Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise, believes crypto valuations “could at least double” as a growing number of protocols redirect revenue toward buying back and burning their native tokens. In his view, the market has yet to price in a structural shift already underway: tokens are increasingly behaving like equity in a business, with cash flows attached.
“Crypto outside of Bitcoin is becoming a revenue-driven market in which network activity feeds into native-token value,” Hougan said, pointing to a wave of DeFi applications and layer-1 networks that have adopted or expanded buyback programs over the past year. He expects the mechanism to spread further across the sector over the next 12 to 24 months.
The Buyback Math Behind the Thesis
Hougan's argument leans heavily on Hyperliquid, the perpetuals exchange that has become the clearest test case for revenue-to-token mechanics. The protocol has funneled roughly 99% of its fees into HYPE buybacks, generating more than $800 million in revenue last year. In the second quarter of 2026 alone, it booked $169 million in protocol revenue, with $141 million of that routed directly into buybacks.
Independent research digging into the same mechanism found the numbers run even larger on a trailing basis: over the past 12 months, Hyperliquid's Assistance Fund has channeled $932 million into HYPE purchases out of $1.04 billion in total fees collected, removing roughly 44.4 million HYPE from circulation — worth about $2.2 billion at prevailing prices. That scale is precisely what Hougan points to when he argues token holders are starting to capture value the way shareholders capture buybacks in public markets.
Not Just Hyperliquid
Hyperliquid isn't the only example Hougan cites. Uniswap activated protocol fees earmarked for UNI burns on December 22, 2025, formalizing a mechanism the community had debated for years. Aave has purchased more than 205,000 AAVE over the past ten months and is moving toward a fully automated buyback system. Newer platforms including Pump.fun and Lighter have built similar revenue-sharing structures into their token designs from the outset.
“Crypto outside of Bitcoin is becoming a revenue-driven market in which network activity feeds into native-token value.”
Related: Hyperliquid's US Access Push Meets a Newly Opened CFTC Pathway
Regulation and the Caveats
Hougan attributes part of the shift to a more permissive US regulatory environment, which has reduced securities-law concerns that once made protocols wary of anything resembling a dividend or buyback tied to network revenue. With that overhang easing, more teams have felt comfortable formalizing the link between usage and token value.
He is careful to flag the limits of the comparison to equities, however. Token holders don't have the legal claims to cash flow that shareholders do, and tokenomics set by a protocol's community or foundation can be altered or reversed, unlike contractual dividend rights. Governance votes, treasury decisions, or a change in fee structure could unwind a buyback program as easily as they created it — a risk that doesn't show up in the headline revenue figures Hougan cites.
Still, the pattern across Hyperliquid, Uniswap and Aave suggests the trend has momentum heading into the back half of 2026, with more layer-1s and DeFi platforms reportedly evaluating similar mechanisms as competitive pressure builds around who can best reward token holders directly from protocol usage.
