Crypto Assets projects adopt Apple's model, buy back Tokens on a large scale

Seven years ago, Apple Inc. achieved a financial feat whose impact even surpassed the company's most outstanding products. In April 2017, Apple opened the $5 billion “Apple Park” campus in Cupertino, California; a year later, the company announced a $100 billion stock buyback plan, which was 20 times the investment in its headquarters campus. This sent a core message from Apple to the world: besides the iPhone, it has another equally important “product.”

This was the largest stock buyback program in the world at the time and was part of Apple's decade-long buyback spree. During this period, Apple spent a total of over $725 billion to repurchase its own shares. In May 2024, this iPhone manufacturer broke the record again by announcing an $110 billion buyback plan. This move proves that Apple not only knows how to create scarcity in hardware devices but also understands the operations at the stock level.

Nowadays, the Crypto Assets industry is adopting similar strategies, with a faster pace and larger scale.

The two major “revenue engines” in the industry—perpetual futures exchange Hyperliquid and meme coin issuance platform Pump.fun—are using almost every cent of their fee income to buy back their own tokens.

Hyperliquid set a record of $106 million in fee revenue in August 2025, with over 90% used to repurchase HYPE Tokens in the open market. Meanwhile, Pump.fun's daily revenue briefly surpassed Hyperliquid—on a certain day in September 2025, the platform's single-day revenue reached $3.38 million. All of this revenue was ultimately used to repurchase PUMP Tokens. In fact, this repurchase model has been ongoing for more than two months.

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This operation gradually endows the encryption Token with the attributes of “shareholder rights agency”—which is rare in the realm of Crypto Assets, as Tokens in this field are often sold off to investors at the first opportunity.

The logic behind it is that crypto assets projects are trying to replicate the long-term successful path of Wall Street's “Dividend Aristocrats”: these companies spend large sums to return to shareholders through stable cash dividends or stock buybacks. Taking Apple as an example, its stock buyback amount reached $104 billion in 2024, accounting for about 3%-4% of its market value at that time; while Hyperliquid achieved a “circulation offset ratio” of up to 9% through buybacks.

Even by the standards of traditional stock markets, such figures are astonishing; in the realm of Crypto Assets, they are unprecedented.

Hyperliquid has built a decentralized perpetual futures exchange that offers the smooth experience of a centralized exchange while operating entirely on-chain. The platform supports zero Gas fees and high-leverage trading, and it is a Layer 1 network focused on perpetual contracts. By mid-2025, its monthly trading volume has surpassed 400 billion USD, capturing about 70% of the DeFi perpetual contract market.

What truly sets Hyperliquid apart is its approach to capital utilization.

The platform will allocate more than 90% of its daily fee income to the “Assistance Fund”, and these funds will be directly used to purchase HYPE Tokens on the open market.

As of the writing of this article, the fund has accumulated over 31.61 million HYPE Tokens, valued at approximately 1.4 billion dollars - a tenfold increase from 3 million coins in January 2025.

This buyback frenzy reduced the circulating supply of HYPE by about 9%, driving the price of the Token to a peak of $60 in mid-September 2025.

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At the same time, Pump.fun has reduced the circulation of PUMP Tokens by approximately 7.5% through buybacks.

This platform transforms the “Meme coin craze” into a sustainable business model with extremely low fees: anyone can issue Tokens on the platform and build a “binding curve” to let market enthusiasm ferment freely. This platform, which was initially just a “joke tool,” has now become a “production factory” for speculative assets.

But hidden dangers also exist.

The revenue of Pump.fun shows significant seasonality—because its income is directly linked to the popularity of Meme coin issuance. In July 2025, the platform's revenue dropped to $17.11 million, the lowest level since April 2024, and the buyback scale also shrank accordingly; by August, the monthly revenue rose again to over $41.05 million.

However, “sustainability” remains an unresolved issue. When the “Meme season” cools down (which has happened in the past and will inevitably happen in the future), Token buybacks will also shrink accordingly. More seriously, the platform is facing a lawsuit amounting to $5.5 billion, with the plaintiff accusing its business of being “similar to illegal gambling.”

Currently supporting Hyperliquid and Pump.fun at their core is their willingness to “return profits to the community.”

Apple has returned nearly 90% of its profits to shareholders through buybacks and dividends in some years, but these decisions are mostly phase-based “bulk announcements”; whereas Hyperliquid and Pump.fun continuously return almost 100% of their revenue to Token holders every day—this model is sustainable.

Of course, there are still essential differences between the two: cash dividends are “tangible returns” that require taxation but have strong stability; while buybacks are at most just a “price support tool”—once income declines or the amount of Token unlocks far exceeds the buyback amount, the effect of the buyback will become ineffective. Hyperliquid is facing the impending “unlock shock”, while Pump.fun needs to deal with the risk of “Meme coin popularity transfer”. Compared to some companies' long-term stable buyback strategies, the operations of these two crypto platforms resemble “walking a tightrope at a high altitude”.

But perhaps, this is already difficult in the crypto industry.

Crypto Assets are still in a period of development and maturity, and a stable business model has not yet been formed, but they have already shown an amazing “development speed”. The buyback strategy happens to possess elements that drive industry acceleration: flexibility, tax efficiency, and deflationary attributes—these characteristics are highly compatible with the “speculation-driven” crypto market. As of now, this strategy has transformed two completely different projects into top “income machines” in the industry.

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There is currently no conclusion on whether this model can be sustained in the long term. However, it is evident that it has, for the first time, freed crypto tokens from the label of “casino chips,” making them closer to “company stocks that can generate returns for holders”—the speed of returns may even put pressure on traditional companies.

This contains a deeper revelation: some large companies realized before the emergence of Crypto Assets that they were selling not just products, but also their own stocks. Since 2012, Apple has spent nearly $1 trillion on share buybacks (more than the GDP of most countries), and the circulation of its stocks has decreased by over 40%.

Today, Apple's market value remains above 3.8 trillion dollars, partly because it views its stock as a “product that needs marketing, refinement, and maintaining scarcity.” Apple does not need to raise funds through issuing more stock—its balance sheet is cash-rich, so the stock itself has become a “product,” and shareholders have become “customers.”

This logic is gradually penetrating the Crypto Assets field.

The success of Hyperliquid and Pump.fun lies in the fact that they did not use the cash generated from their business for reinvestment or hoarding, but rather converted it into “the purchasing power to boost the demand for their own Token.”

This has also changed investors' perceptions of Crypto Assets.

Product sales are certainly important, but investors who are optimistic about certain companies know that the stock has another “engine”: scarcity. Nowadays, for HYPE and PUMP Tokens, traders are starting to form a similar understanding - these assets in their eyes have a clear commitment behind them: every consumption or transaction based on this Token has over a 95% probability of being converted into “market repurchase and destruction”.

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But the cases of traditional companies also reveal another aspect: the intensity of buybacks always depends on the strength of the cash flow behind them. What happens when revenue declines? When product sales slow down, the strong balance sheets of traditional companies enable them to fulfill their buyback commitments by issuing bonds; however, Hyperliquid and Pump.fun do not have such a “buffer”—once trading volume shrinks, buybacks will also come to a halt. More importantly, traditional companies can turn to dividends, service businesses, or new products to cope with crises, while these crypto protocols currently have no “backup plans.”

For Crypto Assets, there is also the risk of “Token dilution.”

Traditional companies do not have to worry about “200 million new shares flooding the market overnight”, but Hyperliquid faces this issue: starting from November 2025, HYPE Tokens worth nearly 12 billion dollars will be unlocked for insiders, far exceeding the daily buyback volume.

Traditional companies can independently control the circulation of stocks, while encryption protocols are constrained by the Token unlocking schedule that was “written in black and white” many years ago.

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Even so, investors still see the value in it and are eager to participate. The strategies of traditional companies are obvious, especially to those familiar with their decades-long development process—they have cultivated shareholder loyalty by transforming stocks into “financial products”. Today, Hyperliquid and Pump.fun are trying to replicate this path in the Crypto Assets space, only at a faster pace, with greater momentum, and higher risks.

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