Bold Experiment in the Crypto Assets Industry: Can Buyback Strategies Replicate Apple's Success?

Seven years ago, Apple Inc. completed a financial feat whose impact even surpassed that of the company's 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. This amount is 20 times the investment in its 360-acre headquarters campus, known as the "Spaceship." This sent a core signal from Apple to the world: besides the iPhone, it has another "product" that is equally important (if not more so) than the iPhone.

This was the largest stock buyback program in the world at the time and part of Apple's decade-long buyback frenzy. During this period, Apple has spent over $725 billion repurchasing its own shares. Exactly six years later, in May 2024, the iPhone manufacturer broke the record again by announcing an $110 billion buyback program. This operation proves that Apple not only understands how to create scarcity in hardware devices but is equally adept in stock operations.

Today, the Crypto Assets industry is adopting similar strategies, at a faster pace and on a 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.

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Hyperliquid set a record of $106 million in fee revenue in August 2025, over 90% of which was used to repurchase HYPE coins on 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. Where does this revenue ultimately go? The answer is that it is 100% used to repurchase PUMP coins. In fact, this repurchase model has been ongoing for more than two months.

This operation gradually endows crypto assets with the attributes of "shareholder rights agency"—which is rare in the crypto asset field, as tokens in this domain are often sold off to investors at the first opportunity.

The underlying logic is that Crypto Assets projects are trying to replicate the long-term successful path of Wall Street's "Dividend Aristocrats" (such as Apple, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola): these companies spend huge amounts to return value to shareholders through stable cash dividends or stock buybacks. For example, Apple's stock buyback amount reached $104 billion in 2024, accounting for about 3%-4% of its market value at the time; while Hyperliquid achieved a "circulation offset ratio" of up to 9% through buybacks.

Even by traditional stock market standards, such numbers are astonishing; in the field of Crypto Assets, it is unprecedented.

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 surpassed $400 billion, capturing about 70% of the DeFi perpetual contract market.

What truly sets Hyperliquid apart is its method of utilizing funds.

The platform will allocate over 90% of its fee income to the "Assistance Fund" every day, and this fund will be used directly to purchase HYPE coins on the open market.

As of the writing of this article, the fund has accumulated over 31.61 million HYPE tokens, worth approximately $1.4 billion—an increase of 10 times from 3 million tokens in January 2025.

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

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

This platform converts the "Meme coin craze" into a sustainable business model with extremely low 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 hidden dangers also exist.

The income of Pump.fun exhibits significant seasonality—because its revenue is directly linked to the issuance popularity of Meme coins. In July 2025, the platform's income fell to $17.11 million, the lowest level since April 2024, and the buyback scale was also reduced accordingly; by August, the monthly income 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 accordingly. More seriously, the platform is facing a lawsuit amounting to $5.5 billion, with the plaintiffs 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."

Apple has returned nearly 90% of its profits to shareholders through buybacks and dividends in certain 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 is still an essential difference between the two: cash dividends are "income received", which, although subject to taxation, are highly stable; whereas buybacks are at most just a "price support tool"—once income declines or the amount of tokens unlocked far exceeds the buyback amount, the effects of the buyback will become ineffective. Hyperliquid is facing the imminent "unlock impact", while Pump.fun needs to deal with the risk of "Meme coin popularity shift". Compared to Johnson & Johnson's record of "63 years of continuous dividend increases" or Apple's long-term stable buyback strategy, the operations of these two crypto platforms are more like "walking a tightrope at high altitudes".

But perhaps, this is already not easy in the Crypto Assets industry.

Crypto Assets are still in a developing maturity stage and have not yet formed a stable business model, but they have already demonstrated an astonishing "growth rate". The buyback strategy just happens to possess the elements that drive the industry to accelerate: flexibility, tax efficiency, and deflationary properties—these characteristics align closely with the "speculation-driven" crypto market. As of now, this strategy has transformed two completely different positioned projects into top "income machines" in the industry.

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Whether this model can be sustained in the long term is still inconclusive. However, it is evident that it has allowed encryption tokens to shed the label of "casino chips" for the first time, bringing them closer to "company stocks that can generate returns for holders"—its rate of return may even put pressure on Apple.

This contains a deeper revelation: Apple realized long before the emergence of Crypto Assets that it was not just selling iPhones, but also its own stocks. Since 2012, Apple has spent nearly $1 trillion on buybacks (more than the GDP of most countries), and the circulation of its stocks has decreased by more than 40%.

Today, Apple's market value remains above $3.8 trillion, partly because it views stocks as "products that need marketing, polishing, and maintaining scarcity." Apple does not need to raise funds through additional stock issuance—its balance sheet is cash-rich, so the stocks themselves have become "products," and shareholders have become "customers."

This logic is gradually permeating the Crypto Assets field.

The success of Hyperliquid and Pump.fun lies in that they did not use the cash generated from their business for reinvestment or hoarding, but rather transformed it into "purchasing power that drives up the demand for their own tokens".

This has also changed investors' perception of Crypto Assets.

While iPhone sales are certainly important, investors who are optimistic about Apple know that the stock has another "engine": scarcity. Nowadays, traders are beginning to form a similar understanding regarding HYPE and PUMP tokens — in their eyes, these assets come with a clear commitment: every consumption or transaction based on the token has over a 95% probability of being converted into "market buybacks and burn".

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But Apple's case also reveals another aspect: the intensity of buybacks always depends on the strength of the cash flow behind them. What happens if revenues decline? When iPhone and MacBook sales slow down, Apple's strong balance sheet allows it to fulfill buyback commitments by issuing debt; however, Hyperliquid and Pump.fun do not have such a "buffer" — once trading volume shrinks, buybacks will also come to a halt. More importantly, Apple can turn to dividends, service businesses, or new products to respond to crises, while these Crypto Assets protocols currently have no "backup plan."

For Crypto Assets, there is also the risk of "token dilution."

Apple need not 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 buyback volume.

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Apple can autonomously control the circulation of its stocks, while the encryption protocol is bound by the token release schedule that was "set in stone" years ago.

Even so, investors still see value in it and are eager to participate. Apple's strategy is evident, especially to those familiar with its decades-long development process—Apple has fostered shareholder loyalty by transforming its stock 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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