How a Wall Street Lifer and a Wyoming Backing Just Stumbled Into Crypto’s Most Dangerous Incumbent Killer
(SeaPRwire) –
By: Robert Kensington
Most people who walk into Jackson Hole for the SALT conference come back with a story about who they met. I came back thinking about Hyperliquid Strategies. Everyone at that conference is chasing the next Binance. What is building in Wyoming and on-chain right now might actually be it. David Schamis is not the usual crypto native. He arrived from Salomon Brothers, the Salomon Brothers, which is to say he learned to price bonds when trading was still a desk sport rather than a algorithm war. That background matters more than you would think. He runs Hyperliquid Strategies under the ticker PURR. The company sits on a Digital Asset Treasury of Hyperliquid HYPE tokens and the shares have been climbing. Most DATs have been disasters. This one is not.
The real engine behind this is Hyperliquid itself, a DeFi platform that has become the dominant venue for perpetual futures trading. Its fee model is brutal in the best possible way for the treasury, since fee income funds a continuous HYPE burn. You are not watching a speculative pump. You are watching a cash-generating loop where on-chain activity compounds the value of the underlying token supply. The user base is far broader than pure crypto degens. Commodity traders are using the platform to swing oil contracts and traditional asset perps around the clock. This is offshore trading with serious institutional appetites attached. It explains the volume. It also explains why the founders got complacent about compliance. Jeff Yan spent years running the offshore cowboy operation. He is American born and Harvard educated with a physics background, which makes him a strange combination for someone building outside the rules.
The play now is different. Schamis and his team are pushing to build a regulated U.S. operation. Jake Chervinsky is moving in on the legal architecture side, trying to carve out a workable legal regime for DeFi in the United States. This is not a polite regulatory lobbying campaign. This is a deliberate attempt to re-enter the U.S. through the front door. Other offshore firms tried that path and hit the wall. Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood have spent a decade locking down compliance infrastructure and user trust. Breaking through is supposed to be nearly impossible. The Hyperliquid team is counting on political headwinds in their favor. President Trump has publicly championed the platform. The CFTC chairman is sympathetic toward perpetual futures products. That is not normal market access. That is regime capture through informal political channels. It gives them a door that no offshore competitor has enjoyed before.
The competitive math is blunt. If Hyperliquid succeeds in the United States, it will bring fee-driven burn economics and perpetual futures liquidity into a market that has been starved for that combination. Coinbase and the incumbents hold the compliance keys. They do not hold the user flow that comes from oil traders and commodities desks who want 24/7 perps. Schamis is importing a proven offshore volume engine into a regulated environment while leaning on political capital that no CFO could buy. That is how a new heavyweight emerges in an industry that spends most of its time predicting the next crash instead of building one.
Author bio: Robert Kensington is an overseas entrepreneurial veteran with decades of experience in real-economy industrial investment and expansion.