Private markets are enormous, yet most investors cannot reach them—a gap thatliquid co-founder Jeff Yan believes should be closed on-chain. Private markets—a category that typically spans private equity, private credit, and other assets generally reserved for institutional and accredited investors—have long sat beyond the reach of most retail participants. Yan laid out that vision at Korea Blockchain Week 2026 in Seoul, telling attendees that "huge opportunities" exist in asset classes that have historically been locked behind institutional gates.

Yan framed the opportunity in terms of access rather than profit alone. Wealth and investment opportunities have long been gate-kept, he argued, and building stronger on-chain market infrastructure for restricted assets is "socially beneficial." The framing taps into a long-running industry debate over whether public blockchains can widen participation in markets that traditionally required institutional status to enter.

The KBW 2026 Stage

Korea Blockchain Week 2026 ran from September 29 to October 1 at the Walkerhill Hotels & Resorts in Seoul, with Arthur Hayes and Tom Lee among the featured speakers. The event is one of Asia's largest annual blockchain gatherings, drawing industry leaders and investors to Seoul each year. Hyperliquid hosted its own dedicated seminar on September 28, one day before the main conference kicked off, aimed specifically at Korean financial institutions exploring on-chain trading—a focus that places institutional participation at the center of the platform's private-markets pitch.

HIP-3 and the Permissionless Market Thesis

The technical backbone of Yan's private markets vision is HIP-3, a Hyperliquid initiative—HIP stands for Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal—that allows independent teams to create their own perpetual markets on the platform without needing permission from the core team. That permissionless design contrasts with traditional exchanges, where market creation is controlled by a central operator. HIP-3 has already driven meaningful trading volume in non-crypto assets, an early signal of interest in on-chain exposure beyond crypto-native instruments. Bringing traditional assets on-chain has become a broader industry focus, with trading platforms competing to offer exposure to instruments once confined to traditional finance.

The Bootstrapped Advantage

Yan built the platform drawing on his background in quantitative trading, and the team funded operations internally. Hyperliquid, which operates with a team of roughly 11 people, was built without a single dollar of venture capital funding. Rather than selling tokens to VCs at a discount, the project ran a major airdrop of its HYPE token in late 2024, distributing tokens directly to users—a route that diverged from the venture-backed playbook followed by many crypto projects.

That lean structure has not constrained scale. Hyperliquid has become one of the highest-volume perpetuals platforms in crypto, and Yan's argument is that the same infrastructure should extend to asset classes that remain off-limits to most investors today. How HIP-3 markets in non-crypto assets develop from here, and whether the Korean financial institutions Hyperliquid courted at KBW move from exploring on-chain trading to participating in it, will offer a measure of how far the private-markets thesis reaches.