When you own a stock and the business behind your shares makes money, you usually see some of it kicked back your way, whether as a direct transfer of money like with a dividend, a buyback of shares that lifts the price of what you still own, or a reinvestment that increases the value of the company on a longer timetable.
But when you hold a cryptocurrency like Solana or Ethereum, the relationship is almost always one-way, as there's rarely any mechanism by which the network's activity or on-chain value gets translated into price appreciation or a payout of any kind. That also makes it hard to be enthusiastic about their development roadmaps as a holder, since the reinvestment into platform technology offers no clear way to reward you.
Contrary to that, the common dynamic is that two smaller cryptos are building something closer to the corporate playbook. There's Hyperliquid (HYPE +2.05%), which routes nearly all of its trading revenue into open-market buybacks of its own token, and Zcash (ZEC +0.58%), which hands a fifth of every newly issued coin to the developers in its ecosystem.
As an investor, that makes the outlooks for those two coins a lot easier to believe in -- but should you buy either of them?
Image source: Getty Images.
The buyback machine that pays on every trade
Hyperliquid runs a decentralized crypto exchange for a type of financial derivative called perpetual futures. It automatically captures 99% of the trading fees paid by users of its exchange and uses the proceeds to buy its native token, Hype, on the open market, removing those tokens from circulation, just like a stock buyback.
Hyperliquid's cumulative buybacks crossed $1.3 billion in mid-May 2026, which, on an annualized basis, would mean buying back nearly 7% of Hype's market cap. For comparison, that's several times Ethereum's token burn rate from transactions and many times Solana's burn rate, so the relationship between Hyperliquid's network activity and holder returns is far more palpable.
CRYPTO: HYPE
Key Data Points
What's more, this single mechanic reframes the issue of what actually makes a token valuable more clearly than most token whitepapers manage; Hype is valuable because it's currently a net-deflationary asset that constantly re-creates its own conditions of scarcity, so long as traders continue to use its platform.
But there are a few caveats to be aware of.
First, around $700 million of Hype unlocks on June 6. So holders could get diluted if the rate of buybacks is too low to keep up with this (and future) dollops of new supply entering the market. Furthermore, Hyperliquid itself doesn't yet compete in the U.S. to avoid running afoul of the regulations there, and, if regulations are clarified, its competitors may get preferential treatment.
Zcash's protocol pays for its own growth
Zcash is a privacy coin that funds its own future development through the block subsidies it distributes with each newly mined block.
Of every newly issued token, 20% of the value bypasses miners and flows to ecosystem funding. The protocol thus structurally pays the people who build the tooling that drives future demand for ZEC, almost as if a company were reinvesting its earnings into new avenues for growth.
CRYPTO: ZEC
Key Data Points
Pair that with the 21 million coin hard cap, just like Bitcoin, and the November 2024 halving that cut new mining issuance in half, and the supply picture starts to look pretty good over the long run. If you can imagine a company that's forbidden to raise money by issuing new shares, reinvests a lot of its earnings every quarter, and structurally reduces its new share issuance to employees over time without actually paying anyone less, that's Zcash.
The risk profile differs from Hyperliquid's but is of a similar magnitude. The E.U.'s Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (AMLR), taking effect in mid-2027, will prohibit crypto exchanges from listing privacy coins, and several Asian jurisdictions have already pulled privacy tokens. Therefore, Zcash could face significant regulatory barriers to widespread distribution, and it could even be banned altogether.
Neither Zcash nor Hyperliquid belongs at the center of a portfolio. Nonetheless, they offer a very rare thing: a direct, mechanical link between their network activity and the value of their cryptocurrency. And over a five-year hold, that's the kind of edge that can make for a great investment; it's worth buying these coins if their formidable risks aren't too intimidating for you.
