With over two and a half years of history, Hyperliquid has firmly established its leading position in the decentralized perpetual contract market. Just looking at the top 100 perpetual contract pairs, last week, Hyperliquid's perpetual contract trading volume equaled that of Binance's USD-denominated perpetual contract volume, forming an "82 ratio."

Despite this achievement, Hyperliquid's core team consists of only 11 people. On August 20, HyperliquidFR released data showing that Hyperliquid achieved an annual revenue per employee of $1.024 billion, making it the company with the highest revenue per capita in the world.

Looking back on Hyperliquid's development journey, it has experienced moments of obscurity, sudden wealth creation through airdrops, and even lows. As $HYPE hits a new all-time high for the third time this year, let's review Hyperliquid's legendary journey together.

Obscurity

On December 27, 2022, Hyperliquid sent out its first tweet, announcing the launch of the Hyperliquid L1 testnet.

During this nearly unnoticed period of obscurity, Hyperliquid's founder, Jeff, was focused on building his own underlying logic. Coming from a background in quantitative and high-frequency trading research at Citadel, with a Harvard education and Silicon Valley upbringing, he understood how the traditional financial system maintained matching efficiency and fund security under extreme pressure.

"How to bring Wall Street-level execution experience to on-chain transactions" was a question Jeff had been pondering. With this background in mind, Jeff chose not to build a contract trading platform on an existing public chain but insisted on creating a new Layer 1, holding the entire matching, clearing, and risk control system in his own hands.

Over the next few months, Hyperliquid's official Twitter account did not see much activity. On April 20, 2023, a tweet from Hyperliquid announced referral rewards sent to 81 addresses. A user in the comments expressed happiness at earning a $3 reward, presumably unaware that such early participation would bring him a generous return far beyond that $3. Did he imagine a bright future back then?

On May 17, 2023, Hyperliquid announced the launch of the community-owned native liquidity pool "HLP," and this tweet became Hyperliquid's first highly noticed tweet. As of now, HLP's TVL has reached approximately $5.73 billion.

On June 17, 2023, HLP experienced its first attack. The attacker manipulated the price of $SNX on a CEX, dumped $SNX on Hyperliquid, and then liquidated on the CEX, making a profit of about $37,000. Hyperliquid quickly adjusted to this, anticipating that as Hyperliquid grows, HLP will face more challenges.

On November 1, 2023, Hyperliquid introduced a points system. On the 24th of the same month, Hyperliquid announced that the platform's total trading volume had reached $100 billion. By the end of 2023, Hyperliquid announced that the platform's total trading volume had reached $210 billion, with over 31,000 users. In the first week of 2024, the weekly trading volume surpassed dYdX, taking the top spot in the decentralized perpetual contract market.

It can be said that since that time, Hyperliquid has entered a rapid development stage. The leader is faintly emerging, and the hibernation is about to end.

Remarkable Achievement

If Jeff during the hibernation period was a dedicated engineer, then in the 2024 "Remarkable Achievement" phase, he has begun to show clearer strategic ambitions. Hyperliquid is not satisfied with just leading in the contract market. Jeff has emphasized on several occasions that he wants Hyperliquid to become an "on-chain full-fledged financial ecosystem," rather than just a single Perp DEX.

Therefore, on March 29, 2024, Hyperliquid announced support for native spot trading and introduced two native token standards, HIP-1 and HIP-2. HIP-1 is a native token protocol that allows users to mint custom tokens on Hyperliquid L1. HIP-2 is a liquidity solution that provides market-making strategies for tokens issued under HIP-1, ensuring liquidity without relying on external platforms like Raydium.

At the same time, Hyperliquid also announced that the first token to be listed on spot trading would be its own issued meme coin on Hyperliquid L1, $PURR. $PURR was the first gift to all users who participated in the Hyperliquid point system. At its peak, the token had a market cap of over 6 billion U.S. dollars. Currently, it still holds a market cap of 1.08 billion U.S. dollars, remaining the largest native meme coin on Hyperliquid L1.

On May 20, 2024, Hyperliquid announced support for native EVM, a plan that signaled Hyperliquid's ambition to build a larger ecosystem beyond the success of its contract product. The goal was to enable users to fully embrace the Hyperliquid ecosystem without the need for CEX or other blockchains.

On November 29, 2024, the native token of Hyperliquid, $HYPE, was listed, and its closing price on the first day reached 6.25 U.S. dollars. Early users reaped generous rewards, but the bigger surprise came later, as within less than half a month, $HYPE surged more than 5 times, reaching a high of 35 U.S. dollars.

Twitter was flooded with discussions about $HYPE, and whether or not one was a contract player, everyone began to be aware of the existence of Hyperliquid.

Trial

With size comes scrutiny. Hyperliquid, which had been developing almost effortlessly, faced its first trial shortly after the launch of $HYPE.

On December 30, 2024, renowned security researcher Tay (@tayvano_) tweeted a warning — multiple flagged North Korean hacker addresses had been transacting on Hyperliquid from October 29, 2024, to December 18, 2024, resulting in a total loss of over $700,000.

Although Hyperliquid showed no signs of being attacked at that time, it could also mean that Hyperliquid was already considered a potential target by North Korean hackers. In the tweet, Tay also mentioned, "If I were one of Hyperliquid's 4 validators, I would have crapped my pants by now," sparking discussions in the market about the security implications of having too few Hyperliquid validators.

One day later, according to an official announcement, Hyperliquid Labs stated that they had become aware of reports regarding alleged North Korean hacker activity. In fact, Hyperliquid did not suffer any North Korean hacker attack—no form of attack took place. All user funds were being properly managed.

On January 7, 2025, validator operator Chorus One published an open letter on Twitter detailing multiple issues with the Hyperliquid testnet, including frequent node shutdowns, operational difficulties due to closed-source code, the risk of centralization from API, and proposed several improvement suggestions aimed at increasing the chain's transparency and decentralization.

In response to these concerns, Hyperliquid founder Jeff replied emphasizing that the validator selection criteria had been outlined in the announcement; the Hyperliquid official account also made a separate post on Platform X to address the issues raised in the letter and clarified that the node code would be open-sourced under secure conditions.

On March 27, 2025, Hyperliquid encountered a significant market turmoil. A large on-chain whale established a substantial JELLY short position on Hyperliquid, causing a massive price swing in the JELLY token that led to their position being liquidated. Hyperliquid's counterparty rescue fund took over the position, leading to a near-liquidation event, posing a risk of total depletion of the protocol's treasury. Simultaneously, centralized exchanges (CEX) took advantage of the situation, swiftly listing JELLY contracts to engage in sniper attacks and hunting against Hyperliquid.

The incident concluded with Hyperliquid delisting the JELLY token and settling the received short position at a price of $0.0095 (well below market price), without any loss of funds. However, FUD persisted. Arthur Hayes tweeted that Hyperliquid mishandled the JELLY incident, claiming it was not decentralized at all and daring to bet that $HYPE would quickly plummet back to zero. Bitget CEO Gracy Chen went further to state that Hyperliquid's handling of the event was immature, unethical, and unprofessional and suggested that Hyperliquid might become FTX 2.0.

This event did not deter Hyperliquid's progress. After the first week of April, $HYPE resumed its upward trend, continually setting new all-time highs.

Whale's Favor

In March 2025, Hyperliquid first gained market attention due to whale manipulation. At that time, a "Hyperliquid 50x Leverage Whale" appeared, attracting widespread attention for their high win rate and earning huge profits through high-leverage trading, earning them the nickname "Insider."

In May, James Wynn engaged in a long and short battle with this "Insider." James Wynn's position once surpassed one billion dollars and eventually emerged victorious.

However, he soon encountered a massive failure. James Wynn had a peak profit of 87 million dollars at the end of May, but eventually not only lost all his profits but also lost 21.77 million dollars of his capital. At the end of May, he opened a 12.3 billion dollar worth BTC long position on Hyperliquid at its peak.

Whether whales succeed or fail, whale movements on Hyperliquid have become an important market indicator, making it a vivid hallmark of Hyperliquid.

Just 2 days ago, according to Arkham's on-chain data analysis, a whale, also known as the recent market-famous "Sleeping Seven-Year High-Profile ETH Whale Who Swapped BTC," once again staked 1.25 billion dollars worth of ETH. So far, this unknown whale has bought 25.5 billion dollars worth of ETH through Hyperliquid (Hyperunit) and staked all of it.

With so much ETH, this whale's ETH holdings on Ethscan's ETH total holdings ranking can now be ranked in the top 10, about 2.5 times the Ethereum Foundation's current ETH holdings. This whale has had a significant impact on Bitcoin's market as the sell-off caused a 3% drop in Bitcoin. Perhaps in an effort to remain mysterious, this whale used Hyperliquid for their operations.

Providing a CeFi-level trading experience on a fully decentralized Layer 1, Hyperliquid has achieved this, which is the core reason for gaining whale favor.

Conclusion

Indeed, the crypto world is a place where miracles happen. Considering that Hyperliquid has challenged giants like Binance and OKX, and looking at Hyperliquid's growth rate and revenue scale, it's hard for anyone not to marvel at Hyperliquid as another "crypto miracle."

Looking back on the journey of Hyperliquid, it is easy for people to focus on those dazzling numbers and stories. However, if you zoom in, you will find that the essence of Hyperliquid is actually Jeff's essence.

Jeff is not a founder who enjoys frequent appearances in public. He rarely gives interviews and hardly does any excessive marketing. In a recent interview, he mentioned that Hyperliquid has only 11 team members and does not have an internal marketing team.

Behind the beautiful story, Hyperliquid has also gone through unknown periods of silent growth, experiencing various doubts and tests. And now, they are still persevering and will continue to reap rewards.

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