The Hyperliquid name-check came at the request of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a small but powerful market regulator, said a person familiar with the matter, who was granted anonymity to speak freely. The agency’s staff wanted to show its commitment to bring crypto companies onshore, the person said. For Hyperliquid’s backers, the presidential shout-out could juice their bid to open the platform up to the American public.
“There’s really no dark arts to this,” said Jake Chervinsky , who leads the Hyperliquid Policy Center, an advocacy group that was set up by a Hyperliquid-linked foundation earlier this year. Chervinsky said he was surprised by the president’s shoutout and called it a sign of “the importance and the priority of the work that we’re doing and the mission to bring Hyperliquid onshore in a legal and compliant fashion.”
The episode highlights the muscle that crypto now wields in Trump ’s Washington. Hyperliquid’s backers have enlisted the help of heavyweights like the K Street lobbying shop BGR Group and the Trump-tied law firm Sullivan & Cromwell to bring the platform into the U.S.
How the CFTC will bring Hyperliquid into the regulatory fold is still an open question. The Michael Selig-led agency says it will move carefully — and Trump said last week that Selig is working to onshore Hyperliquid “in a fully compliant and legal fashion.”
Yet the push could become a new front in the clash over the future of Wall Street. Financial industry stalwarts have spent much of the last year and a half butting heads with crypto upstarts , many of whom enjoy the Trump administration’s blessing. Legacy financial exchanges will be watching whether — and how — regulators force Hyperliquid to comply with longstanding market rules.
“The incumbents are accustomed to fierce competition, they’re not afraid of that,” former CFTC Commissioner Dawn Stump told POLITICO. But, she added, “it’s only fair that the new entrants and the incumbents have a level playing field when it comes to the core regulatory tenets in the United States.”
Hyperliquid allows users to make 24/7 bets on the price of assets tied to stocks, gold and oil, a feature that helped launch the three-year-old platform into the spotlight earlier this year as one of the only oil-trading hubs that was open over the weekend when the Iran war kicked off.