Hyperliquid: The Next Generation of Decentralized Exchanges

Several decentralized exchanges struggle with liquidity, high purchase costs, and confusing customer experiences, leaving investors with little option but to stick to centralized exchanges like Binance and Bybit

In the sprawling landscape of decentralised exchanges (DEXs), several contenders valiantly clash for liquidity, striving to offer competitive purchase costs and seamless customer experiences—all while attempting to siphon customers away from centralised behemoths like Binance and Bybit. Sadly, for traders seeking an alternative to these centralised giants, the options might appear limited, leaving them with little choice but to stick to the likes of Binance or Bybit.

Several DEXs clash with liquidity, high purchase costs, and customer experience

A substantial setback for DEXs is liquidity. While DEXs provide the benefit of self-custody and censorship resistance, they usually experience high gas costs, sluggish purchase times, and fragmented liquidity compared to their centralised counterparts.

Nonetheless, one particular DEX claims to have finally split the code and offers an answer to this pressing issue: Hyperliquid.

Hyperliquid claims to be a blazing-fast order-book DEX boasting $12 billion in daily volume, nearly instant purchases, and a trading experience that matches CEXs while staying completely on-chain. It is also a no-VC, no-ICO DEX—a feat in an industry where most tasks struggle to launch without early-stage funding. Instead, Hyperliquid airdropped its native token, BUZZ, to early adopters, fostering rapid engagement.

But Hyperliquid’s quick surge isn’t without controversy. Questions remain concerning who precisely lies behind the platform—and whether its purported decentralisation is as genuine as it claims.

Is Hyperliquid the future of decentralised trading, or is it simply one more crypto venture harboring covert centralisation dangers? Today, we’re diving deep into who’s behind it, how it works, and whether it can live up to the hype.

Hyperliquid’s Beginnings and Team

The tale of Hyperliquid begins with Jeffrey Yan, a Harvard graduate with a background in mathematics, quantitative trading, and software development. Before venturing into crypto, Jeff worked at Google and an elite trading firm called Hudson River Trading, where he focused on building high-frequency trading (HFT) algorithms—experience that would later influence Hyperliquid’s design.

Jeff initially became interested in crypto in 2018 after discovering Ethereum and its potential for decentralised applications. His initial attempt at building in the space was a Layer-2 prediction market on Ethereum, but after a few months, he abandoned the project. Instead, he returned to what he knew best—trading.

In early 2020, Jeff started Chameleon Trading, a proprietary crypto trading firm and market maker. According to him, Chameleon became a significant player in the space, yet strangely enough, there is nearly no public information concerning it. The company’s website, now offline, included only a single sentence: “Global proprietary trading and investment firm.” There’s no LinkedIn account, no company information, and no legal documents of its trading activity.

By late 2022, Chameleon Trading had shifted its attention to DeFi, observing that despite the crypto bear market, decentralised exchanges were still attracting huge trading volumes. The collapse of FTX, one of the largest centralised derivatives exchanges, left a significant gap in the market—a void that Jeff and his team saw as an opportunity.

This led to the birth of Hyperliquid, a decentralised derivatives exchange aiming to provide the same speed, liquidity depth, and low latency as centralised exchanges but without the risks of custody and opaque balance sheets.

Hyperliquid’s Unique Funding Model

We can’t discuss Hyperliquid without mentioning its controversial funding.

Among the boldest claims Hyperliquid makes is that it launched with no VC funding, ICO, or pre-sale. This is nearly unprecedented in the crypto space, where most tasks rely on early-stage venture capital or token sales to bootstrap growth and provide liquidity. Instead, Hyperliquid took a different approach: a massive airdrop of its native token, BUZZ, to early adopters—quickly generating a large, engaged user base without selling tokens to VCs.

At first glance, this appears to be a clean launch, reinforcing Hyperliquid’s decentralised values. However, when you look deeper, the question of who precisely funded Hyperliquid’s development and initial liquidity remains unanswered.

Building a custom Layer-1 blockchain, deploying a sophisticated order-book-based DEX, and onboarding users without external financing is no small feat. Without VC funding, the most rational source of capital would be Chameleon Trading—the market-making firm that Hyperliquid’s owner, Jeffrey Yan, ran before launching the exchange. Given Chameleon’s alleged success as a trading firm, it’s plausible that the team self-funded Hyperliquid using trading profits.

Yet if that is true, this raises another question: Did Chameleon Trading—or other professional entities—claim a large portion of the buzz airdrop?

This has led some to speculate that a significant part of the airdrop