The picturesque Wyoming village of Jackson Hole is known for its mountain peaks and abundant wildlife—and, in financial circles, as the late-summer host of the Kansas City Fed's annual central banking symposium—and for a few days each August it also becomes a gathering place for some of the most influential figures in crypto. The occasion is Anthony Scaramucci's SALT conference, which has become one of the industry's highest-signal events. This year, the attendee list included Binance's CZ and former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who now represents crypto exchange OKX.

The person who left the strongest impression, however, was Hyperliquid Strategies CEO David Schamis. He is still relatively unknown in crypto circles, but that may change quickly because of his company's rapid rise.

Schamis is an old-school Wall Street veteran who began his career at Salomon Brothers, the trading firm made famous in Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker. Today, he runs a publicly traded company built around accumulating Hyperliquid's HYPE token. In effect, Hyperliquid Strategies is a digital asset treasury, or DAT—a corporate structure that follows the playbook MicroStrategy popularized by using public markets to accumulate bitcoin. While many DATs have struggled, often trading below the value of the tokens they hold, Hyperliquid Strategies, which began trading in December under the meme-inspired ticker PURR, has seen its share price surge and its treasury position become more valuable.

Part of that success likely reflects Schamis's management. But the main reason Hyperliquid Strategies has avoided the problems that have plagued so many other DATs is that it is linked to a highly profitable engine: the Hyperliquid DeFi platform. Hyperliquid has been dominating the perpetual futures market—derivative contracts with no expiration date, first popularized by the offshore exchange BitMEX in 2016, that now rank among crypto's most heavily traded products—and using its fee revenue to burn HYPE tokens. That dynamic is even more compelling because the platform's users are not limited to crypto speculators. Commodities traders are also using perps to trade oil contracts and other traditional assets around the clock.

Until now, much of that activity has been concentrated overseas. Perpetual futures themselves have been largely absent from U.S.-regulated exchanges, which have historically offered only contracts with fixed expiration dates. Since Hyperliquid launched in 2023, its CEO, Jeff Yan, a Harvard graduate and physics prodigy, has used an offshore growth model to build the platform. That is beginning to change as Schamis's team steps up efforts to establish a regulated U.S.-based operation.

Other offshore firms have tried to break into the U.S. market, but most have failed, discovering how difficult it is to challenge established players such as Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood. Hyperliquid may have a better chance. Yan is American-born, and the platform has influential supporters, including President Trump and the chairman of the CFTC, the agency that oversees U.S. futures and derivatives markets, who is said to favor perpetual futures.

On the corporate side, whether it is called Hyperliquid Strategies, PURR, or something else, the company has assembled a formidable team. Schamis brings decades of TradFi credibility, while Jake Chervinsky, a widely influential crypto lawyer, is working to create a legal framework for DeFi in the United States.

Taken together, these factors suggest Hyperliquid could become a serious competitive threat to the crypto industry's established giants, much as Binance emerged suddenly in 2017 to become the world's largest exchange. The company was widely discussed among attendees in Wyoming last week.

Incumbents, take note.

Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com