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TL;DR
The Best Business(es) in the World?
We’ll keep this one short because, as you’ll see, the numbers speak for themselves.
We have previously highlighted throughout our posts the sheer profitability of some crypto companies, and specifically, that of Tether. One of the more fun comparisons is to put it side by side against Wall Street to show just how profitable Tether’s stablecoin business is.
But before we beat up on poor old Goldman Sachs too much, let’s first set the foundations for the profit levels of some of the top companies in the world. Specifically, we will look at profit-per-employee in order to normalize for size and to showcase the effectiveness of each business (specifically, public company GAAP net income). Below is a chart with the top 5 most profitable public companies on a per-employee basis, as well as that of another dozen or so top companies in the world with a mix of tech, energy and financial services. One will quickly see that Nvidia deserves its recent time in the spotlight, generating an outstanding $2M in profit per employee. We’ve also highlighted 4 companies in particular – CME Group, Robinhood, Coinbase, Intercontinental Exchange (e.g. the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange) and Nasdaq – because they are some of the largest brokerages and exchanges in the market today. These have per-employee profitability anywhere from $130K-$930K per employee on annual net incomes of $1.2B (Nasdaq) to $3.5B (CME Group).
Many of the AI darlings in the world (e.g. OpenAI) have yet to come anywhere close to turning a profit and so we will ignore them here. They remain entirely venture bets and thus are in full-on growth mode and likely shouldn’t be profitable any time soon. They also have incredibly capital-intensive business models, demanding $10s, if not $100s of billions in spend on GPUs and data centers. Oracle, for example, just announced they are purchasing $40B worth of Nvidia chips for a new OpenAI data center. Crypto, on the other hand, is incredibly lightweight in terms of CapEx or other operational costs that most businesses must incur (compliance/regulatory overhang is naturally a major differentiator, but that’s a story for another day). Because of that, crypto companies can run extremely lean, and this shows up in their profitability. Last week we highlighted how Aave – a $70B lending platform – is able to grow assets 205% over the past year while still running with 54% net profit margins.
Tether takes this to an entirely new level and puts all of the above companies to shame. If we add them to the chart above, it looks like this:
But here’s the thing – this post isn’t about Tether.
No, there is another crypto company that makes even Tether look like it could use a little old fashioned McKinsey cost-cutting (iykyk).
Hyperliquid is a 2-year-old decentralized perpetual futures exchange that is increasingly eating into the big incumbent crypto exchanges’ market shares. Built by a team of former Hudson River high-frequency traders and Google engineers, there is a case to be made that Hyperliquid is one of the best businesses on the planet, full stop. For starters, the growth, shown below, is parabolic, driven by $150 billion in cumulative deposits:
Over the past month alone, Hyperliquid has facilitated $391 billion in perpetual futures volumes in addition to another $20 billion in spot trading volume. Since going live, they have enabled $2.5 trillion in perps volume and $80 billion in spot volume.
This translates to $112M fees generated over the past month, or roughly $1.4B annually if this pace were to continue with zero growth based on the last 30 days (keep in mind Hyperliquid’s growth is accelerating). And because Hyperliquid operates in such an efficient manner, they have historically passed 93% of all revenues straight through to buying back the token from the open market. That is, they effectively have operated with a 93% net income margin and returned 100% of those profits to token holders through the use of buybacks. (Note – the team just announced that they will be increasing that buyback % even more). To date, that means the protocol has bought back $585M worth of the HYPE tokens from the market, resulting in $735M profit on those buybacks and an aggregate-protocol controlled ‘assistance fund’ of $1.32B. At current levels, Hyperliquid has in fact already passed Nasdaq in annual profits on an absolute basis if this pace holds.
Importantly, this is only in reference to the core exchange itself and completely ignores Hyperliquid’s own layer 1 chain and the ecosystem that is starting to develop there, now up to $6 billion in total value deposited on the chain. This makes it the 8th largest chain by deposits in the world, in less than 1 year, quickly closing in on Coinbase’s Base chain ($8.6B) and Binance’s BNB Chain ($13.1B).
That is all fine and good, but here is the incredible kicker:
Bold, underline, italics, highlighting intentional.
At current levels, this means that Hyperliquid is generating nearly $1.3B in profit from just 11 employees, or $118 million profit per employee, or 393x that of Goldman Sachs. And whereas Tether remains privately held, Hyperliquid is public, with the entirety of the value capture going to the token holders. Adding Hyperliquid to our charts above, we now get this:
It feels almost insane to say this, but Nvidia is barely a blip on these charts compared to Hyperliquid and Tether. Now, Hyperliquid is obviously operating on a much smaller scale than Google, Meta, Apple, Nvidia or even Tether. But it is very much operating on the same scale as CME Group ($3.5B), Robinhood ($1.4B), Coinbase ($2.5B), ICE ($2.8B) and Nasdaq ($1.2B) and given Hyperliquid’s growth, it would not be surprising to see it start to match or surpass a few of these by next year. This level of efficiency is likely not possible to keep up over the long term, but the 60x cushion Hyperliquid has over Nvidia suggests they have ample room to expand headcount and operational spend if and when necessary while still maintaining their mind-boggling profitability.
This is only the beginning
Are these just one-off lottery-luck outcomes? There is a common saying from your author’s past hockey-playing life: “Two’s a fluke, three’s a streak”.
Aave is quickly climbing the charts against US banks, about to break into the top 30 in terms of assets while running with net margins twice that and growth 10x that of any of the incumbents it is blowing past. Tether is already passing Goldman Sachs and is hot on the heels of Visa in terms of annual profit and transaction count, requiring just a fraction of the employees (0.47%, to be exact) and operational costs to do so. And now Hyperliquid is putting traditional brokerages and exchanges to shame by just about any metric imaginable. We are deep in streak territory at this point and there will undoubtedly be more projects like these breaking out over time (Polymarket is a top contender, for example).
Definitely makes one stop and think: maybe there’s something here.
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Hyperliquid and Tether outpace Wall Street in profit per employee, with lean teams, massive trading volumes, and token buybacks creating a new standard of efficiency in crypto.
Traditional banks like Comerica and DeFi protocols like Aave now manage similar asset scales, but DeFi offers higher yields and instant liquidity. With $120B+ across leading protocols, governance tokens are capturing growing value as adoption accelerates.
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