Two Robinhood engineers were charged with wire fraud and commodities fraud for insider trading on Hyperliquid using confidential listing info.
Two employees of Robinhood have been charged with insider trading on the Hyperliquid decentralized exchange, using confidential information about upcoming cryptocurrency listings.
The US Department of Justice filed the charges yesterday against Hefu Chai, 36, and Huaisong Xiang, 30, accusing them of wire fraud and commodities fraud.
Prosecutors allege that the pair used their advance knowledge of which digital assets Robinhood planned to list to trade perpetual futures on Hyperliquid, breaching their duties to the company.
Between 2025 and 2026, each man allegedly made more than $50,000 by trading on the non-public information.
US Attorney Jamie McDonald said, “Today’s charges make clear that corporate insiders cannot evade the securities and commodities laws by trading based on misappropriated information in derivatives like perpetual futures, tokenized securities, or other similar financial instruments.”
Observers have linked the filing to the work of pseudonymous researcher Astra Trades.
In 2025, Astra Trades uncovered a pattern of trades in which a single user bought dozens of tokens months in advance, each purchase made minutes before Robinhood publicly listed those assets.
The researcher also flagged suspicious short positions on Robinhood stock on Hyperliquid, placed just before disappointing earnings reports.
Astra Trades believes the same individual is responsible for both the token purchases and the short positions.
In 2023, a former Coinbase employee was sentenced in the US's first criminal insider trading case involving cryptocurrency.
Ishan Wahi provided his brother and a friend with confidential information about upcoming token listings. The two then bought those tokens before they were listed and sold them at a profit around the time of the listings.
More recently, insider trading concerns have emerged in crypto-based prediction markets.
Suspicious activity has been reported in markets involving Israeli military action, the kidnapping of Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro, and the Nobel Peace Prize.
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Disclaimer: this article comes from third-party media and is provided for reference only. It does not constitute investment advice. Crypto and other financial products carry significant price volatility risk, so please make your own decisions carefully.
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