Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan told Cointelegraph in a July 30 interview that decentralized finance tokens are undergoing a structural shift, with protocol revenue increasingly flowing back to the people holding the token rather than sitting inside a treasury. He pointed to Hyperliquid as the clearest example of the model in practice.
Hyperliquid's mechanism is straightforward: the exchange redirects roughly 99% of its protocol revenue into buying back its own HYPE token from the open market, permanently reducing supply with every dollar the platform earns. Hougan has estimated Hyperliquid could generate around $800 million in revenue in 2026, nearly all of which would flow into buybacks under the current structure.
Not an isolated case
Hougan named Uniswap and Aave as protocols moving in a similar direction, suggesting the buyback-and-burn approach is becoming less of a Hyperliquid-specific quirk and more of an emerging standard for how mature DeFi protocols return value to token holders. His broader thesis, laid out in recent interviews and public comments, is that traditional finance is converging with crypto rails faster than markets are pricing in — citing BlackRock's largest ETF now being a crypto product, Goldman Sachs hiring into tokenization, and JPMorgan building out its own blockchain infrastructure as evidence of that shift.
A valuation argument, not a guarantee
Hougan has separately argued that Hyperliquid and Robinhood could be among the biggest winners of the next crypto cycle, describing many DeFi tokens with revenue-sharing mechanisms as dramatically undervalued relative to their traditional fintech counterparts. That argument rests on token buybacks functioning economically like the share repurchases traditional public companies use to return cash to shareholders — a comparison that only holds if protocol revenue remains durable through market cycles, something DeFi platforms have not yet had to prove over a multi-year downturn.
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