Hefu Chai and Huaisong Xiang each face one Commodity Exchange Act count and one wire fraud count over perpetual futures bought before Robinhood announced listings. Trading derivatives rather than spot tokens is what routes the case through commodities law.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed criminal complaints on Tuesday against two former Robinhood engineers, accusing them of buying perpetual futures on Hyperliquid ahead of token listings they learned about at work.
Hefu Chai, 36, of Menlo Park, California, and Huaisong Xiang, 30, of Jersey City, New Jersey, who also goes by Jerry Xiang, each face one count of violating the Commodity Exchange Act and one count of wire fraud, according to the US Attorney's office for the Southern District of New York. The statutory maximums are 10 years on the commodities count and 20 years on the wire fraud count. Chai was presented in the Northern District of California; Xiang appeared before US Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang.
Prosecutors allege that between 2025 and 2026 the two men took nonpublic information about which tokens Robinhood Crypto was about to list and bought perpetual futures tied to those tokens on Hyperliquid before the announcements went out. Each is alleged to have made more than $50,000.
CoinDesk reported that both men were designated "Coin Aware Individuals" inside Robinhood, a status that gave them access to a private Slack channel carrying listing information, and that Robinhood's own policy barred people with that access from trading the tokens concerned before an announcement and for 24 hours afterward. CoinDesk puts the pattern at trades ahead of at least 10 listings for Chai and at least 11 for Xiang.
"Misappropriating confidential information to trade in the derivatives markets for personal benefit is illegal," US Attorney Jamie McDonald said. "That is exactly what we allege Hefu Chai and Huaisong Xiang have done." FBI Assistant Director James C. Barnacle, Jr. said the charges "make clear the FBI with its partners will act when individuals access sensitive business information for their own benefit."
Robinhood said it "takes market integrity seriously and has zero tolerance for insider trading," adding that it "immediately investigated and reported this matter to law enforcement and regulators, and will continue to cooperate with their investigations." That establishes what the company has said about its own conduct; it is not independent confirmation of the allegations against its former staff.
Hyperliquid is a decentralized derivatives exchange, and it is not a defendant here. No wrongdoing is alleged against it. Charging a Commodity Exchange Act count rather than a securities offense puts the government's position plainly: trading a perpetual future on a permissionless venue does not place the trade outside federal commodities fraud law. Buying perps rather than spot tokens is what routes the case through commodities law.
That distinction separates this case from the one it otherwise resembles. The Block noted the parallel with the 2022 prosecution of a Coinbase manager over listing information, which turned on spot tokens and a securities framing. How perpetual futures should be classified is an argument the industry is actively having: Hyperliquid's own policy arm asked in August for equity perps to be treated as security futures, and Robinhood moved leveraged perp accounts onto its own chain as ERC-20s the same month.
Robinhood's April addition of Zcash in New York is the shape of announcement involved, though nothing connects that particular listing to these charges. What the complaints describe is knowing an announcement is coming and being able to take a leveraged position on it somewhere else.
Nothing has been proven. These are complaints, not indictments: no grand jury has returned a charge, and the allegations have not been tested. Neither man has entered a reported plea, and no defense counsel has been named in any published account. Assistant US Attorney Alexandra N. Rothman is prosecuting the case through the office's Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force.
