I. A Dusty Photo, a Living Legend
A single resurfaced group picture is now ricocheting through crypto-Twitter.
In the back row, wearing a light sweater and an almost shy smile, stands a young Jeff Yan—today the anonymous founder of Hyperliquid, the perpetual-swap DEX that routinely out-trades Coinbase’s entire derivatives book.
The shot was taken in 2018 at the inaugural BUIDLers camp run by Binance Labs. Seven years later the apprentice has become the giant’s most stubborn competitor.

II. 2019: Too Early Is Indistinguishable From Wrong
Binance Labs’ own Medium archives list Jeff’s first start-up: Deaux, a prediction-market protocol that mixed off-chain order-matching with on-chain settlement.
In other words, exactly what Polymarket popularised half a decade later.
The tech was sound, the thesis was right, but the world wasn’t ready. Crypto was crawling out of the 2018 crater; gas fees were measured in dollars and wallet UX was a command line.
Deaux’s site is now a 404 and its Twitter ends in July 2019.
Jeff’s takeaway: being N versions ahead is meaningless if the runway is shorter than the adoption curve.

III. 2020-2022: Pivot, Timing and the FTX Void
He re-surfaced with Chameleon Trading, a prop shop that morphed into Hyperliquid.
This time he picked a market that already had product-market fit—perpetual futures—and attacked it with three non-negotiables:

1. Build our own L1 so we never queue for someone else’s block-space.

2. Zero trading fees; monetise via token value-capture, not rent.

3. Internalise liquidity through the HLP vault, turning every user into a pseudo-market-maker.

When FTX imploded in November 2022 the industry’s trust deficit became Hyperliquid’s user-acquisition funnel.
Volume went vertical, HLP vaults hit nine-figure TVL, and Binance suddenly had a shadow it couldn’t acquire.