Hyperliquid's founder tells Washington to regulate the firms that run markets on his chain, not the chain itself

The founder of Hyperliquid, the decentralized derivatives exchange, has set out how he thinks Washington should handle it. In an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday, Jeff Yan said US oversight should fall on the financial firms that launch and run markets on Hyperliquid, which he calls deployers, and not on the blockchain underneath. He argued that "the deployers are the ones that exercise these controls," according to CoinDesk's account of the interview. He compared the model to companies that use internet infrastructure and are regulated for what they do with it.

The pitch matters because the line between a trading venue and the software it runs on is one of the hardest questions in US crypto policy, and the CLARITY Act, the market structure bill meant to settle it, remains stalled in the Senate, The Block reported this week. Hyperliquid's own perpetual futures market is closed to US customers. But US access is arriving through other doors: CoinDesk reported that Payward, the parent of Kraken, plans to offer US investors derivatives built on Hyperliquid's technology through a regulated exchange, which would put a federally overseen operator in the middle.

Yan's comments came on the same day Ripple Prime began offering institutional swaps that track markets listed on Hyperliquid.