Hyperliquid and PumpFun Copy Silicon Valley Playbook, Invest in Themselves

To support the price of their own cryptocurrencies, crypto companies are increasingly buying back their own tokens. Hyperliquid and PumpFun in particular are copying the well-known Silicon Valley strategy.

Buybacks

On stock markets, share buybacks have been a tried and tested way of underpinning the share price and creating more shareholder value for decades. American tech companies and British industrial firms in particular spend billions of dollars on them every year. In the crypto world, things were different for a long time. Because tokens generally do not represent ownership or voting rights like shares do, buyback programmes remained a rare phenomenon for years. Only recently have they gained popularity as a tool to strengthen investor confidence and support the token price.

This is mainly due to the recent slump in the crypto market, also known as crypto winter.

$1.3 billion

According to an article in the Financial Times, it is above all the Hyperliquid investment platform and the memecoin platform PumpFun that lead the way when it comes to buybacks. Together they account for almost 90 percent of all token buybacks.

Hyperliquid spends around 99 percent of its revenue from transaction fees on buying back its own HYPE token, according to the article. Since its launch in December 2024, the company has bought back $1.3 billion worth of HYPE tokens. While the broader crypto market is in a downward spiral, HYPE has risen about 70 percent over the past year (since the start of this year HYPE’s value has tripled), making it one of the biggest gainers of 2026.