Hyperliquid: how an 11-person crypto DEX generates over $1 billion a year

Hyperliquid has generated over $1 billion in annualized revenue with just 11 employees. How do they pull it off?

Summary

• Hyperliquid earns the majority of its revenue from trading fees on its perps exchange, with cumulative fees and revenue rising in near-perfect sync.
• The firm operates lean, with roughly half of its 11-person team focused on engineering, enabling $10B in daily volume.
• Founder Jeff Yan rejected venture capital to keep the protocol self-funded, emphasizing product development, community, and disciplined hiring of elite talent from top institutions and trading firms.

Hyperliquid (HYPE), the derivatives DEX built on its own Layer-1 blockchain, has become the most productive company in the world by revenue per employee. With just 11 full-time staff, the platform is generating more than $1 billion in annualized revenue, translating to over $102 million per employee, surpassing Tether, OnlyFans, and Nvidia.

For context, Hyperliquid generates revenue primarily through trading fees on its decentralized perpetuals exchange. According to data from DefiLlama, Hyperliquid has generated $610M in cumulative fees (total fees paid by users since the protocol was launched), ~97% of which accrued as protocol revenue (~$589M).

The growth trajectory has been remarkably consistent. Since the start of 2025, cumulative fees and revenue have climbed almost in lockstep. By mid-August, cumulative fees reached $481.6 million, with revenue close behind at $460.9 million — a gap of less than 5%, showing how cleanly trading activity translates into protocol income.

Source: DefiLlama## How can 11-person Hyperliquid team pull it off?

How Hyperliquid manages to pull this off with just 11 employees may come down to its founder’s unconventional philosophy. Jeff Yan deliberately rejected venture capital, arguing that VCs often foster an illusion of progress by bloating valuations without delivering real utility. Instead, the team kept the protocol self-funded, focusing entirely on product and community.

That lean approach has allowed Hyperliquid to scale with extraordinary efficiency. Roughly half of the staff are engineers, shipping upgrades like HLP3 while processing $10 billion in daily trading volume. Yan says the priority is maintaining integrity and discipline within the small team, noting that “hiring the wrong person is much worse than not hiring anyone at all.”

Yan, a former co-founder of the centralized exchange Chameleon Trading, launched Hyperliquid Labs alongside Iliensinc, his Harvard classmate. The group has since attracted a small but elite roster of talent with backgrounds at Caltech, MIT, Citadel, and Hudson River Trading.