NG

Liquid HF

I dibble dabble in a few religions.

[Lorenzo Valente @LorenzoARK]

Crypto is the only industry where 3 year old startups with thin moats and near zero barriers to entry are handing money back to investors.

Think about what a buyback signals in traditional markets. Apple buys back stock because it generates $100B a year and has run out of things to build. Mature. Saturated. Ex-growth.

Now look at the list. Pump is burning 50% of revenue. Hyperliquid sends 97% of fees to buybacks. These are companies that in any other industry would be reinvesting every dollar into distribution, product, and moat building. Amazon didn't return a cent for 20 years. Nvidia plows everything into R&D.
Heck, even Google, one of the highest cash flowing machines ever built, is now raising debt because it sees ROIC opportunities bigger than its own cash generation. The most dominant company of the internet era is levering up to invest while 3 year old protocols are handing money back.

Tokens returning capital this early means one of two things. Either the teams see no reinvestment opportunities, which is terrifying for growth assets. Or the fee pools are so contestable that the only way to keep holders is to bribe them with their own revenue.

There's a third option that's even worse. Buybacks as moat substitute. When you can't defend fees with network effects, you defend the token with burns. That works until a fork offers the same product at 10% of the take rate. Then your $2B of buybacks bought you nothing but a higher cost basis for exit liquidity.

Value capture isn't the achievement. Durable value creation is. We keep celebrating the mechanism and skipping the question of whether the cash flows survive competition.

[NG @nectarmancer]

@BrianEstes32 @BrianEstes32 BTC is only seized evidence and not in government hands yet. DOJ can’t legally sell until a fed judge issues a Final Order of Forfeiture (and the case is still in "claim" period). Check addresses at very end via Arkham: https://t.co/w8TPo6Pomi. Funds still there.