Hyperliquid has generated more than $ 1 billion in annualized income with only 11 employees. How do they pull it up?
Summary
- Hyperliquid earns most of its income from trading costs on its Perps grant, with cumulative costs and income that rise in almost perfect synchronization.
- The company operates Lean, with about half of its 11-person team aimed at Engineering, making $ 10 billion in daily volume possible.
- Founder Jeff Yan rejected Durf -Capital to keep the protocol himself financed, whereby the emphasis places on product development, community and disciplined hiring of elitentalent from top institutions and trading companies.
Hyperliquid (hype), the derivatives DEX built on his own Layer-1 blockchain, has become the most productive company in the world through income per employee. With only 11 full -time employees, the platform generates more than $ 1 billion in income from an annual basis, which translates into more than $ 102 million per employee, who surpass Tether, Onlyfans and Nvidia.
Hyperliquid is now the company that generates the most income per employee in the world, even surpassing Tether.
Hyperliquid team that survives everyone. pic.twitter.com/jlippxl7f5
– Hypeconomist (@thehyponomist) August 19, 2025
For context, Hyperliquid generates income mainly through trading costs on its decentralized perpetual exchange. According to Defillama data, Hyperliquid has generated $ 610 million in cumulative costs (total reimbursements paid by users since the protocol was launched), of which ~ 97% are constructed as protocol income (~ $ 589 million).
The growth process has been remarkably consistent. Since the beginning of 2025, cumulative costs and income have almost increased in Lockstep. Halfway through August the cumulative costs reached $ 481.6 million, with a turnover close to $ 460.9 million a gap of less than 5%, which shows how neat trading activity translates into protocol income.
Source: Defillama
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How can 11-person hyperliquid team do it?
How Hyperliquid succeeds in achieving this with only 11 employees can amount to the founder’s unconventional philosophy. Jeff Yan deliberately rejected venture capital and claimed that VCs often promote an illusion of progress by fascinating blasting without delivering real use. Instead, the team held the protocol itself financed and focused entirely on product and community.
Hyperliquid has enabled that lean approach to scale with extraordinary efficiency. About half of the staff are engineers who send upgrades such as HLP3 while you process $ 10 billion in daily trade volume. Yan says that the priority is to maintain integrity and discipline within the small team, and notes that “hiring the wrong person is much worse than hiring no one.”
Yan, a former co-founder of the centralized Exchange Chameleon Trading, launched Hyperliquid Labs alongside Iliensinc, his classmate of Harvard. The group has since attracted a small but elite raster of talent with backgrounds at Caltech, MIT, Citadel and Hudson River Trading.
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