Two Robinhood Engineers' Hyperliquid Wallets Led Back to Exchange Accounts in Their Names

On Tuesday, the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York unsealed complaints against two Robinhood engineers, Hefu Chai, 36, of Menlo Park, California, and Huaisong "Jerry" Xiang, 30, of Jersey City, New Jersey. Each is charged with one count of commodities fraud and one count of wire fraud. Prosecutors say both men had advance knowledge of which tokens Robinhood Crypto was about to list, and that they bought perpetual futures on those tokens on Hyperliquid before the listings were announced. Each allegedly made more than $50,000. These are allegations, and both men are presumed innocent.

Most coverage stopped at the press release. The two complaints, each sworn by FBI Special Agent Joseph Kim, say more about how this was pieced together. Hyperliquid is an onchain exchange, so the trades themselves were public. Xiang's complaint cites "publicly available information reflecting trading on Hyperliquid" as one of its sources. What the government needed was a name on each wallet. According to the complaints, it found those names at centralized exchanges.

The Slack channel

Both complaints describe the same setup. Robinhood restricted information about upcoming listings to a group of employees it called "Coin Aware Individuals." Those employees could see a private Slack channel whose description read, in part, "Confidential channel for [Robinhood Crypto] coin listings covering planning, readiness, and launch." Chai joined Robinhood in about 2021 and was a technical lead for new digital-asset listings until about May 2026. Xiang was a software engineer in the Manhattan office from about 2024 until about September 2026. Both were on the list.

Robinhood's policy did not leave much room for interpretation. According to the Chai complaint, Coin Aware Individuals were "strictly prohibited" from trading on Robinhood or on any other platform before a listing announcement and for 24 hours after it. In November 2024, Chai got an email reminding him not to trade on listing information. In May 2025, a Manhattan-based channel member wrote to him and others: "we're T-1 from launch ... The 24-hour trading halt for employees will be in place."

The complaints also explain the timing of the trades. According to the Chai complaint, a token can go live for trading on Robinhood Crypto up to an hour before Robinhood publicly announces it, and prices often start rising once it's tradable. That's why, the complaint says, Chai sometimes closed his positions before the announcement was out.

How the wallets got names

According to the complaint, Chai opened an account on a cryptocurrency exchange in his own name on December 17, 2017. The complaint doesn't name the exchange. The FBI linked three Hyperliquid wallets to that account through ordinary transfers. The account received about $100,000 from one wallet between November 2025 and March 2026, and sent that same wallet $5 in ether in December 2025. A second wallet had received about $7,550 from the account in late 2024 and later sent $75,000 to a third wallet. That third wallet sent about $25,000 back to the account and received $10,000 from it. The trades, the complaint says, rotated through all three wallets.

According to his complaint, Xiang made the connection more directly. On March 10, 2025, the Slack channel said Robinhood was considering listing POPCAT on March 13. On March 12, the complaint says, Xiang used an exchange account registered in his name since July 2022 to send about 18 ether, then worth about $34,000, to a Hyperliquid wallet. Later that day the channel confirmed the listing for 9:00 a.m. on March 13. The next day, the complaint says, the wallet went long POPCAT perpetuals and closed the position at a profit before Robinhood's announcement.

The same wallet, which the complaint calls Wallet-0x8081, is alleged to have traded ahead of at least ten more listings through February 2026. A footnote adds one more detail. After the POPCAT trade, a person the complaint calls Individual-1, who appears to live outside the United States, sent the wallet about $33,395 in USDC. State Department records show Individual-1 listed Xiang as a point of contact on a recent visa application. The complaint doesn't accuse Individual-1 of anything.

Most of the examples follow the same pattern: a Slack message between one and seven days ahead, a long position opened on launch day, and the position closed once the token went live on Robinhood, often before the announcement. The allegation isn't a long-term bet. It's about an hour in which the defendants, according to the government, knew something the rest of the market didn't.

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A venue that isn't open to Americans

Both complaints spend a paragraph on Hyperliquid itself. They say it doesn't have approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to operate a futures market, and that it geofences users who connect from US IP addresses. The agent adds that, in his training and experience, "individuals can easily bypass these geographical limitations" with a VPN. The complaints don't say how either defendant reached the platform, and they don't accuse Hyperliquid of any wrongdoing.

The commodities count cites the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC Rule 180.1, the agency's broad anti-fraud rule. It describes the conduct as fraud "in connection with a swap" or a commodity contract, based on trading while knowingly holding information obtained "in breach of a duty." The wire fraud count treats Robinhood's listing calendar as confidential business property. The Chai complaint spells out why that information is worth something to Robinhood. Rivals could list the same tokens first, and customers who expected a price move could trade elsewhere ahead of it.

US Attorney Jamie McDonald framed the case more broadly. "Today's charges make clear that corporate insiders cannot evade the securities and commodities laws," he said, "by trading based on misappropriated information in derivatives like perpetual futures, tokenized securities, or other similar financial instruments." Tokenized securities don't appear anywhere else in either complaint.

What's next

According to the release, Chai was to be presented in the Northern District of California, and Xiang before Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang in Manhattan. The Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force is handling the case, with Assistant US Attorney Alexandra N. Rothman in charge, and the FBI is the only agency the release credits. It doesn't mention any parallel CFTC or SEC action. In a statement reported by The Block, Robinhood said it "immediately investigated and reported this matter to law enforcement and regulators," and the release thanks the company for its cooperation. This desk found no public statement from Hyperliquid or from lawyers for either defendant.