Stronger than Apple: When crypto companies start playing the "buyback" game

Source: Token Dispatch

Author: Prathik Desai

Compiled and organized by: BitpushNews

Seven years ago, Apple completed a "financial operation" that dwarfed even its greatest products.

In April 2017, Apple opened its $5 billion Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California. A year later, in May 2018, it announced a $100 billion stock buyback program—a massive sum, 20 times the cost of its 360-acre headquarters known as "the spaceship." This move was undoubtedly Apple’s way of declaring to the world: it had another "product" as important as, or perhaps even more important than, the iPhone.

This was the largest buyback program ever announced at the time, and part of a decade-long frenzy in which Apple spent over $725 billion buying back its own shares. Just six years later, in May 2024, the iPhone maker broke its own record by announcing a $110 billion buyback plan. It demonstrated how to create scarcity not just in devices, but in equity itself.

The crypto industry is adopting similar strategies—but on a larger scale and at a faster pace.

Two major revenue engines—the perpetual futures exchange Hyperliquid and the meme coin launch platform Pump.fun —are reinvesting almost all of their fee income into buying back their own tokens.

“True Buybacks”

Of the $10.6 million record daily fees Hyperliquid set in August, over 90% was used for open market buybacks of HYPE tokens. On a certain day in September, pump.fun’s daily income reached $3.38 million, briefly surpassing Hyperliquid. Where did this huge revenue go? The platform continuously used 100% of its income to buy back PUMP tokens—in fact, this buyback mechanism has been running steadily for over two months.

This behavior makes tokens similar to equity certificates. This is rare in the crypto industry, as crypto tokens are often dumped on investors whenever possible.

The underlying logic is to imitate Wall Street’s "dividend aristocrats" (such as Apple, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola) and their decades-long shareholder return strategies. These companies continuously reward shareholders through stable cash dividends or stock buybacks: in 2024, Apple spent $104 billion on buybacks, equivalent to returning 3%-4% of its then market cap to investors. Hyperliquid’s buyback scale, however, reached 9% of token circulation, far exceeding Apple’s ratio.

Even by stock market standards, these numbers are insane. In the crypto world, they are unheard of.

Hyperliquid’s model is actually very straightforward.

It has built a decentralized perpetual contract exchange, offering an experience comparable to centralized platforms like Binance, but fully on-chain. Zero gas fees, high leverage, a Layer1 designed specifically for perpetuals—by mid-2025, its monthly trading volume had surpassed $40 billion, accounting for about 70% of the DeFi perpetuals market.

But what truly sets Hyperliquid apart is how it uses its funds.

Over 90% of the daily fees collected by the platform flow into the so-called "aid fund." This fund goes directly to the open market, continuously buying HYPE tokens.

As of this writing, the fund has accumulated over 31.61 million HYPE tokens, worth about $1.4 billion. This is a tenfold increase from the 3 million tokens it held in January.

This buyback frenzy has absorbed about 9% of the circulating supply, pushing the HYPE token price to a peak of $60 in mid-September.

Meanwhile, Pump.fun has reduced its supply by about 7.5% through buybacks.

The platform turns meme coin mania into a business model with extremely low fees. Anyone can launch a token, set up a bonding curve, and let the public participate. What started as a joke tool has now become a factory for speculative assets.

But instability still exists.

Pump.fun’s income is cyclical, as it is tied to meme coin issuance traffic. In July, income plummeted to $17.11 million, the lowest since April 2024. Accordingly, buybacks also fell. By August, monthly income jumped back above $41.05 million.

However, sustainability issues remain. When meme coin season cools down (which has happened and will continue to happen), token burns will also slow. On the horizon, there is also a $5.5 billion lawsuit claiming the entire project looks like unlicensed gambling.

Giving Back to the Community: “Dividends” Happening Every Day

What is currently driving the development of Hyperliquid and Pump.fun is their willingness to give back to the community.

In some years, Apple has returned nearly 90% of its profits to shareholders through buybacks and dividends. But these are occasional, centrally announced decisions. Hyperliquid and Pump.fun, on the other hand, are continuously recycling almost 100% of their income back to token holders every day.

Of course, they are not exactly the same. Dividends are cash in hand—taxable but reliable. Buybacks, at best, are a form of price support; if income drops or unlocks overwhelm liquidity, they are useless. Hyperliquid faces an imminent cliff of token unlocks. Pump.fun faces the risk of meme users moving elsewhere at any time. Compared to Johnson & Johnson’s 63 years of steadily increasing dividends or Apple’s ongoing buybacks, these are high-wire acts.

But maybe that doesn’t matter.

Crypto is still in its maturation phase and has yet to find consistency. But it has found speed for now. Buybacks have the elements to drive speed: they are flexible, tax-efficient, and deflationary. They fit a market driven primarily by speculation. So far, they have turned two very different projects into top revenue machines.

We have yet to determine whether this can be sustained in the long term. But it is clear that, for the first time in crypto, this approach is making tokens behave less like casino chips and more like company stocks that return value at a pace that could even leave Apple in the dust.

I see a bigger lesson here. Apple understood this long before crypto: it doesn’t just sell iPhones, it sells its stock. Since 2012, it has spent nearly $1 trillion on buybacks—more than the GDP of most countries—and has reduced its outstanding shares by over 40%.

The company’s market cap still exceeds $3.8 trillion, partly because Apple treats its equity as a product that must be marketed, polished, and made scarce. It doesn’t need to issue more shares to raise funds; its balance sheet is extremely strong. This is where stock becomes a product and shareholders become customers.

The same language is now extending to crypto.

Both Hyperliquid and Pump.fun have successfully implemented this strategy by turning business-generated cash not into reinvestment or hoarding, but into buying pressure for their own equity.

This also changes how investors view assets.

iPhone sales are important, but Apple bulls know the stock has another engine: scarcity. For HYPE and PUMP, traders are starting to view these tokens the same way. What they see is an asset backed by a promise: for every spend or trade on the token, there is over a 95% chance it will be converted into buybacks and burns on the market.

Apple also shows the other side of the coin.

The power of buybacks is only as strong as the cash flow behind them. What happens when income drops? If iPhone and MacBook sales slow, Apple can issue debt and fulfill its buyback commitments thanks to its balance sheet. Hyperliquid and Pump.fun do not have this luxury. If trading volume dries up, buybacks will stop. Unlike Apple, which can pivot to dividends, services, or new products, these protocols have yet to find their Plan B.

And in the crypto world, projects also face the risk of token dilution.

Apple doesn’t have to worry about 200 million new shares suddenly hitting the market overnight, but Hyperliquid does face such a risk. Starting this November, nearly $12 billion worth of HYPE tokens will begin unlocking for insiders, a scale that will dwarf daily buybacks.

Apple can precisely control the number of outstanding shares, while crypto protocols struggle with token unlock schedules set in stone years ago.

Nevertheless, investors still see echoes of legendary stories and are eager to participate. Apple’s playbook is very familiar—especially to those who know Apple’s decades-long history. By turning equity into a financial product, Apple has successfully fostered shareholder loyalty. Now, Hyperliquid and pump.fun are trying to carve out a similar path for the crypto world—only faster, louder, and with greater risk.