Jeffrey Sprecher, the founder and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange, said Hyperliquid has become “bigger than Nasdaq,” praising its founders and technology and saying he wishes he was young enough to be building it himself.

“The people that have built that exchange are extremely smart, and that is a true DeFi exchange,” Sprecher said, speaking at the Bernstein 42nd Annual Strategic Decisions Conference this week.

“If you haven’t heard about it, it’s bigger than Nasdaq, okay? It’s 11 people. You look at it, you’re like, wow, that’s pretty something,” he told the audience.

According to Sprecher, Hyperliquid’s popularity has surged due to its ability to facilitate oil trading during weekends when traditional exchanges are closed, giving traders access during major geopolitical developments.

The rise has prompted ICE to narrow the weekend trading gap in energy markets, Sprecher added.

“So we went to all the major oil companies and said, good news, we can stay open,” Sprecher said. “And so the market hated it. So what you’re going to see us do is stay open very, very late on Friday and open very, very early on Monday. And so essentially narrow down the window that there isn’t traditional trading.”

The Wall Street billionaire also highlighted Hyperliquid’s decentralized structure, algorithmic stablecoin settlement, and highly leveraged products as key drivers behind its rapid growth and appeal among crypto-native traders and traditional market participants.

Hyperliquid has listed a derivative linked to SpaceX ahead of the company’s widely anticipated public offering. Sprecher said June 11 may become a critical moment for assessing whether decentralized market pricing has a meaningful impact on IPO dynamics.

He added that the scale of trading around the SpaceX derivative could potentially surpass the IPO itself if retail and speculative participation continues to grow.

Hyperliquid has climbed 140% year-to-date, outperforming major crypto assets including Bitcoin and Ethereum.

ICE and CME Group push for tighter regulation of Hyperliquid

CME Group and ICE are pushing US authorities to regulate Hyperliquid due to concerns about market integrity and offshore trading activity, Bloomberg reported earlier this month.

The exchanges warn that Hyperliquid’s expanding role in crypto and commodity markets could distort price discovery, especially in oil markets where benchmark pricing is sensitive to speculative activity.

Commenting on this, Sprecher clarified that ICE is not hostile toward Hyperliquid and is instead learning from the platform while engaging regulators about fair competition rules.

“We’re not freaked out about it. We’re actually talking to these people and learning about it. They’re learning what we’re doing. We’re helping them understand our world. They’re helping us understand their world,” he said.

He argued that regulators must decide whether decentralized perpetual futures should fall under existing swap regulations such as Dodd-Frank or receive a separate legal framework altogether.

Sprecher added that ICE has already experimented with blockchain-based settlement tied to the New York Stock Exchange, but said current blockchain systems still struggle to support the speed and scale of traditional exchange trading activity.