HYPE: How DeFi Built the Everything Market

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On this page: What HYPE is about · What you will learn · Contents · Free excerpts · Why Ryan wrote it · Disclosure · FAQ

What is HYPE about?

HYPE is Ryan Bethencourt’s history of decentralized finance, from The DAO’s 2016 hack and Uniswap’s first pools to DeFi Summer, the Terra collapse, Hyperliquid and the tokenized stocks of 2026. It asks who got rich and who got hurt, and argues that the institutions adopted DeFi’s plumbing while discarding its ideology.

Title	HYPE: How DeFi Built the Everything Market
Author	Ryan Bethencourt
Series	Book Six of The Decentralized Revolution Series, after ZERO, TAO, LIGHT, PUNKS and DOGE
Edition	First edition, October 2026
Formats	Paperback (ISBN 9798165024757; ASIN B0HP7CNYTN) and Kindle ebook (ASIN B0HG6F8WY1)
Years covered	2015 to 2026
Chains covered	Ethereum, Solana, Terra, Arbitrum and Hyperliquid’s own chain
Structure	Author’s Note, Prologue, 24 chapters in five parts, Epilogue, two appendices (a glossary and a ledger of crashes), twelve Key Concept boxes and a Sources section
Current as of	October 2026
License	CC BY-SA 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0)
AI disclosure	Co-written with AI, as the book’s Author’s Note discloses

The book description

On November 2, 2018, at a developer conference in Prague, a laid-off mechanical engineer named Hayden Adams deployed an exchange with no order book, no company in the middle of the trade, and about $30,000 of liquidity. By October 2026 Uniswap had handled close to $4 trillion of trades, and the idea behind it, finance as open code that anyone can use, had drawn in BlackRock, Robinhood, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, and a Harvard-trained market maker named Jeff Yan.

HYPE is the story of decentralized finance: The DAO hack, MakerDAO and Black Thursday, the yield farms and vampire attacks of DeFi Summer, the Curve Wars, the week Terra unwound, the lenders that fell after it, and the sanctions on Tornado Cash’s code. Then it follows Yan’s Hyperliquid, an exchange with no outside investors that gave its token to its traders and kept running through the largest liquidation day on record, and the stablecoin law, tokenized funds and after-hours stocks that brought Wall Street onto public chains.

Its argument: the institutions adopted the plumbing and discarded the ideology.

Book Six of The Decentralized Revolution Series. Co-written with AI. Current as of October 2026.

What you will learn

HYPE is a narrative history, and it also explains how the machinery works. Among other things, you will learn:

• How an automated market maker prices a trade with one formula, Uniswap’s x times y equals k, with no order book and no company between buyer and seller, and why each trade shifts the price (Chapter Three).
• How a perpetual future works, a contract that never expires and is held near the market price by funding payments, and how forced closings become a liquidation waterfall, as on October 10, 2025, when more than $10 billion of positions were liquidated on Hyperliquid alone, by CoinGlass’s figures (Chapters Thirteen and Nineteen).
• How Hyperliquid’s genesis was split: 310 million HYPE, 31 percent of the supply, was allocated to users, while the chain’s own record shows about 270.9 million credited to 94,019 addresses on November 29, 2024 (Chapter Seventeen).
• Whether Hyperliquid is decentralized: what its validators did when they voted to delist the JELLY market in March 2025, and who can still halt a market (Chapter Eighteen).
• What a tokenized stock gives its holder, from a broker’s price tracker, to a token that some holders can redeem for a real share, to the share itself, and why, as of October 2026, the SEC’s September 2026 exemption leaves synthetic tokens out (Chapters Twenty-One and Twenty-Two).
• What Terra’s seven days in May 2022 did: how UST lost its dollar peg, how swaps into LUNA pushed its supply from under a billion tokens to about 5.89 trillion between May 11 and May 13, by an NBER study’s count, and why estimates of the value lost run from about $40 billion to $50 billion (Chapters Nine and Ten).

Who this DeFi history book is for

• Readers of The Decentralized Revolution Series, who will meet Tornado Cash from ZERO, Bittensor’s subnet pools from TAO, Serum and FTX from LIGHT and BONK from DOGE again, this time from the money’s side.
• Traders and builders who want the record of how DeFi’s machinery was built and how it broke, rather than a how-to or a trading system.
• Students, journalists and researchers who need dated, sourced figures they can quote under an open license.
• Anyone who has asked whether DeFi is dead, or whether Wall Street’s arrival means it won.

No technical background is needed. Twelve Key Concept boxes explain the mechanics, and Appendix I is a glossary. HYPE is not a trading guide: it makes no price predictions and no buy or sell calls.

What’s inside: the table of contents

HYPE opens with an Author’s Note and a Prologue, runs through twenty-four chapters in five parts, and closes with an Epilogue, two appendices and a Sources section. The line under each part is a summary written for this page.

Prologue. Swaps of About a Hundred Dollars

Part I: The Ancestors (2015 to 2020)

The DAO and its hack, Maker’s Dai, Uniswap’s first pools, and the attacks and the March 2020 crash that put them to the test.

• Chapter 1. Unstoppable Code
• Chapter 2. A Dollar No Bank Issued
• Chapter 3. Unipeg
• Chapter 4. Black Thursday

Part II: DeFi Summer (2020 to 2022)

Compound’s token rewards, the yield farmers, Yearn, SushiSwap’s raid on Uniswap’s liquidity, the Curve Wars, and the backers behind DeFi on Solana and Terra.

• Chapter 5. Paid to Borrow
• Chapter 6. I Test in Prod
• Chapter 7. The Vampire and the Airdrop
• Chapter 8. The Curve Wars
• Chapter 9. Two Patrons

Part III: The Reckoning (2022 to 2023)

Terra’s collapse, the lenders, funds and exchange that fell after it, the Tornado Cash sanctions, the derivatives exchanges that survived, and the trading firm Jeff Yan wound down to build a chain.

• Chapter 10. Seven Days in May
• Chapter 11. Dominoes
• Chapter 12. Sanctioned Code
• Chapter 13. The Survivors
• Chapter 14. Chameleon

Part IV: The Exchange With No Investors (2023 to 2025)

Solana’s markets rebuilt after FTX, then Hyperliquid’s on-chain order book, its genesis airdrop, the JELLY vote and October 10, 2025.

• Chapter 15. The Chain That Came Back
• Chapter 16. An Order Book on the Chain
• Chapter 17. Genesis
• Chapter 18. The Machine and the Vote
• Chapter 19. October 10

Part V: Wall Street Without Walls (2025 to 2026)

The federal stablecoin law, BlackRock’s tokenized fund, stocks that trade after hours, Ethena’s synthetic dollar and Aave, and Hyperliquid’s bid to list every kind of market.

• Chapter 20. A Law for the Dollar
• Chapter 21. Where the Internet Was in 1996
• Chapter 22. Stocks After Hours
• Chapter 23. The Synthetic Dollar and the Lender
• Chapter 24. House All of Finance

Epilogue, appendices and sources

• Epilogue. Still Shipping
• Appendix I, the glossary. A Glossary of the Open Market
• Appendix II, the crash ledger. A Ledger of Crashes, 2016 to 2026
• Sources. The book’s source list

Twelve Key Concept boxes

Short boxes explain the mechanics in plain language: Overcollateralized Stablecoins (Chapter Two); The Automated Market Maker (Chapter Three); The Oracle Problem (Chapter Four); Airdrops and Governance Tokens (Chapter Seven); Vote-Escrowed Tokens and Bribes (Chapter Eight); The Death Spiral (Chapter Ten); Perpetual Futures (Chapter Thirteen); Liquid Staking (Chapter Fifteen); On-Chain Order Books (Chapter Sixteen); The Liquidation Waterfall (Chapter Nineteen); What Backs a Stablecoin (Chapter Twenty); What a Tokenized Stock Is (Chapter Twenty-Two).

Read four excerpts free (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Every book in The Decentralized Revolution Series is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, so you can read, quote and share these passages with credit. Here are four: two passages from the Prologue, the opening of Jeff Yan’s story in Chapter Fourteen, and eight entries from the glossary.

From the Prologue: “Swaps of About a Hundred Dollars”

The Prologue opens with Uniswap’s first contract going live while Ethereum’s developers met in Prague. One paragraph is cut, marked […].

At 05:37:22 UTC on November 2, 2018, a new program was created on Ethereum, in block 6,627,917. It was the factory contract for Uniswap, a small piece of code that anyone could use to set up an exchange for a token, one exchange per token, and that kept a public registry of every exchange it had made.

[…]

What Uniswap did was simple to say and strange to picture. Each exchange was a pool holding two tokens, ether and one other, and it quoted a price from a formula. A trader sent one token in and took the other out, in a single transaction, at whatever price the formula gave. Traders dealt with the pool itself. There was no order book of buyers and sellers waiting to be matched, and no company standing in the middle of the trade, holding customers’ money or deciding who was allowed in. Listing a new token was open and free. How one equation could do the work of a trading floor is a story for later in this book. On the first day, the striking thing was how little money the pools held.

“About $30,000 was deposited into the contracts by a single provider, split across 3 tokens. This allowed for swaps of about $100.” That is Adams’s own account, written a year later for the project’s first birthday. Thirty thousand dollars, from one depositor, spread across three markets: enough for trades of about a hundred dollars at a time. He announced the launch on Twitter to his roughly 200 followers.

Small as it was, all of it happened in the open. Anyone could read the code, check the balances in each pool, and watch every trade settle on Ethereum’s shared ledger. Nobody needed an account, and nobody had to ask permission.

Excerpted from HYPE: How DeFi Built the Everything Market by Ryan Bethencourt, Prologue, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

Three ideas in this opening run through the whole book: a market can be a formula rather than a room of people, anyone can check its books, and it can begin with almost no money.

From the Prologue: the same design, eight years on

A few lines later the Prologue jumps ahead to 2025 and 2026, when the open design reached BlackRock and the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange.

On August 10, 2025, the trades that had passed through Uniswap, counting every version of it, crossed $3 trillion by DefiLlama’s tally, and by October 18, 2026 the total stood at about $3.98 trillion. On February 11, 2026, BlackRock made its tokenized Treasury fund, BUIDL, tradable for whitelisted investors through UniswapX, a Uniswap system in which professional market makers quote the prices, and, Uniswap Labs said, made a strategic investment in the Uniswap ecosystem. On October 5, 2026, OKXICE, a joint venture between the crypto exchange OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, said it had notified the SEC of plans for a venue that would trade tokens of 63 U.S.-listed stocks in Uniswap v4 pools. A design that had opened with swaps of about a hundred dollars had become part of Wall Street’s plans.

Excerpted from HYPE: How DeFi Built the Everything Market by Ryan Bethencourt, Prologue, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

From Chapter Fourteen, “Chameleon”: Jeff Yan in Puerto Rico

Before Hyperliquid, its founder traded crypto by himself from a living room in Puerto Rico. This is the paragraph that starts his story. One sentence is cut, marked […].

In late 2019, when his non-compete agreement with Hudson River Trading expired, Jeff Yan moved to Puerto Rico with $10,000. The island, Colossus noted in its 2026 profile of him, was a place where residents could legally cut their tax on capital gains to nearly zero. He had no monitor, so he took over the television in the living room and made it his trading screen. […] He put in at least 14 hours a day, writing Python scripts that connected to crypto exchanges and traded for him around the clock, watching them, refining them, and tearing them down when they misbehaved.

Excerpted from HYPE: How DeFi Built the Everything Market by Ryan Bethencourt, Chapter Fourteen, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

The chapter follows that one-man operation as it grows into a trading firm with a small team, and then to the decision, in 2022, to stop trading and build an exchange on a chain of its own.

From Appendix I: eight terms from “A Glossary of the Open Market”

HYPE’s glossary gives each term the meaning its chapters give it, with a pointer to the chapter where it is explained. Eight of its entries:

Auto-deleveraging: The last step of a liquidation waterfall. If the backstop cannot absorb a failing position, the exchange closes winning positions on the other side, whether their owners wanted out or not. (Chapter Nineteen)

Automated market maker: A pool of two tokens priced by a formula rather than an order book. Uniswap’s rule, x times y equals k, keeps the product of the two balances constant, so every trade moves the price. (Chapter Three)

Funding rate: Periodic payments between the two sides of a perpetual future that pull its price toward spot. Above spot, longs pay shorts; below it, shorts pay longs. (Chapter Thirteen)

HIP-3: The Hyperliquid proposal, enabled on October 13, 2025, that lets outside teams staking 500,000 HYPE deploy their own perpetual markets, subject to slashing by validators. (Chapters Twenty-Two and Twenty-Four)

Liquidation: The forced closing of a position whose collateral no longer covers it. It is a position closed, not a loss of the same size. (Chapters Two, Thirteen and Nineteen)

Perpetual future: A futures contract that never expires, kept near the market price by funding payments. CoinDesk credits BitMEX with introducing it in 2016. (Chapter Thirteen)

Total value locked: The market value of the tokens deposited in DeFi contracts. It rises with prices as well as deposits and differs by tracker; this book uses DefiLlama unless it names DeFi Pulse. (Chapter Five)

Yield farming: Moving deposits to whichever protocol pays most in its own new tokens, often borrowing to deposit more. It took off when Compound began paying COMP to lenders and borrowers on June 15, 2020. (Chapter Five)

Excerpted from HYPE: How DeFi Built the Everything Market by Ryan Bethencourt, Appendix I, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

How to cite HYPE: Bethencourt, Ryan. HYPE: How DeFi Built the Everything Market. The Decentralized Revolution Series, 2026. ISBN 9798165024757.

The full story runs through twenty-four chapters, from The DAO’s code in 2016 to Hyperliquid’s stock perpetuals and BlackRock’s tokenized fund trading through UniswapX in 2026. Get HYPE in paperback on Amazon, or read the Kindle edition.

Why Ryan Bethencourt wrote HYPE

Ryan Bethencourt wrote HYPE because his first three books kept running into it. ZERO’s privacy mathematics reappeared in Tornado Cash, TAO’s market for machine intelligence priced its subnets with an automated market maker, and LIGHT’s account of Solana ran through Serum, an exchange whose upgrade key FTX held. Each time, the money’s side of the story was left for a separate book. HYPE is that book, and its Author’s Note frames it with one question:

The question I wanted this book to ask is not whether DeFi will replace Wall Street. It is whether, by the time it has, anyone will still call it DeFi.

Excerpted from HYPE: How DeFi Built the Everything Market by Ryan Bethencourt, Author’s Note, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Author’s Note also sets the book’s rules. Its dialogue is reconstructed from third-party sources such as interviews, court filings, governance forums and on-chain records. Direct quotations are taken from documented sources; where the record was too thin to quote, the book paraphrases. No scenes, private moments or composite characters are invented, and where the text asks you to picture a trader or a yield farmer working through round numbers, it says the person is illustrative. Like the earlier books, HYPE was co-written with AI; the FAQ below explains how.

About the author

Disclosure

Disclosure: Ryan holds HYPE, along with SOL, JUP and other digital assets HYPE covers. Nothing here is financial advice.

HYPE was co-written with AI, as its Author’s Note discloses. The book and this page are for information only: neither makes price predictions or buy or sell calls, and neither gives advice on leverage.

Frequently asked questions about HYPE

What is HYPE: How DeFi Built the Everything Market about?

HYPE is Ryan Bethencourt’s history of decentralized finance, published in October 2026 as Book Six of The Decentralized Revolution Series. It runs from The DAO’s 2016 hack and Uniswap’s first pools through DeFi Summer, the Curve Wars and Terra’s collapse to Hyperliquid, the October 10, 2025 liquidations and the tokenized stocks of 2026. Its argument is that Wall Street took up DeFi’s plumbing and left its ideology behind.

Who founded Hyperliquid?

Jeff Yan, who traded U.S. stocks at the market maker Hudson River Trading and then ran his own crypto trading firm, founded Hyperliquid with a Harvard classmate who uses the pseudonym iliensinc. Hyperliquid’s timeline dates the start of work on its exchange to September 2022, and HYPE dates the chain’s first real trades to February 26, 2023. Hyperliquid Labs says it has taken no outside capital. Chapter Fourteen tells Yan’s story; Chapter Eighteen asks how much control its validators hold.

Is there a book about Hyperliquid?

Yes. HYPE, a history of DeFi, gives six of its chapters to Hyperliquid and its founder: Jeff Yan’s trading years in Puerto Rico (Chapter Fourteen), the order book on its own chain (Sixteen), the genesis airdrop of November 29, 2024 (Seventeen), the JELLY vote of March 2025 (Eighteen), the October 10, 2025 liquidations (Nineteen) and Hyperliquid’s bid to list every kind of market (Twenty-Four).

When did Uniswap launch?

Uniswap’s factory contract, the code that creates its exchanges, went live on Ethereum on November 2, 2018, at 05:37:22 UTC, in block 6,627,917, on the last day of the Devcon 4 conference in Prague. Its creator, Hayden Adams, later wrote that one provider supplied about $30,000 across three tokens, enough for trades of about $100. The Uniswap story runs from HYPE’s Prologue through Chapters Three and Seven to the Epilogue.

What was DeFi Summer?

DeFi Summer was the 2020 boom in decentralized finance. It began on June 15, 2020, when the lending protocol Compound started paying its COMP token to lenders and borrowers, setting off yield farming. Yearn’s YFI followed in July, SushiSwap drew liquidity from Uniswap in September, and Uniswap launched its UNI token a week later. By DefiLlama‘s count, deposits rose from about $1.12 billion on June 15 to above $10 billion on September 26. HYPE’s Part II tells the story.

Does HYPE cover the October 10, 2025 crash?

Yes. Chapter Nineteen, “October 10,” follows the day a tariff announcement set off a liquidation cascade. CoinGlass, in figures reported by Cointelegraph, put the leveraged positions liquidated within 24 hours at more than $19 billion, the largest such day on its records, with more than $10 billion of it on Hyperliquid. The chapter’s Key Concept box explains the liquidation waterfall: the order book first, then a backstop vault, and last, the forced closing of winning positions.

Does HYPE cover tokenized stocks?

Yes. Chapter Twenty-One follows tokenized funds such as BlackRock’s BUIDL onto public chains, and Chapter Twenty-Two covers tokenized stocks: Robinhood’s stock tokens in the European Union, Backed’s xStocks on Solana, the Nasdaq rule the SEC approved in March 2026, the SEC’s September 2026 exemption and Hyperliquid’s synthetic stock markets. A Key Concept box sorts them by what the holder owns, from a price tracker to the share itself.

Is HYPE investment advice?

No. HYPE is a narrative history, and neither the book nor this page makes price predictions or tells anyone to buy, sell or trade with leverage. Disclosure: Ryan holds HYPE, along with SOL, JUP and other digital assets HYPE covers. Nothing here is financial advice. Prices and legal cases in the book were current as of October 2026 and will have changed since.

Can I quote HYPE?

Yes. HYPE is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0), so anyone may share and adapt it, commercial uses included, provided they credit the author, link to the license, say whether they made changes and release adaptations under the same license. Use this credit line: Excerpted from HYPE: How DeFi Built the Everything Market by Ryan Bethencourt, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. The ebook is enrolled in KDP Select, so the full text is not offered free.

Was HYPE written with AI?

Yes, and the book says so. Its Author’s Note explains that the synopses were developed with Claude and with Google’s Gemini, and that Claude Opus 5.5, Anthropic’s model, directed teams of AI agents that researched, drafted and fact-checked the chapters against their sources. Ryan Bethencourt directed the project and reviewed the work.

Do I need to read the other books first?

No. Each book in The Decentralized Revolution Series stands alone, and HYPE explains the ideas it uses. Where its story crosses the earlier books, it points to them: Tornado Cash and ZERO, Bittensor’s subnet pools and TAO, Serum and FTX and LIGHT, BONK and Pump.fun and DOGE. The twelve Key Concept boxes and the glossary in Appendix I cover the mechanics for newcomers.

Read more on Grey Area Labs

Guides on the same subjects, with sources and dated figures:

• How Solana Survived FTX: The Greatest Comeback in Crypto: the recovery that HYPE’s Chapter Fifteen tells from the side of Solana’s markets.
• Solana vs Ethereum in 2026: Which Blockchain Wins?: the two chains compared, DeFi included.
• Dynamic TAO (dTAO) Explained: How Bittensor Emissions Work in 2026: Bittensor’s subnet pools, which price each subnet’s token with an automated market maker.
• LIGHT: The Solana Story and the Man Who Turned Time Into Code: Serum, FTX and the chain’s comeback, the backdrop to HYPE’s Solana chapters.
• DOGE: Memes and the Joke That Ate Wall Street: the memecoin side of the same years, from BONK to Pump.fun.
• Are privacy coins legal? (publishing November 6) Covers Zcash, Monero and the Tornado Cash case. The Treasury’s 2022 sanctions on Tornado Cash, lifted in March 2025, are the subject of HYPE’s Chapter Twelve.
• The history of DeFi, 2015 to 2026 (publishing November 10): a dated timeline from The DAO to Hyperliquid, a ledger of DeFi’s crashes and every DeFi guide on the site.
• Tokenized stocks explained (publishing November 17): what each kind of token actually gives you, and what the SEC allowed in September 2026.
• Pump.fun explained (publishing November 19): how the memecoin token factory works and what it earned, the launchpad story HYPE leaves to DOGE.
• The Hyperliquid airdrop by the numbers (publishing December 1): who received HYPE at genesis, how much, and who holds the rest of the supply.
• The October 10, 2025 crypto crash (publishing December 11): what happened, why so much of it ran through Hyperliquid, and how auto-deleveraging works.
• Is Hyperliquid decentralized? (publishing December 29) A dated scorecard of its validators, the JELLY vote, its incidents and whether US users can trade on it.
• Perpetual futures explained (publishing January 8): how perps and funding rates work, and how perps reached US markets in 2026.
• Uniswap’s complete history (publishing January 15): from the 2018 launch and the UNI airdrop to the fee switch and BlackRock.

Also in The Decentralized Revolution Series

• ZERO: The Zcash Revolution: How Privacy Became the Next Bitcoin. How the cypherpunks’ dream of private digital cash became Zcash, from the 2016 ceremony to Grayscale’s Zcash ETF. Second edition, October 2026.
• TAO: The Bittensor Story and the Rise of Decentralized Intelligence. How Bittensor set out to reward machine intelligence on an open network, and what decentralized AI has built so far.
• LIGHT: The Solana Story and the Man Who Turned Time Into Code. How Anatoly Yakovenko’s Proof of History became Solana, through outages, the FTX collapse and the recovery that followed.
• PUNKS: NFTs and the Misfits Who Made Art Ownable. How artists, coders and misfits made digital art ownable, from CryptoPunks and Beeple to Solana’s first collections and MoMA.
• DOGE: Memes and the Joke That Ate Wall Street. How a joke became a currency, and how memecoins went from Dogecoin’s tipping culture to BONK, Pump.fun and politics.

From the same author: AGENT: AI, Money and the Rise of the Non-Human Economy, Book One of The Frontier Series, on AI agents that hold and spend money.

Each book stands alone. Suggested pairings: ZERO with HYPE’s Chapter Twelve, “Sanctioned Code”, for Tornado Cash and the Treasury’s 2022 sanctions, lifted in March 2025; LIGHT with HYPE’s Part IV, where Chapter Fifteen, “The Chain That Came Back”, tells how Solana’s builders replaced Serum after FTX failed; and TAO with HYPE’s Chapter Three, on automated market makers, the kind of pool Bittensor uses to price its subnets. All books, free excerpts and how to quote them.

Published October 27, 2026.