Dialogue with Hyperliquid founder Jeff: After entering the circle, he taught himself programming and did not accept VC investment

Interview: When Shift Happens

Compiled by: Yuliya, PANews

"When Shift Happens" previously interviewed Jeff, the founder of Hyperliquid Labs. Hyperliquid is a decentralized sustainableXiaobai NavigationcontractThe trading platform is also a Layer 1 project. In the one-hour conversation, Jeff shared his entrepreneurial journey, project vision, and observations on the DeFi industry. PANews compiled the interview content, covering the project's technological innovation, operating model, user experience improvement, and other aspects.cryptocurrencyIndustry trends and challenges.

Entrepreneurial journey

Host: Jeff, can you tell us how you got into entrepreneurship?

Jeff：This story started in early 2020. At that time, I started to study some simple trading scripts, mainly focusing on centralization.cryptocurrencyexchange(CEX). Although there were already many large market makers entering the market at that time, sometimes "ignorance is bliss" is a good thing. I thought about trying to make some money.

The initial results were promising, so I decided to do it seriously. To be honest, I didn't know how to code before, but in order to achieve my goal, I taught myself programming. By 2022, we have grown into one of the largest traders on many trading venues, and probably one of the best at high-frequency market making.

Host: What motivated you to move from successful quantitative trading to creating Hyperliquid?

Jeff: There are two main reasons:

First, we started to pay attention to the DeFi field and found many interesting protocol designs. There is an interesting phenomenon in DeFi: many people who don’t understand finance are trying to build financial systems, which in turn brings many opportunities for quantitative strategies.

Secondly, the collapse of FTX was an important turning point. This incident made people realize that they cannot blindly trust centralizedexchangeThis wasn’t some abstract theoretical discussion, this was real money lost. For us, this was an important revelation — the world was finally ready for real DeFi.

Product Concept

Host: Can you explain in layman's terms what Hyperliquid does?

Jeff: From the perspective of human history, society has been moving towards individualism. Every progress towards individualism, human rights, etc., is positive in terms of results, whether measured by GDP or happiness.

Hyperliquid is continuing to push this direction: from the initial need to use weapons to protect your farm, to later being able to deposit money in the bank, to the current Hyperliquid - you can fully control your funds through encryption technology.

Specifically, we are building a system that:

• Meet all users' expectations for Web2 finance

• Provide low fees

• Support fast transfer

• Realize instant settlement

• Providing liquidity comparable to centralized exchanges

• Allows trustless integration with other applications

• Supporting lending with collateral

• Allow users to use their funds freely

Financing Strategy

Moderator: Why did you choose not to accept any investment? This is rare in the industry.

Jeff：这确实不是传统意义上的商业项目。这可能是 DeFi 甚至整个加密货币领域第一次这样做，但如果看看亚马逊的例子，贝佐斯在早期也很长时间没有从中获利。

We do this for several reasons:

• The cryptocurrency industry is too focused on short-term gains

• If you want to create a new financial method, letting VC hold 50%'s network share in the early stage will be a permanent stain

• Our team's ability to not rely on external financing allowed us to stick to this decision

Industry perspective

Host: Do you have any criticisms of the current cryptocurrency industry?

Jeff: To be honest, the most "successful" products in the industry are often fraudulentToken. Few projects truly follow the user-first model because acquiring real users is indeed difficult. Most projects take shortcuts: first get investment from large market makers, and then attract transactions through incentive programs. This model is unsustainable in the long run.

Host: What do you think of the current state of the cryptocurrency industry?

Jeff: Although many people see cryptocurrency as a failed experiment, I believe it is humanity’s only hope to reinvent the financial system. Finance is one of the greatest inventions of mankind, it allows us to:

• Representing value in a more abstract way

• Achieving better capital allocation

• Establishing a complete economic system

Without these, all other progress may not be possible. Human society may still remain in the farming or even gathering and hunting stage.

Software is supposed to revolutionize finance, but the reality is that finance (and possibly healthcare) is one of the few large industries that is not experiencing substantial innovation.

Technological innovation

Host: Can you explain the concept of Builder Codes in detail?

Jeff: This is a simple but powerful concept. It allows anyone to build financial applications on top of Hyperliquid, such as:

• Innovative mobilewallet

• Social Trading Platform

• Regional Exchanges

• Fiat currency deposit channel

Developers can:

• Build your own exchange business

• Use our neutral backend

• Charge fees in a way that users trust

• Earn revenue directly at the protocol level, rather than relying on private agreements with centralized exchanges

This will open up a whole new way to build businesses in DeFi, making specialization possible. People who understand the needs of users in a specific region can focus on serving those users, while Hyperliquid provides support in the background.

Future Outlook

Host: How do you view the long-term development of the project?

Jeff: I like to use Go and chess as an analogy. You don't need to be completely sure where you're going to end up, but make sure each step is in the right direction. It's important to take each step well, rather than being overly obsessed with the distant end. That's why we focus more on infrastructure construction rather than short-term market performance.

Host: What is Hyperliquid’s long-term vision?

Jeff：Our core philosophy is:

• Cryptocurrency will change the way finance works

• Traditional finance will eventually migrate to cryptocurrency

• Hyperliquid will become the basic platform for these financial activities

The specific implementation path is difficult to predict, but that is not the most important thing. We focus on building infrastructure that will play an important role no matter how the future develops:

• Builder Codes System

• EVM integrated with native components on the chain

• Sustainable high-quality liquidity

These are all difficult but necessary infrastructures to get right, and I believe they will be essential building blocks no matter how cryptocurrencies evolve in 10 years.

The article comes from the Internet:Dialogue with Hyperliquid founder Jeff: After entering the circle, he taught himself programming and did not accept VC investment

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