Hyperliquid CEO tells Token2049: Wall Street's wealth game is rigged, and the receipts are onchain 📊

Wall Street's traditional wealth-creation model leaves retail investors on the sidelines during the most lucrative phases of a company's growth, according to Hyperliquid co-founder and CEO Jeff Yan. Speaking during a Tuesday fireside chat at Token2049 Singapore, Yan said that assets such as pre-listing company stocks are typically accessible only to a privileged few before public markets get a look in. "Some assets are only tradable by a few people for many orders of magnitude of its growth, and then ultimately tradable by the public only after all of the growth has been realized by a select few people with privilege," Yan said. While he framed the dynamic as a byproduct of the broader economy, Yan added that the wealth-creation model is not "sustainable."

Yan positioned Hyperliquid's financial results as a consequence rather than a goal, emphasizing that the protocol's main mission is expanding access to wealth-creation opportunities and broadening participation in the financial system. "We're not really optimizing for revenue. That's a byproduct of providing value to users," he said. He attributed part of the platform's traction to its perpetual futures contracts, which carry no expiry dates, a design choice that reduces the number of decisions traders must make and is intended to prevent liquidity fragmentation.

Data from DefiLlama ranks Hyperliquid as the third-largest revenue-generating protocol, with $72 million generated during the past 30 days. The exchange's rise has coincided with growing attention from established financial institutions evaluating blockchain-based derivatives. In July, blockchain-focused asset manager Pantera said perpetual futures may become one of the dominant trading instruments in global finance due to their structural advantages, pointing to Hyperliquid as an example of how onchain infrastructure could compete with traditional markets.

Traditional finance participants have also begun weighing in on the shift. Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), has engaged with regulators on the topic. ICE CEO Jeffrey Sprecher urged the creation of a "level playing field" for launching 24/7 onchain perpetual futures contracts. In a separate effort, the NYSE partnered in March with tokenization platform Securitize to develop blockchain-based stock trading infrastructure aimed at enabling 24/7 trading and settlement for Wall Street.