How a Harvard grad helped make Hyperliquid the biggest new player in crypto—with just 11 people and no venture funding

The alarm jolted Jeff Yan awake at around 5:00 a.m. It was a ringtone designed to—among other scenarios—blare out when something abnormal occurs on Hyperliquid, the decentralized crypto exchange he had cofounded. And on this morning in early October, things were very abnormal indeed. 

That day, crypto traders saw more than $19 billion in leveraged positions—or bets where investors wager more capital than they have on hand—evaporate after President Donald Trump threatened China with another round of tariffs, according to data from the crypto analytics site CoinGlass. “I’m just looking at it and praying that it’s good,” Yan said, referring to his exchange’s systems. Within one hour, using his “every brain cell” to analyze the data, he was confident that the platform had worked as intended—surviving a stress test where thousands of traders lost money and others who were shorting the market cashed in. 

In coming weeks, the crypto industry would come to refer to the wipeout of Oct. 10 as a flash crash, one that was the largest liquidation event ever tracked by CoinGlass and an episode whose fallout still reverberates throughout the industry two months later. It was also one of the...