Robinhood Engineers Charged with Insider Trading via Perpetual Futures
US prosecutors have charged two former Robinhood engineers, Hefu Chai and Huaisong 'Jerry' Xiang, with commodities fraud and wire fraud for allegedly using confidential information about upcoming cryptocurrency listings to profit from perpetual futures trades on Hyperliquid.
The DOJ alleges that the defendants accessed a private Slack channel containing planned listing dates and used this information to trade perpetual contracts linked to tokens shortly before Robinhood Crypto listings between 2025 and 2026. Each defendant reportedly generated profits exceeding $50,000 from these trades.
Prosecutors claim that the defendants traded ahead of listings by establishing long positions in advance and exiting when the contracts' values rose following each token's debut on Robinhood.