Ansem 🐂🀄️@blknoiz06
i have a thesis that buybacks don't actually work
hyperliquid makes $800M annualized revenue
pump fun makes $440M annualized revenue
$HYPE trades at $65B FDV while $PUMP trades at $1.4B FDV
both teams do regularly recurring buybacks with portions of their profits from the business but they trade at vastly different ratios to their revenues
i believe the difference is not in how much actual revenue is generated by the business but instead its reflective of the trust premium ascribed to the team determined by their actions and decisions in the market, hyperliquid never overpromised anything, only focused on shipping product and emphatically rewarded their core users based on pre-determined metrics that contributed the most to the platform, the core users of hyperliquid have a very high trust rating with Jeff, & even if you believe the perps revenues are slightly more durable which maybe they are, i believe this trust premium on their execution and social alignment with the community is a major factor in why the token trades so well
in contrast, pump fun made $1B in revenue, raised another $1B in their ICO, and promised an airdrop to users that was never delivered, even though they are one of the most successful and consistent businesses in crypto, they do not have social alignment with their core userbase and therefore do not have a comparable trust premium that hyperliquid has, recently it seems they've made concerted effort to improve comms and talk to community more, i believe that if they were ever to seriously focus attention on shifting this dynamic by actually doing the airdrop they've promised and responding to the concerns of their core user base, then the token would trade 10-15x higher, as it would also likely materially increase their volume, attention, and resulting revenues on their platform
bitcoin makes $0 in revenue but has a ~$1.3T market cap, it has the greatest trust premium of any asset to ever exist, people know that there will only ever be 21M coins, and they know that the network will always continue to function no matter what to fulfill its necessary actions
this is part of what ive been talking about when i say that there is intangible value that contributes to the valuation of a business in addition to the tangible value that is determined purely from revenues and other metrics
trust, memetics, and attention are all very important and heavily underdiscussed in markets
