The spectacular Wyoming village of Jackson Hole is marked by gorgeous mountain peaks, plentiful wildlife, and, for a few days every August, a gathering of the most powerful people in crypto. They come to take part in Anthony Scaramucci’s SALT conference, which has become the industry’s most high-signal event. I tagged along this year, and sat down with the likes of Binance’s CZ and former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has a new gig repping crypto exchange OKX. The person who made the biggest impression on me, though, was Hyperliquid Strategies CEO David Schamis. He is not well known in crypto circles—but that’s likely to change due to his company’s recent rocketship trajectory.
Schamis is an old-school Wall Street guy who spent his early career at Salomon Brothers, the trading shop immortalized in Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker. His current act involves running a publicly traded firm that’s built a business amassing Hyperliquid’s HYPE token. It’s a digital asset treasury, or DAT, in other words. Most DATs these days are a dumpster fire, but Hyperliquid Strategies, which started trading in December under the meme-inspired ticker symbol PURR, has been killing it with a soaring share price and a DAT stash that grows ever more valuable.
This success is partly due, no doubt, to Schamis’s sound management. But the biggest reason that Hyperliquid Strategies hasn’t flamed out like so many other DATs is because it is tied to a money printing machine. That machine is the Hyperliquid DeFi platform, which is dominating the perpetual futures trade and using its fee income to burn HYPE tokens. The situation is even sweeter for Hyperliquid because its customers are not just degens, but commodities traders using perps to swing oil contracts and other traditional assets 24/7.
So far, all of this action has been taking place overseas. Since the project’s 2023 launch, its hard-charging CEO Jeff Yan (check out Fortune’s profile of the Harvard grad and physics whiz here) has been content to use an offshore cowboy model to grow Hyperliquid. But that’s about to change as Schamis’s team ramps up a push to create a regulated U.S.-based operation.
Other offshore firms have made plays for the U.S. market but mostly struck out, learning the hard way that it’s not easy to dislodge longtime incumbents like Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood. Hyperliquid, though, is likely to fare better since Yan is American-born, and because it has some very influential people advocating for its platform, including President Trump and the Chairman of the CFTC, who is a fan of perpetual futures.
On the corporate side—Hyperliquid Strategies or PURR or whatever you want to call it—there is a powerful team. That includes Schamis, who brings decades of TradFi credibility, and Jake Chervinsky, a highly influential crypto lawyer who is determined to create a legal regime for DeFi in the U.S.
All of this suggests Hyperliquid could suddenly become a major competitive threat to the crypto industry’s big dogs—much as Binance emerged out of nowhere in 2017 to become the biggest exchange in the world. Indeed, the company was on the lips of many of those gathered in Wyoming last week. Incumbents take note.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
