Hyperliquid CEO Jeff Yan lays out a US compliance plan that regulates operators, not the chain

Hyperliquid wants into the US market. It just doesn’t want to be the one holding the license. In an October 15, 2026 appearance on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, Hyperliquid Labs CEO and co-founder Jeff Yan sketched a regulatory model in which US oversight targets the financial firms that run markets on Hyperliquid’s Layer-1 blockchain. Under his proposal, the blockchain itself would sit outside exchange-level rules. The internet analogy, applied to derivatives Yan’s core argument leaned on a comparison to the internet. Nobody asks the protocols that move web traffic to register as a bank. The bank running a website on top of those protocols handles the compliance. Hyperliquid, in Yan’s framing, is the plumbing. The licensed market operators building on it would be the ones answering to regulators. Yan also pitched Hyperliquid as a partner to traditional finance rather than a rival. He described the goal as supplying core infrastructure that established firms can build on. Washington is already paying attention On August 19, 2026, President Trump said CFTC Chair Michael Selig was actively working to bring Hyperliquid into US markets in a fully legal way. Hyperliquid had been prepari...