Decentralized Derivatives Platform Hyperliquid Announces Establishment of Policy Center in the U.S.
Decentralized derivatives platform Hyperliquid has announced the establishment of the Hyperliquid Policy Center (HPC) in the U.S., funded by the Hyper Foundation with a donation of approximately 1 million HYPE tokens, valued at nearly $30 million. HPC is positioned as an independent 501(c)(4) policy and research organization focused on DeFi. Jake Chervinsky, a well-known crypto lawyer, will serve as CEO, with team members including policy advisors from traditional large law firms and crypto funds. The center will communicate directly with Congress and regulatory agencies in Washington to advocate for a clear regulatory path for on-chain perpetual contracts and decentralized market infrastructure.
According to official sources and several English media outlets, HPC's core mission is to advocate for legal clarity and protection for U.S. users and developers, focusing on on-chain perpetual contracts, which are currently mainly traded in offshore markets and are almost impossible to offer to retail investors in compliance with U.S. regulations. The center believes that existing U.S. laws heavily rely on centralized intermediary models, resulting in a lack of registration or exemption frameworks for decentralized perpetual contracts, on-chain spot trading, prediction markets, and tokenized securities, forcing U.S. users to turn to offshore platforms or be completely excluded. HPC plans to promote the formation of a new generation of derivatives regulatory framework that reflects on-chain transparency and self-custody advantages through technical research, rule drafts, and hearing briefs.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
HPC's establishment marks a proactive approach for on-chain perpetual contracts to move from being "offshore products in a regulatory gray area" to the core of U.S. regulation, rather than continuing to operate in an "offshore circumvention" model. Hyperliquid, primarily focused on high-frequency, 24/7 on-chain perpetual contracts, has chosen to set up a policy center in Washington, acknowledging a reality: without changing the centralized intermediary-based derivatives regulatory paradigm, U.S. retail investors will remain excluded from this market structure, and mainstream liquidity and innovation will continue to flow abroad.
From a regulatory structure perspective, the U.S. futures and derivatives framework is designed for the exchange + clearinghouse + member brokerage model of the industrial era, with regulatory targets being "licensed intermediaries" rather than "self-executing protocols." On-chain perpetual contracts compress matching, settlement, and clearing into smart contracts, allowing users to self-custody assets and interact directly with contracts, thereby weakening or eliminating the roles of traditional brokers, clearinghouses, and custodians. Under this structure, if regulation insists on the premise of "finding a penalizable centralized entity," it will inevitably exclude most truly decentralized products from legitimate pathways, creating a systemic stratification where "U.S. users are locked onshore while market liquidity flows offshore."
HPC's strategy attempts to shift regulation from "targeting platform operators" to "targeting the protocols and market structures themselves," designing new registration or exemption pathways for on-chain perpetual contracts, on-chain spot trading, prediction markets, and tokenized securities—similar to a "protocol-level exchange license," rather than forcibly applying traditional licensing templates. The underlying judgment is that blockchain-native market infrastructure (settlement transparency, margin rules, funding rate mechanisms) may not be inferior to traditional OTC derivatives in terms of market integrity and risk control; the issue lies in the legal framework remaining in the "simulation era."
In the long term, on-chain perpetual contracts dominate global crypto trading volume, while U.S. retail and domestic developers are almost entirely excluded from this structure, resulting in a typical phenomenon of "technological and liquidity offshoring." Hyperliquid's approach of using token value to support the policy organization indicates that the DeFi ecosystem is beginning to convert part of its seigniorage and trading income into "institutional chips," directly participating in the competition for rule-making—this is different from the early internet's passive acceptance of regulation and is closer to the traditional financial industry's model of shaping regulatory details through lobbying and policy think tanks. Once on-chain derivatives gain a compliant pathway within the U.S., the reshaping will not just be the fate of a single platform, but the power and profit distribution pattern among the global derivatives market in the triad of "centralized exchanges—offshore DeFi—compliant on-chain infrastructure."