Jeff Yan: TradFi's Speed Arms Race Is Zero-Sum — and Even Negative-Sum

Hyperliquid Labs co-founder Jeff Yan said at DAS Asia 2026 on October 7 that he does not view Hyperliquid’s priority fee mechanism as “bribery.” Its purpose, he said, is to reduce advantages from low-latency infrastructure and make genuine trading alpha more important. Yan argued that the latency race in traditional finance — involving microwave towers and transatlantic fiber cables — is fundamentally zero-sum, and sometimes even negative-sum, because it creates little meaningful value. Hyperliquid aims to use priority fees to internalize these negative externalities, allowing traders to compete more fairly without spending heavily on low-latency infrastructure.