Hefu Chai and Huaisong Xiang were charged by US prosecutors with commodities and wire fraud for using nonpublic company data to trade cryptocurrency. The US Department of Justice alleges the Robinhood engineers misappropriated information about upcoming token listings on the platform's crypto service to trade perpetual futures on Hyperliquid between 2025 and 2026.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York filed the case, stating that each employee profited more than $50,000 from positions taken just before public listing announcements. The engineers allegedly diverted confidential business information from Robinhood to execute trades on the third party decentralized exchange.

The charges target a scheme to misappropriate confidential business information from Robinhood Markets Inc. and use it for personal gain on a external derivatives platform. Prosecutors allege the two employees repeatedly took positions in tokens based on internal listing schedules before the assets were available to general users.