Hyperliquid CEO: Wall Street-style wealth model is unsustainable

Wall Street’s most profitable moments of wealth creation typically happen before shares ever hit the public market—when companies remain private and gains accrue mainly to insiders. Hyperliquid CEO and co-founder Jeff Yan argued this “pre-listing” model leaves retail investors locked out of early upside, and he said the current system is ultimately unsustainable.

Speaking during a fireside chat at Token2049 Singapore on Tuesday, Yan framed the appeal of onchain perpetuals and decentralized trading as a path toward broader access to blockchain-based wealth creation, rather than a strategy built to maximize short-term protocol income.

Key takeaways

• Jeff Yan says traditional markets concentrate early growth among privileged participants, while public investors often arrive only after most upside is realized.
• Hyperliquid’s CEO characterizes its revenue growth as an outcome of expanding user access, not a goal in itself.
• Perpetual futures without expiry can reduce trader decision friction and help avoid liquidity fragmentation, according to Yan.
• DefiLlama data cited in the discussion places Hyperliquid among the leading fee-generating DeFi protocols over the past 30 days.
• Wall Street institutions have started paying attention to 24/7 onchain derivatives, pushing for regulatory parity to enable them.

Why Yan believes retail access is structurally blocked

Yan compared blockchain markets with the traditional public-equities pipeline, where an asset typically becomes widely tradable only after it lists on an exchange. In that model, he argued, early-stage growth is often “traded” by only a small set of participants—sometimes for growth that occurs over orders of magnitude—before the general public gains access.

While he described this concentration as a byproduct of how the broader economy operates, Yan said the arrangement cannot continue indefinitely. In his view, onchain infrastructure changes the accessibility equation by enabling trading and participation in tokenized economic instruments without waiting for centralized listing cycles.

Hyperliquid’s approach: access first, revenue second

Yan said Hyperliquid’s mission is aimed at financial openness—making it easier for more people to participate in wealth-creation opportunities—while revenue is a “byproduct” of user value. In his words, Hyperliquid is “not really optimizing for revenue. That’s a byproduct of providing value to users.”

He connected the protocol’s momentum to product design choices intended to improve how trading works for participants. A central example was Hyperliquid’s use of perpetual futures contracts with no expiry dates. Yan argued that removing contract expiration reduces the number of decisions traders must manage and can also limit liquidity fragmentation—both issues that commonly affect how markets form around time-bound instruments.

In other words, Yan’s argument is not just that perpetuals are faster or more convenient, but that structural design can influence market depth and the way liquidity aggregates in DeFi.

Revenue momentum highlighted by DefiLlama

The discussion also pointed to fee generation as a measurable signal of user activity. According to DefiLlama, Hyperliquid has generated about $72 million in revenue over the past 30 days, placing it as the third-largest revenue-generating protocol in DeFi by that metric.

While the CEO framed revenue as secondary to access and usability, the reported fee figure matters because it suggests that the design trade-offs—like perpetuals without expiration—have translated into meaningful engagement. For traders, that can mean tighter market behavior when liquidity is less dispersed across multiple contract timelines. For builders and investors, it underscores that DeFi models can attract sustained flows even without mimicking traditional listing schedules.

Onchain perps as a challenge to traditional market structures

Yan’s comments fit into a larger debate about whether blockchain-based derivatives can compete structurally with parts of traditional finance—especially instruments designed for continuous participation. The article also referenced Pantera’s July assessment that perpetual futures may become a dominant instrument in global finance because of their underlying advantages, and that Hyperliquid illustrates how blockchain infrastructure could pressure incumbent market designs.

Attention from traditional finance has also grown around the regulatory question of whether onchain markets can operate on a truly comparable basis to existing platforms. The piece noted that ICE’s CEO, Jeffrey Sprecher, urged regulators to establish a “level playing field” for launching 24/7 onchain perpetual futures. Earlier reporting from Cointelegraph has discussed this push in the context of onchain derivatives expanding beyond crypto-native venues.

The regulatory and infrastructure competition is not limited to derivatives. The article pointed to a March development in which the NYSE partnered with Securitize as part of efforts to build blockchain-based stock trading infrastructure that supports 24/7 trading and settlement for Wall Street.

Taken together, the message for market participants is that “24/7” is becoming a battleground issue: not just a marketing slogan, but a structural capability that influences how liquidity, settlement, and trading strategies can work across time zones and market hours.

What to watch next

Yan’s central claim—that wealth-creation access shouldn’t depend on traditional listing gatekeeping—will likely remain tied to product and regulatory progress. Traders should watch whether onchain perpetual markets continue consolidating liquidity as more institutions and liquidity providers engage, and whether regulators move toward clearer rules that enable 24/7 crypto-native products to operate with rules that match the scale and risk of traditional derivatives.