Bitcoin traded below $100,000 for the first time in six months on November 14, marking the third sharp correction after mid-September and mid-October. The pullback came as investors priced in a cooling of expectations for further Federal Reserve rate cuts and liquidity pressures tied to a potential U.S. government shutdown. While traders focus on Bitcoin’s price path, a growing set of blockchain projects is delivering real use cases that appear to lift token prices through on-chain economics.
Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange, has become a standout example. The platform eliminated gas fees and launched a tiered fee model—taker 0.035% and maker 0.01%—with about 97% of trading fees funneled into an Assistance Fund that buys back and burns the HYPE token. In the first half of 2025, daily fee income surpassed $3 million, enabling more than $600 million in buybacks for the year, representing over 45% of the sector’s total buybacks and burning about 21.36 million tokens (roughly 2.1% of total supply). As a result, HYPE’s price rose from around $3 in November 2024 to above $50 by August 2025, a rise linked to higher trading activity on Hyperliquid and the resulting flywheel effect.
Uniswap, previously criticized for a dormant UNI token, has proposed a “Unification” plan to redirect a portion of fees into protocol buybacks. If approved, UNI buybacks would rely on converting a share of fees into buybacks, potentially generating about $38 million in monthly buybacks. The project’s annual fee revenue is on the order of $1.8–$1.9 billion. The dYdX community has also moved to allocate around 75% of its fee revenue to buybacks. Taken together, these moves reflect a shift from regulatory avoidance toward building revenue-generating products and relying on on-chain governance to share profits, with potential expansion into computing resources, AI, on-chain marketing, and data oracles. Beyond the regulatory uncertainties of the Biden era, global projects are pursuing real-world monetization, increasingly on-chain finance in the United States and worldwide. How Korean firms and citizens position themselves, and which tokens and services they adopt, will require careful, macro-level judgment.
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