Article Details

The Race to $100M in Revenue

In the ever-evolving landscape of technology, AI, and finance, crypto has now quietly surpassed the AI sector in dominating the race to $100 million in revenue. Many of these companies, such as Hyperliquid, Axiom, and Pump.Fun, are achieving milestones that once took traditional web companies years or even decades to reach.

While legacy tech giants like OpenAI and Snowflake took 1,278 and 1,800 days respectively to hit $100 million in annual revenue, innovative companies building on crypto rails are doing it in a fraction of the time.
For instance, Hyperliquid, a decentralized perpetual exchange bootstrapped without external funding (No VC, ICO, Presale), reached this remarkable achievement in just 89 days. Others like Axiom (117 days to $100M in revenue), PancakeSwap (121 days), Pump.Fun (186 days), Photon (202 days), Trojan (276 days) or Backpack (853 days) are setting the standard for hypergrowth.

This isn’t mere hype; it’s driven by the unique advantages of crypto-native ecosystems. Unlike traditional Web2 companies, which often start with localized user bases and grapple with barriers like infrastructure fragmentation, payment friction, and gradual market penetration, crypto protocols inherit global, distributed, and deeply liquid ecosystems such as Solana, Aptos, Sui, or Hyperliquid from day one. These “native traders,” already immersed in DeFi and token cultures, provide a preset user base eager for superior products.

The result? Rapid scaling fueled by on-chain users (over 3.5 million daily active Solana addresses and more than 2 million on Hyperliquid), where better products quickly attract liquidity and volume. Protocols like Axiom and Pump Fun leverage a global user base that trades 24/7 with deep liquidity, generating fees from compounding trading volumes that turn early traction into sustainable revenue streams.

Building Superior Products on Crypto Rails

The key to success in crypto? Simply building a superior product on-chain.
At their core, blockchains are asset ledgers purposefully built for moving capital efficiently. Early low-throughput chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum prioritized security and neutrality over throughput, limiting their role in high-frequency coordination.

The emergence of high-throughput chains has expanded the design space, enabling trading, orchestration, and global coordination at scale. Chains like @Solana, @Aptos, and @SuiNetwork were designed from the ground up for speed, with faster block times that enabled tighter spreads, price discovery, and more efficient coordination. Functioning as a single global API, they provide the foundational rails upon which revenue generating applications are built, liquidity compounds, and markets deepen.

Founders at the earliest stages are increasingly choosing crypto rails over traditional ones, either knowingly (technical expertise) or unknowingly (practical experience or observed performance), because they offer Web2-like properties such as open access, scalability, and seamless integration plus additional benefits like decentralization, composability, permissionless onboarding, and built-in token incentives for user alignment and bootstrapping.

One of these traditional technical founders, @DavidRhodus, who previously built content delivery systems for major players like AWS, founded @pipenetwork, a decentralized CDN on Solana. While he could have built the company on traditional rails, he deliberately chose to build on crypto rails.

Today, his network offers all the capabilities of a traditional CDN while leveraging a hyper-localized mesh network of over 280k points-of-presence (PoP) nodes worldwide. These nodes, positioned within about 10 miles of end-users (compared to 150 miles for typical CDNs), cut round-trip latency by 50–70% by pushing content right to the edge.
Pipe is now a company that can compete with legacy giants like Akamai or CloudFront from day one, delivering data in as little as 3 milliseconds plus the speed of light (because of hyperlocalization), has the ability to settle instantly on crypto rails and is able to offer a better product at a more effective cost to users.

In addition to these decentralized networks’ inherent properties, founders building better trading products on crypto rails can tap into a global network of 24/7 market participants who are already opted-in users of the underlying infrastructure.

These include wallet holders like @Backpack, @Phantom, or @MetaMask; fee-paying traders on platforms such as Jupiter, dYdX, Binance, and Backpack; and people ready to use your product from day one.
Unlike traditional marketplaces that must bootstrap both supply and demand sides from scratch, often facing chicken-and-egg problems, crypto markets function like global APIs, enabling easier user onboarding through instant, borderless access without regulatory hurdles or geographic restrictions.

Consider @Robinhood: It requires users to be at least 18, have a valid Social Security number, U.S. residency, and a linked bank account, plus generally being a U.S. citizen, permanent resident, or visa holder in the U.S., U.K., or E.U. In contrast, @HyperliquidX, @Titan_Exchange, or @JupiterExchange lets anyone worldwide with an internet connection access a deeply liquid, 24/7 market via just a wallet and crypto.

These uniquely superior products, combined with global 24/7 networks, have enabled companies to achieve revenue at a much faster rate than any others in technology history.And if you can build a better product, crypto’s deep liquidity, global nature, and 24/7 markets can help your company soar to hundreds of millions if not billions in revenue.

This is evidenced by Hyperliquid, which achieved over $100 million in revenue in less than 90 trading days and now boasts annualized revenue exceeding $1.25 billion (DeFi Llama), with cumulative fees surpassing $450+ million since its launch in late 2024.

In contrast, companies like @Snowflake (1,278 days) or @OpenAI (1,825 days) built wildly successful products but contend with slower adoption cycles. Even breakout AI firms like Loveable, which hit $100 million in ARR in less than 12 months have been outpaced by crypto’s sub-100-day sprints.
So, to scale revenues fast, craft a killer product that tackles a real-world problem at scale. But to hyper-scale? Do it on the deeply liquid crypto rails who have embedded native traders ready to use your killer app.

By: https://x.com/MichaelPinto_/

The Race to $100M in Revenue was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.