Immy Dorse 
So, here’s a story that makes you stop and think. A crypto exchange, Hyperliquid, is apparently pulling in over a billion dollars in annualized revenue. That’s a staggering number on its own. But the real kicker? They’re doing it with a team of just eleven people.
It feels almost too lean to be real. I mean, how do you even manage that kind of volume with a team you could fit in a single minivan? The numbers, according to data from places like DefiLlama, seem to back it up though. They’ve racked up hundreds of millions in cumulative fees, and nearly all of that—something like 97%—goes straight to the protocol as revenue. The growth lines for fees and revenue are almost on top of each other, which is… unusual, to say the least. It suggests a very direct, very efficient model.
A Founder’s Unconventional Blueprint
A lot of this seems to stem from the founder, Jeff Yan. His approach is pretty counter to the standard Silicon Valley playbook. He actively turned away venture capital. The common thinking is that VC money fuels growth, but Yan argued it often just inflates valuations without building anything truly useful. It creates a kind of theater of progress. Instead, he kept things self-funded. The focus had to be entirely on the product itself and the community using it, not on impressing investors for the next funding round.
That’s a difficult discipline to maintain. It means every single hire is critical. Yan has been quoted saying that bringing on the wrong person is far more damaging than simply having an open position. It can poison a small culture fast. So they’ve moved slowly, picking up talent from top-tier places—think Citadel, or trading firms like Hudson River Trading, along with folks from MIT and Caltech. It’s a small, but incredibly focused, group.
The Mechanics of a Lean Machine
With about half of those eleven people dedicated to engineering, the output is pretty intense. They’re building on their own custom Layer-1 blockchain and routinely processing around ten billion dollars in daily trading volume. They push out major upgrades while handling that load. It’s a testament to building something that’s fundamentally sound from the ground up, rather than trying to scale a messy operation with sheer manpower.
Perhaps that’s the real lesson here. In a world that often equates headcount with success, Hyperliquid is a stark reminder that sometimes, less really is more. It’s not about how many people you have; it’s about what they’re building and how well they work together. They’re not chasing hype—they’re just building something that clearly works, and works exceptionally well. And the market is responding.
