on centralized cryptocurrency exchanges (CEX). Although many large market makers had already entered the scene, sometimes 'ignorance is bliss' can be a good thing. I thought, why not try to make some money?
The initial research results were promising, so I decided to take it seriously. To be honest, I wasn't very good at coding before, but to achieve my goals, I started self-learning programming. By 2022, we had become one of the largest traders in many trading venues, possibly among the best in high-frequency market-making.
Host: What prompted you to transition from successful quantitative trading to creating Hyperliquid?
Jeff: There are mainly two reasons:
First, we began to focus on the DeFi space and discovered many interesting protocol designs. There's an interesting phenomenon in DeFi: many who don't understand finance are trying to build financial systems, which paradoxically brings many opportunities for quantitative strategies.
Secondly, the collapse of FTX was an important turning point. This event made people realize that they cannot blindly trust centralized exchanges. This is not an abstract theoretical discussion, but a tangible loss of funds. For us, this was an important revelation — the world was finally ready to embrace real DeFi.
Product Philosophy
Host: Can you explain in simple terms what Hyperliquid does?
Jeff: From the perspective of human history, society has always been moving towards individualism. Every progress towards individualism and human rights has been positive, whether measured by GDP or happiness.
Hyperliquid continues to push this direction: from needing weapons to protect one's farm, to being able to store money in banks, and now to Hyperliquid — you can completely control your funds through cryptographic technology.
Specifically, we are building a system that can:
Meet all user expectations for Web2 finance
Offer low fees
Support fast transfers
Achieve instant settlements
Provide liquidity comparable to centralized exchanges
Allow trustless integration with other applications
Support collateralized lending
Empower users to truly freely use their funds
Financing Strategy
Host: Why choose not to accept any investments? This is rare in the industry.
Jeff: This is indeed not a traditional business project. This may be the first time in DeFi or even the entire cryptocurrency field that this is happening, but if you look at Amazon's example, Bezos also didn't profit from it for a long time in the early days.
We have several deep reasons for doing this:
The cryptocurrency industry places too much emphasis on short-term gains
Creating a new financial model where VCs hold 50% of the network share early on would always be a stain.
Our team is capable of operating without relying on external financing, which allows us to stick to this decision.
Industry Perspectives
Host: Do you have any criticisms of the current cryptocurrency industry?
Jeff: To be honest, the most 'successful' products in the industry often involve issuing fraudulent tokens. Very few projects genuinely follow a user-centric model because acquiring real users is indeed challenging. Most projects take shortcuts: first securing investments from large market makers, and then attracting trading through incentive programs. This model is unsustainable in the long run.
Host: How do you view the current state of the cryptocurrency industry?
Jeff: Although many people see cryptocurrency as a failed experiment, I believe it is humanity's only hope for reinventing the financial system. Finance is one of humanity's greatest inventions; it allows us to:
Express value in a more abstract way
Achieve better capital allocation
Establish a complete economic system
Without these, all other advancements may be unattainable. Human society might still be stuck in agricultural or even hunting-gathering stages.
Software should fundamentally change finance, but the reality is that finance (and possibly healthcare) is one of the few large industries that has not undergone substantial innovation.
Technical innovation
Host: Can you elaborate on the concept of Builder Codes?
Jeff: This is a simple but powerful concept. It allows anyone to build financial applications on the Hyperliquid foundation, such as:
Innovative mobile wallets
Social trading platforms
Regional exchanges
Fiat deposit channels
Developers can:
Building your own exchange business
Using our neutral backend
Charging fees in a way that earns user trust
Generating revenue directly at the protocol level, rather than relying on private agreements with centralized exchanges
This will open up a new way to build businesses in DeFi, making specialization possible. Those who understand the specific needs of regional users can focus on serving those users, while Hyperliquid provides support in the background.
Future Outlook
Host: How do you view the long-term development of the project?
Jeff: I like to use Go and chess as metaphors. You don't need to be completely sure of where you want to end up, but you must ensure that every step is in the right direction. It's important to do each step well, rather than being overly fixated on a distant endpoint. That's why we focus more on building infrastructure rather than short-term market performance.
Host: What is Hyperliquid's long-term vision?
Jeff: Our core philosophy is:
Cryptocurrency will change the way finance operates
Traditional finance will eventually migrate to cryptocurrency
Hyperliquid will become the foundational platform for these financial activities
The specific implementation path is difficult to predict, but that's not the most important thing. We focus on building infrastructure that will play a crucial role regardless of how things evolve in the future:
Builder Codes system
EVM integrated with on-chain native components
Sustainable, high-quality liquidity
These are essential infrastructures that are hard to get right, and I believe they will be indispensable cornerstones no matter how the cryptocurrency evolves in 10 years.