Written by: Prathik Desai
Translated by: Saoirse, Foresight News
Seven years ago, Apple accomplished a financial feat whose impact even surpassed that of its most outstanding products. In April 2017, Apple opened its $5 billion “Apple Park” campus in Cupertino, California; a year later, in May 2018, the company announced a $100 billion stock buyback plan—an amount 20 times its investment in the 360-acre headquarters known as the “Spaceship.” This sent a core message to the world: besides the iPhone, Apple had another “product” of equal (if not greater) importance.
This was the world’s largest stock buyback plan at the time and part of Apple’s decade-long buyback spree—during which Apple spent over $725 billion repurchasing its own shares. Six years later, in May 2024, the iPhone maker broke the record again, announcing a $110 billion buyback plan. This move proved that Apple not only knows how to create scarcity in hardware devices but is also adept at operating on the stock level.
Now, the cryptocurrency industry is adopting similar strategies, but at a faster pace and on a larger scale.
The industry’s two major “revenue engines”—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.
In August 2025, Hyperliquid set a record with $106 million in fee income, over 90% of which was used to buy back HYPE tokens on the open market. Meanwhile, Pump.fun’s daily income briefly surpassed Hyperliquid’s—on one day in September 2025, the platform’s daily income reached $3.38 million. Where did this income ultimately go? The answer is that 100% was used to buy back PUMP tokens. In fact, this buyback model has been ongoing for more than two months.
@BlockworksResearch
This operation is gradually giving crypto tokens the attributes of “shareholder equity proxies”—which is rare in the crypto space, as tokens in this field are often dumped on investors at the first opportunity.
The logic behind this is that crypto projects are trying to replicate the long-term success path of Wall Street’s “dividend aristocrats” (such as Apple, Procter & Gamble, and Coca-Cola): these companies reward shareholders with massive cash dividends or stock buybacks. For example, Apple’s stock buybacks in 2024 reached $104 billion, accounting for about 3%-4% of its market cap at the time; while Hyperliquid’s “circulating supply offset ratio” achieved through buybacks reached as high as 9%.
Even by traditional stock market standards, such figures are astonishing; in the crypto space, they are unprecedented.
Hyperliquid’s positioning is very clear: it has built a decentralized perpetual futures exchange that offers the smooth experience of centralized exchanges (like Binance) but operates entirely on-chain. The platform supports zero gas fees, high-leverage trading, and is a Layer1 focused on perpetual contracts. By mid-2025, its monthly trading volume had exceeded $400 billion, accounting for about 70% of the DeFi perpetual contract market.
What truly sets Hyperliquid apart is its use of funds.
The platform allocates over 90% of its daily fee income to an “aid fund,” which is directly used to purchase HYPE tokens on the open market.
@decentralised.co
As of this writing, the fund has accumulated over 31.61 million HYPE tokens, worth about $1.4 billion—a tenfold increase from 3 million tokens in January 2025.
@asxn.xyz
This buyback spree has reduced the circulating supply of HYPE by about 9%, pushing the token’s price to a peak of $60 in mid-September 2025.
Meanwhile, Pump.fun’s buybacks have reduced the circulating supply of PUMP tokens by about 7.5%.
@pump.fun
This platform, with extremely low fees, has turned the “meme coin craze” into a sustainable business model: anyone can issue tokens on the platform, build a “bonding curve,” and let market hype ferment freely. What started as a “joke tool” has now become a “production factory” for speculative assets.
But risks also exist.
Pump.fun’s income is clearly cyclical—because its revenue is directly tied to the popularity of meme coin issuance. In July 2025, the platform’s income fell to $17.11 million, the lowest since April 2024, and buyback volume shrank accordingly; by August, monthly income rebounded to over $41.05 million.
However, “sustainability” remains an unresolved issue. When “meme season” cools down (as it has in the past and inevitably will again), token buybacks will shrink accordingly. More seriously, the platform is facing a lawsuit of up to $5.5 billion, with plaintiffs accusing its business of being “akin to illegal gambling.”
Currently, the core support for Hyperliquid and Pump.fun is their willingness to “return profits to the community.”
Apple has, in some years, returned nearly 90% of its profits to shareholders through buybacks and dividends, but these decisions are mostly made as periodic “batch announcements”; Hyperliquid and Pump.fun, on the other hand, continuously return almost 100% of their income to token holders every day—this model is ongoing.
Of course, there is still an essential difference: cash dividends are “profits in hand”—taxable but highly stable; buybacks are at most a “price support tool”—once income declines, or token unlocks far exceed buybacks, the effect of buybacks will fail. Hyperliquid is facing an imminent “unlock shock,” while Pump.fun must deal with the risk of “meme coin hype shifting.” Compared to Johnson & Johnson’s “63 years of continuous dividend increases” or Apple’s long-term stable buyback strategy, these two crypto platforms’ operations are more like “walking a tightrope at high altitude.”
But perhaps, this is already remarkable in the crypto industry.
Cryptocurrency is still in its maturation phase and has yet to form a stable business model, but it has already demonstrated astonishing “development speed.” The buyback strategy happens to have the elements to accelerate the industry: flexibility, tax efficiency, deflationary attributes—these features are highly compatible with the “speculation-driven” crypto market. So far, this strategy has turned two completely different projects into the industry’s top “revenue machines.”
Whether this model can be sustained in the long term remains to be seen. But it is clear that it has, for the first time, freed crypto tokens from the label of “casino chips” and made them more like “company stocks that can generate returns for holders”—with a return speed that might even put pressure on Apple.
I believe there is a deeper lesson behind this: Apple realized long before the advent of cryptocurrency that it was selling not just iPhones, but also its own stock. Since 2012, Apple’s cumulative buyback spending has approached $1 trillion (more than the GDP of most countries), and its share float has decreased by over 40%.
Today, Apple’s market cap remains above $3.8 trillion, partly because it treats its stock as a “product that needs to be marketed, polished, and kept scarce.” Apple does not need to raise funds by issuing new shares—its balance sheet is flush with cash, so the stock itself becomes the “product,” and shareholders become the “customers.”
This logic is gradually permeating the crypto space.
The success of Hyperliquid and Pump.fun lies in the fact that they do not reinvest or hoard the cash generated by their businesses, but instead convert it into “purchasing power that drives demand for their own tokens.”
This is also changing investors’ perceptions of crypto assets.
iPhone sales are certainly important, but investors bullish on Apple all know the stock has another “engine”: scarcity. Now, for HYPE and PUMP tokens, traders are beginning to form a similar perception—these assets, in their eyes, come with a clear promise: every transaction or consumption based on the token has over a 95% chance of being converted into “market buyback and burn.”
But Apple’s case also reveals another side: the strength of buybacks always depends on the strength of the underlying cash flow. What happens if income declines? When iPhone and MacBook sales slow, Apple’s strong balance sheet allows it to fulfill buyback commitments by issuing debt; but Hyperliquid and Pump.fun have no such “buffer.” Once trading volume shrinks, buybacks will also stall. More importantly, Apple can turn to dividends, services, or new products to weather a crisis, while these crypto protocols currently have no “backup plan.”
For cryptocurrencies, there is also the risk of “token dilution.”
Apple 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, far exceeding the daily buyback volume.
@coinmarketcap
Apple can autonomously control its share float, while crypto protocols are bound by token unlock schedules “set in stone” years ago.
Even so, investors still see the value and are eager to participate. Apple’s strategy is obvious, especially to those familiar with its decades-long development—by turning stock into a “financial product,” Apple has cultivated shareholder loyalty. Now, Hyperliquid and Pump.fun are trying to replicate this path in crypto, only at a faster pace, with greater momentum, and higher risk.
