Hyperliquid Launches Policy Center With $29 Million Backing to Advocate for DeFi in DC

There’s a new heavyweight fighting for the future of decentralized finance on Capitol Hill.

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The Hyperliquid Policy Center, or HPC, announced its debut on Wednesday, positioning itself as a resource for U.S. policymakers on DeFi and derivatives like perpetual futures.

In a press release, founder and CEO Jake Chervinsky said that blockchains are poised to become the bedrock of the financial system, and the U.S. must choose between adopting new rules to support the technology or to “wait and watch as other nations seize the opportunity.”

Chervinsky previously served as chief legal officer at venture capital firm Variant, which has invested in DeFi staples like Uniswap and Morpho. Prior to that, Chervinsky worked at the Blockchain Association, a nonprofit trade association based in Washington, D.C.

The Hyper Foundation, which supports Hyperliquid, has contributed 1,000,000 HYPE to fund the center’s initial operations. That sum was worth around $29 million on Wednesday, with the exchange’s native token rising 22% over the past month, according to CoinGecko. 

The development underscores how Hyperliquid has evolved since the decentralized exchange specializing in perpetual futures debuted three years ago. Although the project was once viewed as a scrappy contender in the DeFi space built around a tight-knit community, some members are setting their sights on policy discussions among the country’s political elite.

That includes Hyperliquid co-founder and CEO Jeff Yan, who said on X that the decentralized nature of exchange’s decentralized development “meant that Hyperliquid lacked a unified voice in important policy discussions until now.”

Yan acknowledged that the organization’s debut comes at a critical time, with a market structure bill stalled in the Senate that has the potential to establish new rules for DeFi.

In October, Chervinsky pushed back against a proposal from Senate Democrats that would require the websites that people use to access DeFi protocols, also known as front ends, to register with regulators and perform Know Your Customer checks. Chervinsky claimed that the Treasury Department could ban DeFi projects under the rules.

“This proposal is less a regulatory framework and more an unprecedented, unconstitutional government takeover of an entire industry,” he said on X. “All U.S. DeFi devs [would] go offshore or have their projects die at home.”

The HPC doesn’t bill itself as just another crypto lobby like the Blockchain Association, Coin Center, or the Chamber of Digital Commerce, which was established in 2014

HPC’s mandate is specifically focused on advancing “decentralized market infrastructure,” with an emphasis on perps—where the Hyperliquid blockchain has built its dominant market share.

Unlike traditional futures, perps don’t have an expiration date, allowing a trader to hold positions indefinitely. They use periodic payments between long and short traders to keep the derivative’s price pegged to an asset’s spot price, also known as a funding rate.

Hyperliquid was once known as a go-to platform for trading digital assets, including meme coins, on leverage. However, the exchange has expanded into real-world assets in recent months, including precious metals like gold and silver.

Under former Acting CFTC Chair Caroline Pham, the regulator greenlit Bitnomial, allowing the exchange’s customers to access spot crypto trading alongside perps and options. And there’s a chance that perps could continue to proliferate under her successor, Michael Selig.

On a recent episode of Bloomberg’s “Odd Lots” podcast, Selig was asked by co-host Joe Weisenthal whether perpetual futures could become more commonplace in traditional finance moving forward. As an example, Weisenthal floated perps for oil.

“If there’s demand for these products, it’s definitely something that we’ll consider,” Selig said. “It’s been too long that this stuff is only developed offshore, and we really want to bring it back with clear rules of the road.”