At the year’s buzziest blockchain conference, a new crypto powerhouse emerges

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.