Joining Hydromancer

On Hyperliquid, every order is public, along with the wallet that placed it, and almost none of the tools traders use were made to visualize that. Figuring out what those tools should look like is now my full time job. This week I joined Hydromancer as Head of Data Visualization to build charts for a market where you can see everything.

If you don’t follow crypto, let’s take a step back. Hyperliquid is a crypto exchange that runs on its own public blockchain, where you can see every order as well as the wallet behind it. It’s also permissionless, so you trade straight from your own crypto wallet without opening an account or sending your ID, unlike exchanges such as Binance that require identity checks, known as KYC. Hydromancer collects all of Hyperliquid’s data and serves it to more than 100 teams that build trading products on top of it.

I’ve been quiet for a while and left a lot of messages unanswered, so I wanted to share what I’ve been up to, why I’m making this move and what happens to Cryexc.

OpenBB and Cryexc

I spent the last five years at OpenBB. It was my first full time job, and I joined as the first full time employee. It asked a lot of me and I gave it a lot, and most of what I know about building software was learned there, from the people I built it with and by shipping something new almost every week. OpenBB ended a few months ago. It was tough to see it come to an end, but I’m proud of what we built and accomplished together.

Last December, still at OpenBB, I started Cryexc A free tool that traders can use to analyze the crypto market before they make a trade, by showing what’s being bought and sold on the big exchanges as it happens. on the side. I wanted to understand markets better, and building tools is how I learn. Every visualization I added forced me to understand something new. I didn’t expect many people to use it. But the fact that a lot of you did, and that so many of you took the time to reach out with kind words and ideas to make it better, was one of the best things that happened to me this year.

Why Hyperliquid

A few months into Cryexc, I started looking at Hyperliquid. Everyone was talking about it and I wanted to see what it was all about, so I added it to Cryexc through its public API, the standard way to pull data from an exchange. That made me curious about what sat underneath, and I ended up running my own non-validator node: a computer that keeps a copy of everything happening on the Hyperliquid blockchain. With a few flags enabled, it gives you every trade, every order as it’s placed, filled or canceled, and every change to the order book (the live list of everyone’s offers to buy and sell). With that you can rebuild the whole order book one order at a time, or replay any minute of trading and see which wallets traded in it.

Like many others, I found that transparency strange at first. On a typical exchange, your orders are private. On Hyperliquid, every order, every cancel and every liquidation A liquidation is when the exchange forcibly closes a trader’s position because they borrowed to trade and the price moved too far against them. is public, along with the wallet that placed it.

The obvious reaction is “why would anyone want that?”.

If everyone can see your orders and the price at which you’d be liquidated, won’t other traders hunt you, pushing the price there on purpose? Or frontrun you by jumping ahead of your orders? People have been asking that since Hyperliquid launched. Hyperliquid co-founder Jeff Yan answered it in a long post, where he ranks, from best to worst, how much data a market makes public:

The system knows > no one knows > some people know

Jeff argues that the best market is one where everyone sees the same information. The second best is one where nobody sees it. The worst is one where a few people see what everyone else can’t.

Jeff’s point is that a centralized exchange, one run by a company on its own private systems, corresponds, in fact, to the third (and worst) option, not the second. Someone inside can see your information, whether that’s the exchange’s staff, its own trading desk or the big trading firms it gives faster and more detailed data to. They can see where your orders sit and the price at which you’d be liquidated, so they can trade against you, and you’d never know. So the hunting that people worry about on Hyperliquid can also happen on a centralized exchange, except only insiders can do it and you won’t see it coming. When everyone sees the same thing, that edge disappears. Market makers A trading firm that is always offering to both buy and sell, and earns the small gap between the two prices. Market makers are the reason you can usually buy or sell instantly at a fair price. compete for your orders in the open, and anyone trying to hunt a position can get hunted back.

Whether that works long term will take time to tell, but so far traders are choosing it. Since late 2023, Hyperliquid went from the smallest of these 13 crypto futures exchanges to the 6th largest by trading volume.

Being able to see every order and the wallet behind it also changes what charts can show. On a centralized exchange you only see the result, like how much is waiting to be bought at each price (and how much was actually bought). On Hyperliquid, you see each order being placed and canceled in real time, and who placed it (and who bought it). Most of the tools we use to read markets were made for a world where you couldn’t see any of this.

Traders describe this as levels of detail. L2 shows the total waiting at each price (which is what most exchanges share publicly), L3 shows each order on its own, and L4 additionally shows who placed it (which is what Hyperliquid shares publicly). Press play below to see the same activity at all three.

This transparency opened so many possibilities and left me extremely curious and excited to experiment with new ways to visualize all this data.

Why Hydromancer

In late August and early September, while I was still figuring out what my next step after OpenBB would be, I made a few experiments on Hydromancer’s data and shared them as I went. Hydromancer’s data is easy to play with, so none of them took long. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a bunch.

After OpenBB ended, for a while I wasn’t sure what I wanted my next step to be. The one thing I knew was that I wanted to stay close to trading and the data.

Then I got married and spent a month on our honeymoon, mostly off screens. Somewhere in that month it became clear. The more I learned about Hyperliquid and Hydromancer, the more natural this step felt for me. I spent five years building visualizations for traditional markets at OpenBB and the last year building them for crypto trading on the side. At Hydromancer, I get to take all of that to the next level, full time and with an amazing team, building visualizations for data no big exchange has ever made public before. That means taking experiments like the ones above and turning them into real products.

Those experiments also showed me why Hydromancer is the right place for this work. Any new chart for Hyperliquid needs every order with its owner and a way to serve it in real time, and Hydromancer already runs both. They’ve been around Hyperliquid since early on and hundreds of products are built on top of Hydromancer’s infrastructure. For the past few months, I kept talking with the team, and the more we did, the more I wanted to work with them.

What I’ll be building

I want to build charts any trader can open and understand at a glance, not just the ones who can work with raw data. I don’t know exactly what they’ll look like yet, and that’s the part I’m looking forward to the most. What I do know is how I want to get there: by building things, sharing them and seeing what traders do with them.

There’s one experiment I think represents this well. A few days before my wedding I built an L4 footprint, a chart that shows which wallets bought and sold at each price, and a few weeks later Flowscan by Hydromancer, Hyperdash and intel.trade had all shipped their own takes on it. The Hydromancer team said my experiments influenced their first release a lot, which was really nice to hear. More than anything, it showed me there’s real demand for seeing this data, and I believe trying ideas in public helps everyone move faster. That’s how I want to keep working, for everyone building on Hyperliquid and for traders in general.

What happens to Cryexc

If you’re wondering about Cryexc, it’s not going anywhere. It stays my trading playground, where I learn and try new things, and I’ll keep improving it, especially with more Hyperliquid data.

Thank you to everyone who used Cryexc, sent kind words or feedback, or reached out these past months, and apologies to everyone who waited too long for a reply. If you noticed I was a bit absent, now you know why.

I’m really excited about this next chapter, and I’ll keep sharing what I build and learn along the way. My DMs are open if you want to chat.