US charges ex-Robinhood engineers over alleged pre-listing crypto trades

US prosecutors on Tuesday charged two former Robinhood engineers with commodities fraud and wire fraud for allegedly using confidential information about upcoming cryptocurrency listings to profit from perpetual futures trades on Hyperliquid. 

According to the US Department of Justice (DOJ), Hefu Chai and Huaisong “Jerry” Xiang bought perpetual contracts linked to tokens ahead of Robinhood Crypto listings. The DOJ alleged each profited more than $50,000 from the trades between 2025 and 2026. 

The DOJ said Chai and Xiang had access to a private company Slack channel containing information about planned listings. Prosecutors allege they used that information to open long positions on Hyperliquid, closing them when their value increased after their debut on Robinhood. 

The allegations have parallels to the Coinbase insider-trading case in 2023, in which a former employee used confidential information to profit from listings of new tokens by directly buying the underlying asset, though the Robinhood case extends the issue into decentralized derivative markets.

Cointelegraph contacted Robinhood for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

Robinhood barred employees from trading around listings