Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan has publicly defended his platform’s role in the October 10 liquidation event that erased an estimated $10 billion in leveraged positions on the exchange, telling the Wall Street Journal in a rare extended interview that Hyperliquid was singled out for scrutiny because of its transparency rather than because of any unique failure on the platform.
The comments, published by the Wall Street Journal on June 3, mark Yan’s most direct public response to the criticism that followed the October 10 wipeout — the largest single-day liquidation cascade in crypto history.
What Yan Actually Said
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Yan made two specific claims about the event. First, the total crypto-wide liquidation damage was substantially larger than the widely reported $19 billion figure. Second, Hyperliquid drew disproportionate attention because of structural transparency advantages over its competitors.
“The real wipeout across crypto was much larger than $19 billion,” Yan said, according to the WSJ. The founder added that Hyperliquid was singled out “mainly because its liquidation data is transparent, and it stayed online while many platforms weren’t fully accessible.”
The framing is significant. Yan is not disputing that $10 billion in leveraged positions were liquidated on Hyperliquid during the cascade. He is arguing that the reason Hyperliquid became the headline number was not because the damage was worse on his platform but because the platform’s on-chain transparency made the damage visible while competitors with less transparent infrastructure obscured comparable losses.
What Happened on October 10
The October 10 liquidation was triggered by President Trump’s surprise announcement of 100% tariffs against China, which sent crypto markets into a violent selloff. According to industry reporting at the time, more than $19 billion in leveraged positions were erased across the market within hours, with Hyperliquid accounting for approximately $10 billion of that total.
The disproportionate share — roughly half of the entire industry’s liquidation total occurring on a single platform — drew significant criticism. Critics argued the concentration revealed either excessive leverage tolerance on Hyperliquid, inadequate risk controls, or a user base disproportionately exposed to volatile market events.
Yan’s interview is the first substantive on-record response to that critique. By framing the issue as one of measurement and disclosure rather than risk control, he is implicitly suggesting that the more accurate question is not how much was liquidated on Hyperliquid but how much was liquidated across the entire crypto market—including on centralized exchanges whose internal liquidation books are not visible to outside observers.
The Transparency Argument
The transparency claim is structural and worth unpacking. Hyperliquid operates as a fully on-chain decentralized exchange, meaning every position, liquidation, and price feed is observable in real time through public block explorers and third-party analytics tools like Hyperdash. Centralized exchanges, by contrast, run their order books and liquidation engines internally—outside observers see only the volumes and price impacts those exchanges choose to publish.
When the October 10 cascade hit, Hyperliquid’s liquidation data was instantly queryable. Researchers, journalists, and competing platforms could see exactly how much was wiped out, when, and across which contracts. The same level of granularity was not available for many centralized exchanges, several of which experienced access issues during the event that further reduced visibility into their internal liquidation activity.
Yan’s argument is that this asymmetry of disclosure created an asymmetry of perception. Hyperliquid’s number was concrete; competitors’ numbers were not. The result, in his telling, is that Hyperliquid absorbed reputational damage that should have been spread across the broader industry.
Wall Street Is Trading Through Hyperliquid on Weekends
The transparency argument is closely tied to a second structural feature that has made Hyperliquid a destination for traditional finance traders: the platform never closes. Hyperliquid operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on every asset class it lists — from Bitcoin and the S&P 500 to crude oil and pre-IPO synthetic perpetuals on companies like SpaceX. Traditional U.S. exchanges, by contrast, close on weekends and after-hours for most products.
That gap has turned Hyperliquid into what the Wall Street Journal characterized as Wall Street’s “weekend warriors” venue—a place where hedge fund traders, prop shop operators, and crypto-native funds can build or unwind large positions on macro news events that break outside traditional market hours.
The WSJ piece highlights Vala Zeinali, a hedge fund commodities trader who closed a crude oil derivatives position on Hyperliquid for a 243% gain after President Trump’s February airstrike announcement against Iran. The trade was executed on a Saturday, hours before traditional futures markets reopened.
“At the time, I’m, like, ‘awesome’ because normally these types of moves fade by the open on Sunday for crude,” Zeinali told the WSJ. “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.”
Other signals of institutional convergence have followed. 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 on traditional financial assets. Benchmark general partner Eric Vishria publicly shared a photo of a banker monitoring Hyperliquid’s perpetual futures on Cerebras during the AI chipmaker’s Nasdaq debut.
For the 24/7 access to function as a real Wall Street tool, the platform must remain online during exactly the high-volatility events when other venues struggle—which loops back to Yan’s transparency defense. The platforms that stayed accessible during the October 10 cascade were the ones absorbing the liquidations that less accessible platforms could neither process nor disclose in real time.
The Critic’s View
The Wall Street Journal piece also includes pushback from Benjamin Schiffrin, director of securities policy for Better Markets, a financial-reform advocacy group.
“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,” Schiffrin told the WSJ. “I think that’s a very dangerous combination.”
The Schiffrin critique cuts at a different layer than Yan’s defense. Yan is arguing about how the October 10 event was measured. Schiffrin is arguing about whether the underlying product is appropriate for retail traders in the first place—regardless of how transparently the resulting damage is reported.
Both points can be true simultaneously. Transparency in liquidation reporting does not mitigate the structural risk of high-leverage derivatives accessible to under-informed retail users. And the structural risk of high-leverage derivatives does not negate the value of transparent on-chain disclosure when those risks materialize.
The Broader Context
Yan’s comments arrive at a sensitive moment for Hyperliquid. The platform has emerged as one of the fastest-growing venues in crypto, with HYPE flipping Dogecoin to enter the top 10 cryptocurrencies at a market cap above $16 billion. The protocol generated approximately $800 million in revenue last year, despite Hyperliquid Labs operating with a team of just 11 employees.
It has also become the platform of choice for what the WSJ characterizes as Wall Street’s “weekend warriors” — traders building or unwinding large positions when traditional markets are closed. The piece highlights Vala Zeinali, a hedge fund commodities trader who closed a crude oil derivatives position on Hyperliquid for a 243% gain after President Trump’s February airstrike announcement against Iran, executed entirely on a Saturday before traditional markets reopened.
The platform’s perpetual futures on traditional assets—including WTI oil, the S&P 500 index licensed by S&P Dow Jones Indices to Trade[XYZ], and SpaceX pre-IPO synthetic perps (cumulative volume of approximately $280 million per Hyperdash)—have driven the convergence with traditional finance.
What Comes Next
Yan also outlined Hyperliquid’s forward roadmap in the WSJ interview, telling the publication that the platform’s ultimate goal is “to house all of finance.” The next product areas are prediction markets and options trading. The platform’s first outcome contracts tied to Bitcoin’s price launched in early May and have already generated millions of dollars in derivatives volume.
The prediction markets push positions Hyperliquid to compete directly with Kalshi and Polymarket—which together processed over $62 billion in cumulative notional volume in the case of Polymarket alone and which just attracted Galaxy Digital’s institutional OTC desk launch on June 2. Hyperliquid would enter the prediction markets sector with the structural advantages of an on-chain order book, sub-second finality, and an existing user base of hundreds of thousands of active traders.
Whether Yan’s transparency defense holds up depends on whether independent researchers can substantiate the claim that crypto-wide October 10 liquidations meaningfully exceeded the reported $19 billion. To date, no aggregated dataset has been published that includes the full internal liquidation activity of major centralized exchanges, which keeps Yan’s argument structurally unfalsifiable—and that, in some respects, is exactly his point.
