Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan has accused some centralized cryptocurrency exchanges of dramatically underreporting liquidation activity, saying that platforms may display a single liquidation while thousands actually occur in the same second — a discrepancy he estimates couldb understate true liquidations by “up to 100 times.” Yan made the comments in recent interviews and posts as Hyperliquid’s on-chain liquidation data attracted attention during a string of large market moves.
Key takeaways
- Jeff Yan says centralized exchanges (CEXs) often report far fewer liquidations than actually happen, because public feeds can aggregate or suppress high-frequency events.
- Hyperliquid — a rapidly growing exchange with on-chain, per-order transparency — has published liquidation figures that markedly exceed CEX public tallies during recent volatility.
- Independent observers and some analytics firms have flagged large gaps between Hyperliquid’s transparent numbers and what major CEXs publicly report.
- The discrepancy matters for market surveillance, risk assessment and public understanding of stress events in derivatives markets.
What Yan said and where he said it
Jeff Yan has been posting and discussing Hyperliquid’s data publicly — including on X (formerly Twitter) and in interviews — arguing that Hyperliquid’s on-chain architecture makes every order, trade and liquidation verifiable, while many CEXs publish far more limited liquidation feeds. In one post he wrote that “many other venues significantly under-report liquidation data,” and in interviews he described scenarios where thousands of liquidations can occur within a single second but only a single event appears in a platform’s public reporting.
Evidence: Hyperliquid’s figures vs. reported CEX feeds
The claim gained traction after a recent violent sell-off in which Hyperliquid’s leaderboard and analytics showed thousands of liquidations and large cumulative losses — figures that, when compared with public CEX summaries, produced a pronounced gap. Coverage of that event (which CoinDesk noted as one of the largest liquidation waves on Hyperliquid) highlighted how Hyperliquid’s transparent, on-chain logs allow external observers to tally liquidations precisely.
Crypto-market analytics and some industry commentators have since run comparisons. A Bitget analysis piece and posts by market observers suggested that published CEX liquidation figures can be much smaller than on-chain tallies, sometimes by orders of magnitude — prompting the “up to 100x” framing in informal estimates. Those independent writeups underline the difficulty of getting apples-to-apples comparisons because CEXs may aggregate, filter, or delay public feeds for internal or technical reasons.
Why the numbers can differ
There are several structural reasons for differences between on-chain (or exchange internal) liquidations and public CEX feeds:
- Reporting granularity: Some CEX public APIs or market pages aggregate events or only report summary statistics, which can hide bursts of sub-second activity.
- Internal matching/settlement practices: CEXs may net or internalize offsetting orders before making a public record, reducing visible liquidation counts.
- Latency and sampling: High-frequency bursts can overwhelm public endpoints; exchanges may sample or throttle public feeds to protect infrastructure.
- Commercial/disclosure choices: Platforms may choose how much detail to surface publicly for competitive or legal reasons.
These mechanisms can make a public “liquidations” number very different from a raw, verifiable on-chain tally.
Reactions from the industry
Responses have been mixed. Some analysts and transparency advocates say Yan’s emphasis on on-chain verifiability strengthens the case for more open market data, which helps researchers, traders and regulators understand systemic risk. Others caution that comparing Hyperliquid (which exposes on-chain events by design) to legacy CEX public feeds is not always a like-for-like comparison: exchanges can and do handle internal risk management and trade matching in ways that don’t always produce an equivalent public trace.
A number of crypto analytics and trading groups reposted side-by-side charts showing the discrepancy and urged exchanges to clarify reporting methodologies so market participants — and, where relevant, regulators — can evaluate the true scale of forced liquidations during stress episodes.
Why it matters
Accurate liquidation data affects more than headlines. Liquidations are a key indicator of leverage, counterparty stress and cascading risk in derivatives markets. Underreported or opaque liquidation figures can:
- Undermine accurate risk models used by institutional traders and funds.
- Hinder regulators trying to assess market stability.
- Obscure how much capital is actually being wiped out during crashes, which matters for contagion analysis.
Greater transparency, or at least clearer disclosure of how CEXs compute and publish liquidation metrics, would help reconcile public reporting with on-chain realities.
Bottom line
Jeff Yan’s claims have focused attention on a real tension in crypto market data: on-chain, per-order transparency (as promoted by Hyperliquid) versus aggregated or filtered1 public feeds from many established CEXs. While the exact “up to 100x” gap may vary by event and methodology, multiple independent observers have documented substantive discrepancies — and those gaps matter for traders, researchers and regulators trying to understand market stress. (Bonus BTC 2: U6GEU432)
