Crypto Assets Repurchase Strategy: A New Attempt to Replicate Apple's Successful Model

Seven years ago, a tech giant completed a financial feat whose impact even surpassed the company's most outstanding product. In April 2017, the company opened its new $5 billion headquarters campus in Cupertino, California; a year later, in May 2018, the company announced a $100 billion stock buyback plan—an amount that is 20 times its investment in the 360-acre headquarters campus known as the “spaceship.” This sent a core message to the world: in addition to smartphones, it has another “product” that is just as important (if not more so) than smartphones.

This was the largest stock buyback plan in the world at the time and part of the company's decade-long buyback spree—during which it spent over $725 billion repurchasing its own shares. Exactly six years later, in May 2024, this mobile phone manufacturer broke the record again, announcing an $110 billion buyback plan. This operation proves that the company not only knows how to create scarcity in hardware devices but is equally adept at operations on the stock level.

Today, 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 penny 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 coins on the open market. Meanwhile, Pump.fun's daily revenue briefly exceeded Hyperliquid's — on a certain day in September 2025, the platform's single-day revenue reached $3.38 million. Where do these revenues ultimately go? The answer is that 100% is used to repurchase PUMP coins. In fact, this repurchase model has been ongoing for more than two months.

This operation gradually gives the Crypto Assets the attributes of “shareholder equity proxies”—a rarity in the field of encryption, as tokens in this domain 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” (such as a certain tech giant, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola): these companies spend huge amounts of money to return to shareholders through stable cash dividends or stock buybacks. Taking a certain tech giant as an example, in 2024 its stock buyback amount reached 104 billion dollars, accounting for about 3%-4% of its market value at that time; while Hyperliquid achieved a “circulation volume offset ratio” of up to 9% through buybacks.

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

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Hyperliquid has a very clear positioning: it has created a decentralized perpetual futures exchange that combines the smooth experience of a centralized exchange while operating entirely on-chain. The platform supports zero gas fees, high leverage trading, and is a Layer 1 focused on perpetual contracts. By mid-2025, its monthly trading volume has exceeded $400 billion, capturing about 70% of the DeFi perpetual contract market.

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

The platform allocates over 90% of its transaction fee income to the “Assistance Fund” every day, 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 — a tenfold increase from 3 million tokens in January 2025.

This buyback craze has reduced the circulating supply of HYPE by approximately 9%, pushing the price of the token to a peak of $60 in mid-September 2025.

Meanwhile, Pump.fun has reduced the circulating supply of PUMP coins by about 7.5% through buybacks.

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

But risks also exist.

The revenue of Pump.fun shows significant seasonality—because its income is directly linked to the issuance popularity of Meme coins. In July 2025, the platform's revenue fell to $17.11 million, the lowest level since April 2024, and the repurchase scale was also reduced accordingly; by August, the monthly revenue rebounded 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. More critically, the platform is facing a lawsuit amounting to $5.5 billion, with the plaintiff accusing its business of being “similar to illegal gambling.”

The core support for Hyperliquid and Pump.fun currently lies in their willingness to “return profits to the community.”

A certain tech giant once returned nearly 90% of its profits to shareholders through buybacks and dividends in certain years, but these decisions were mostly periodic “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 essential differences between the two: cash dividends are “immediate earnings”, which, although taxable, have strong stability; while buybacks are at most just a “price support tool”—once income declines, or the amount of tokens unlocked far exceeds the buyback amount, the effect of the buyback will become invalid. Hyperliquid is facing the impending “unlock shock”, while Pump.fun needs to cope with the risk of “Meme coin popularity transfer”. Compared to Johnson & Johnson's record of “63 years of consistently increasing dividends”, or a certain tech giant's long-term stable buyback strategy, the operations of these two crypto platforms are more like “walking a tightrope at a high altitude”.

But perhaps this is already not easy in the encryption industry.

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Crypto Assets are still in the development maturity stage and have not yet formed a stable business model, but they have already shown an astonishing “development speed”. The buyback strategy just happens to have the elements to accelerate the industry's growth: flexibility, tax efficiency, and deflationary attributes—these characteristics align closely with the “speculation-driven” crypto market. So far, this strategy has transformed two completely different positioned projects into top “income machines” in the industry.

Whether this model can be sustained in the long term is still inconclusive. However, it is evident that it has, for the first time, allowed crypto assets to shed the label of “casino chips,” bringing them closer to “corporate stocks that can generate returns for holders”—with a return speed that may even pressure some tech giants.

I believe there is a deeper revelation behind this: a certain tech giant realized long before the emergence of Crypto Assets that it was selling not just phones, but also its own stocks. Since 2012, the company has spent nearly $1 trillion on stock buybacks (more than the GDP of most countries), and the circulation of its stocks has decreased by over 40%.

Today, the company's market value remains above $3.8 trillion, partly because it views its shares as “products that need to be marketed, polished, and maintained for scarcity.” The company does not need to finance through issuing additional shares—its balance sheet is cash-rich, so the shares themselves have become a “product,” and the shareholders have become “customers.”

This logic is gradually infiltrating the Crypto Assets field.

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

This has also changed investors' perception of Crypto Assets.

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Mobile phone sales are certainly important, but investors who are optimistic about a certain tech giant know that there is another “engine” behind the stock: scarcity. Nowadays, for HYPE and PUMP tokens, traders are also beginning to form a similar understanding - these assets in their eyes have a clear commitment behind them: every consumption or transaction based on the token has over a 95% chance of being converted into “market buybacks and burns.”

But the case of a certain tech giant also reveals another side: the strength of buybacks always depends on the intensity of the cash flow behind it. What happens if revenue declines? When smartphone and laptop sales slow down, the strong balance sheet of a certain tech giant allows it to fulfill buyback commitments by issuing bonds; whereas Hyperliquid and Pump.fun do not have such a “buffer”—once trading volume shrinks, buybacks will also come to a halt. More importantly, a certain tech giant can turn to dividends, service businesses, or new products to respond to crises, while these encryption protocols currently have no “backup plan.”

For Crypto Assets, there is also a risk of “token dilution.”

A certain tech giant does not have to worry about “200 million new shares flooding the market overnight,” but Hyperliquid faces this issue: starting from November 2025, nearly $12 billion worth of HYPE tokens will be unlocked for insiders, which far exceeds the daily repurchase volume.

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A certain tech giant can independently control the circulation of its stocks, while the encryption protocol is bound by a token unlocking schedule that was “written in black and white” many years ago.

Even so, investors still see value in it and are eager to participate. The strategy of a certain tech giant is evident, especially to those familiar with its decades-long development history—this company has cultivated shareholder loyalty by transforming its stock into “financial products.” Now, Hyperliquid and Pump.fun are trying to replicate this path in the Crypto Assets field, only at a faster pace, with greater momentum, and higher risks.

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