Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan said U.S. regulatory oversight should apply to the financial firms using his blockchain rather than to the underlying network itself, telling Bloomberg that supervision belongs with the companies that deploy and control trading markets.

In a Thursday interview, Yan said companies operating trading markets on Hyperliquid should be responsible for meeting regulatory requirements, drawing a comparison to financial firms that rely on internet infrastructure. "The regulation sits at the layer where there are controls, and indeed the deployers are the ones that exercise these controls," Yan said.

Under his proposal, Wall Street firms could build regulated trading businesses on Hyperliquid without requiring the blockchain itself to register as an exchange. Rather than treating the network as a regulated venue, the approach would place compliance obligations on the individual firms that deploy markets on it. How U.S. regulators draw that line between network and operator could shape whether blockchain-based trading venues can operate inside the country's federal market framework.

Hyperliquid is best known for its eponymous perpetual futures trading platform — a venue for derivatives contracts with no expiration date — which remains closed to U.S. customers. Even so, Kraken's parent company, Payward, has said it plans to offer derivatives to U.S. investors using Hyperliquid's technology through a regulated exchange. For Hyperliquid, the arrangement would mean adding an operator regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the top U.S. derivatives watchdog, even as its perpetual futures market stays unavailable to American customers.

Yan said the technology is intended to complement traditional market infrastructure rather than replace it. "We're not trying to displace anything," he said. "In fact, I think the technology can benefit everyone who currently operates markets in a more traditional setting."

His comments came after President Donald Trump said in August that the CFTC was working to bring Hyperliquid into the U.S. under federal regulations. Hyperliquid's HYPE token rose 11% following those remarks, according to CoinDesk reporting at the time. The CFTC outreach Trump described and Payward's planned regulated offering are the concrete threads to watch as U.S. oversight of the platform takes shape.