Jeff Yan On Hyperliquid’s Plan To Bring All Finance Onchain

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Shaunda Devins (0:08)

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Shaunda Devins. I'm a research analyst at Blockworks. And over the past year, I've had the privilege of leading our team's coverage into Hyperliquid.

I'm extremely grateful today for the opportunity to talk with the one and only Jeff, co-founder and CEO of Hyperliquid Labs. Jeff, how are you doing today?

Jeff Yan (0:29)

Great. Thanks for taking the time to do this interview. And I really appreciate all the research you put out. I know you've been super early in the ecosystem writing about it. And I think a lot of the stuff that the insights you've shared, I know have either come true or help people realize what's already true. So I really appreciate the good work you do.

Shaunda Devins (0:48)

Thank you. So hopefully, we're going to use this time today to get into Hyperliquid, what's being built and what's still left to build. But I did just want to start with saying thank you for the incredible amount of work that you and the team are doing and the principles that you have. I mean, it's hard not to get inspired by it. You notice it when you interact with Hyperliquid. You notice it in Singapore. I feel like most importantly, you also notice it in the industry.

Compared to three years ago, there's so much more optimism. It feels like protocols actually value their community and the token. I think that is in no small part due to the example that you guys have set. If anything, you probably set the bar too high.

Jeff Yan (1:27)

It's a team effort. When I say team, I mean everyone building on the protocol.

Shaunda Devins (1:31)

I just wanted to start by saying thanks for that.

On the topic of the amount of work you guys are doing, I wanted to start with just saying, this year, Hyperliquid has shipped HIP4, which is outcomes, portfolio margin, which has been expanded into a native Borough Lend Protocol, priority fees, and also HIP3 star on Testnet. I'm curious broadly how you couldn't textualize everything that you've built and maybe what the overarching strategy is for your decisions.

Jeff Yan (2:00)

Yeah, the overarching strategy, I guess, is just to build the tools that ultimately can house all of finance. I think you can say that all you want, but if someone wants to build something and they can't do it, then they're going to build elsewhere.

The goal is really just to be useful. I think that's probably the undercurrent of all of this, so it's like looking at what can be done today and what people, builders who want to build, feel like the gaps are and noticing the commonalities there. That's really good feedback for how the protocol should, overall, what direction it should go in. I think a number, a sort of important property you always want is that the primitives that are ultimately built, that there aren't too many of them so that it's complicated and there's, you know, it's like, it's like an unclear how things work together. It should be kind of very surgically precise, but also like each primitive should be broadly useful in many ways, and they should compose well with each other. So like, portfolio margin is a good example of how like a borrowing and lending primitive can compose with a trading primitive, like purpose or spot. And I think that that kind of interaction always, well, one, it's nice because it just unlocks a lot of people to build, but it also just feels more elegant. It's like the right way, the way that finance should work, like fewer things, but they work together well.

Shaunda Devins (3:28)

Yeah.

One thing that I noticed, there seems to be a lag between when you guys build something and when maybe the community and public understands how important it's going to be. Like, HIP3 comes to mind that even on Testnet, it was apparent that this would enable the market creation of any asset with the price feed. But it was only until TradeXYZ and Shoku did an amazing job with execution that people really started to understand that. Do you think there's anything similar now in what you guys are building that it's going to take a while until people really understand how important it's going to be?

Jeff Yan (4:03)

Yeah. It's always hard to predict how long it will take. I think some things may just never take off because maybe something about the world is not quite as it seems. But I think every one of these things is primitives. I think has some crazy large stories, some are HIP3, yet to be written and, like you said, waiting for someone to come and really execute on the implementation, which is a hard part.