By Vicky Ge Huang
When Vala Zeinali's phone lit up on a Saturday in February, bringing news that President Trump had announced airstrikes against Iran, the hedge-fund commodities trader calmly turned to Hyperliquid.
Hyperliquid, a decentralized crypto platform, is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The exchange has emerged this year as a go-to spot for Wall Street's weekend warriors like Zeinali -- a place they can build or unload big positions hours or even days before the opening bell rings.
Zeinali had already bet four figures on oil derivatives in early 2026, before Trump's airstrike announcement, in anticipation of a Middle East conflict. When the news sent crude-oil prices rocketing, he logged on to Hyperliquid and closed his position to lock in a massive 243% gain.
"At the time, I'm, like, 'awesome' because normally these types of moves fade by the open on Sunday for crude," said Zeinali. "And so at the time I'm, like, 'OK, I can actually get out of my position' and so I did. I got out of most of it."
A growing army of both traditional and crypto traders is flocking to the platform to wager on just about anything, from bitcoin and the S&P 500 to crude oil and pre-IPO giants like SpaceX. Their market of choice is perpetual futures, or derivative contracts that never expire and allow users to trade at any time and with massive leverage, with their bets amplified by the paper value of their position.
Hyperliquid was founded three years ago by Jeff Yan, a former quant trader at high-frequency trading firm Hudson River Trading. Yan has said that he drew inspiration from the catastrophic collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX exchange. The episode made him realize that the crypto market needed a high-performance trading platform where users -- rather than the exchange -- safeguard their own assets.
"The main thing was that self-custody is not just some academic concept, but rather some essential feature that users will demand," said Yan in an interview. "I'm surprised that users don't demand it more after FTX, but it's as simple as having control of your money."
Hyperliquid Labs, the developers behind the exchange and blockchain, has 11 employees. The blockchain and exchange, which share the Hyperliquid name, generated about $800 million in total revenue last year, according to Blockworks Research. Launched in late 2024, the blockchain's native token "HYPE" has gained more than 100% in the past year and commands a market cap of about $16 billion, according to CoinGecko.
Hyperliquid's rapid ascent highlights the convergence between crypto and traditional finance. The platform's perpetual futures, especially those tied to traditional assets such as stocks and commodities, are capturing Wall Street's attention.
Recently, Eric Vishria, a general partner at venture-capital firm Benchmark, shared on X a photo of a banker monitoring the price of perpetual futures tied to Cerebras, on the day of the AI chipmaker's official stock-market debut on the Nasdaq. Earlier this year, S&P Dow Jones Indices licensed the S&P 500 index to Trade[XYZ], the company that created some of Hyperliquid's most popular perpetual futures contracts linked to traditional financial assets.
Some traders have been drawn to Hyperliquid for the contracts it offers on some of the most anticipated public-market debuts. The cumulative trading volume of perpetual futures tied to SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket company that is slated to go public later this year, on Hyperliquid stood at around $280 million, according to Hyperdash, a data-analytics platform for Hyperliquid.
While Hyperliquid remains inaccessible to U.S. residents, that might soon change. On Friday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission laid out a framework for registered U.S. platforms to launch perpetual futures. The agency also approved the listing of a bitcoin perpetual futures contract at Kalshi, and allowed Coinbase's U.S. customers to access its global perpetuals through an affiliate.
Perpetual futures are also high-leverage and high-risk products that can dramatically amplify traders' gains -- or expose them to devastating losses. For example, Trump's surprise announcement of 100% tariffs against China on Oct. 10 triggered a violent selloff that erased more than $19 billion in leveraged positions, including $10 billion on Hyperliquid.
Yan said that the real wipeout across crypto was much larger than $19 billion, and that Hyperliquid was singled out mainly because its liquidation data is transparent, and it stayed online while many platforms weren't fully accessible.
"Perpetual futures are a complex financial product that is hard for even sophisticated financial professionals to necessarily understand, and I don't believe that the risks of perpetual futures are being adequately disclosed to retail investors," said Benjamin Schiffrin, director of securities policy for Better Markets, a group that pushes for tighter financial regulation. "I think that's a very dangerous combination."
None of that has stopped traders in the U.S. and other restricted regions from using virtual private networks to access the platform. Traders say they are drawn to the fact that Hyperliquid doesn't require identity verification or standard background checks, a contrast to the strict identity rules enforced by traditional brokerages and stock exchanges.
Hyperliquid said in its terms of use that it blocks U.S. traders and bars any circumvention of this restriction, including by VPNs.
What also keeps traders hooked is Hyperliquid's sleek, user-friendly interface, its wide selection of tradable assets and a strong sense of community that binds its user base together.
Pascal Lin, a trader based in Geneva, Switzerland, said he discovered Hyperliquid in late 2023 and quickly became a power user. In those early days, he was struck by how easily he could hop into the platform's Discord channel and give feedback directly to Yan and other Hyperliquid team members.
"It's literally like I'm building the product myself," said Lin, who also works as the head of trading for his own firm, ARES Capital Management.
On Hyperliquid, Lin primarily trades the HYPE token, the native token of the Hyperliquid blockchain, but also dabbles in oil-linked perpetual futures. It was there that he successfully caught a major upswing in oil, riding the price from roughly $67 a barrel to nearly $100 a barrel.
Lin said he became so consumed by Hyperliquid that he set up real-time price alerts for the HYPE token on his Apple watch, a "toxic" habit that he doesn't recommend to fellow traders.
"In one click, I have access to Hyperliquid," he said. "Whenever I wake up in the middle of the night, in one click I can check the HYPE price."
Lin isn't the only trader obsessed with Hyperliquid and its token. Much of Hyperliquid's appeal stems from the culture of its expansive ecosystem, championed by both individual traders and the developers building around the blockchain.
On X, Hyperliquid traders playfully end almost every post with the word "Hyperliquid," regardless of the topic. Many adopt the platform's mascot, a smiling, green-jacketed cat named "Hypurr," as their social-media avatars. Beyond the memes, developers actively build trader-friendly tools and data trackers around the blockchain.
"I think the reason why there's such a big community around it is because it's trying to fulfill crypto's original vision of a meritocratic, permissionless system," said Lawrence Wu, co-founder of Hyperdash. "It's very idealistic."
Yan said Hyperliquid's ultimate goal is to house all of finance. Next on the road map is a push into prediction markets and options trading. Its first outcome contracts, which track bitcoin's price, have already generated millions of dollars in derivatives volume since they rolled out in early May.
Write to Vicky Ge Huang at vicky.huang@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 02, 2026 10:00 ET (14:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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