Crypto spent years creating tokens that had absolutely nothing to do with the businesses behindthem.
Protocol makes $100M, token holders get governance.
Amazing tech bro I can vote (I´m sorry this is boring)
Luckily, that model is changing.
More protocols are taking actual revenue and using it to buy their own tokens from the market.
A protocol buying $10M of its token and burning it is very different from announcing a future buyback proposal that may eventually happen if governance approves it.
And with revenue becoming one of the biggest narratives in crypto again,
I’ve been looking through the projects where the connection between product usage → revenue → token demand is actually starting to exist.
Here are 12 I think are worth understanding.
1. $HYPE Hyperliquid
Probably the obvious one.
Hyperliquid built one of the largest onchain perpetual exchanges and created a very simple relationship between people trading there and HYPE.
Trading generates fees.
Around 99% of those fees are directed toward buying HYPE through the Assistance Fund, with acquired tokens being removed from active circulation under the current mechanism.
This is basically the dream token model.
People trade BTC, ETH or some random perp at 3AM, Hyperliquid makes money from that activity, and a huge portion of that money eventually becomes demand for HYPE.
The important metric for me is Hyperliquid volume and revenue.
If the exchange continues taking meaningful market share, the buyer underneath HYPE continues receiving ammunition. If trading activity contracts substantially, that ammunition contracts with it.
Simple.
2. $PUMP PumpFun
PumpFun is a much dirtier version of the same idea.
Its business depends on people continuing to launch and trade memecoins, which makes its revenue much more sensitive to attention cycles.
But when activity is there, Pump can generate an absurd amount of money.
Part of that revenue has been used to purchase PUMP from the open market, with reported cumulative purchases reaching well into nine figures in some snapshots.
Every terrible coin launched by a teenager with a picture of an animal can indirectly become buying pressure for the platform token.
The thing I’d watch here is how much PUMP actually stays removed from liquid supply.
Buying a token into treasury and permanently destroying it are two completely different economic events.
And Pump still has to fight something much larger than competitors:
people eventually getting bored of launching shitcoins there.
3. $RAY Raydium
RAY is probably one of the least exciting names on this list.
and oh man this is exactly why I find it interesting.
Raydium has been around for years, survived multiple Solana cycles and sits underneath an enormous amount of the trading infrastructure people use without thinking about it.
A portion of protocol trading fees has historically been used to buy RAY and burn it.
So when Solana activity explodes, Raydium doesn’t only benefit as a DEX.
Launches, swaps and LaunchLab activity can feed the economic system around RAY as well.
And we recently saw another example with StonkFun integrating Raydium LaunchLab.
STONK gets the attention.
New tokens get the speculation.
4. $AAVE Aave
Aave generates money from lending markets.
The DAO then uses part of protocol revenue to purchase AAVE from the market.
The initial program was designed at $50M annually, although discussions in 2026 have considered lowering that toward ~$30M as revenue conditions changed.
There is one major difference from HYPE or a classic buy-and-burn:
AAVE purchased by the DAO goes into the Ecosystem Reserve.
That means the DAO is accumulating its own asset and can eventually use those tokens for incentives, staking, grants or other purposes.
I actually like that distinction because it forces you to look at the entire balance sheet instead of seeing the word “buyback” and immediately becoming bullish.
5. $SKY Sky
This is the protocol formerly known as MakerDAO.
USDS, collateralized lending, treasury assets and the broader Sky ecosystem generate surplus.
Part of that surplus can then be allocated toward purchasing SKY, with the capital-allocation system allowing tokens to be removed from circulation.
That gives SKY a completely different revenue source from something like PUMP.
Pump needs memecoin activity.
Sky needs its balance sheet and stablecoin system to keep producing surplus.
6. $RLB Rollbit
RLB is probably the weirdest business on this list.
Rollbit combines crypto trading, gambling and other speculative products, then historically uses part of the money generated by that activity to buy and burn RLB.
It almost behaves like a private internet business conducting share repurchases.
Users lose money trading or gambling.
Rollbit earns revenue.
Part of that revenue buys RLB.
RLB gets burned.
There are obvious reasons I’d apply a bigger risk discount here than Aave or Raydium: business concentration, regulatory exposure and less visibility into some of the underlying financial flows.
7. $SYRUP Maple Finance
Maple is interesting because it has been moving away from the old crypto playbook.
That playbook was basically:
print token → give token to stakers → call the emissions yield.
Maple instead approved a shift toward using protocol revenue for SYRUP purchases.
Instead of focusing on permanently destroying ETHFI, its buyback system directs value toward people actually participating in the token economy.
Certain eETH withdrawal-fee revenue is used for weekly ETHFI purchases, while parts of revenue from products across the Ether.fi ecosystem can support additional monthly purchases.
Purchased ETHFI is primarily distributed toward sETHFI holders.
So this looks closer to a token-denominated dividend.
EtherFi earns money.
It buys ETHFI.
People locking ETHFI receive part of that value.
Of course, the tokens still exist, and recipients can eventually sell them.
But I think that creates an interesting question for every buyback model:
Would you rather permanently destroy the asset or use the revenue to make holding and locking it economically useful?
9. $ENA Ethena
ENA might have one of the largest potential buyback mechanisms here.
And the word potential is doing a lot of work.
Ethena has discussed a framework where a very large percentage of net protocol revenue, potentially as much as 95% under the proposed structure, could eventually be directed toward ENA purchases once USDe reaches the required milestones.
If that fully activates at scale, the numbers could become huge.
USDe is already an actual financial product with revenue coming from its collateral, hedging structure and broader ecosystem.
But Ethena’s economics can change dramatically with market conditions.
Crypto has murdered enough spreadsheets already.
10. $LDO Lido
Lido is fascinating because it controls an enormous economic engine while LDO historically struggled to capture much of it directly.
People stake ETH.
Lido generates protocol revenue.
stETH becomes one of the most important assets in DeFi.
LDO holders mostly govern things.
That gap has been one of the biggest criticisms of the token for years.
The proposed buyback framework attempts to change that by allowing protocol revenue to fund LDO purchases once certain economic conditions are met, including sufficient annualized revenue.
But this is exactly where I separate existing buybacks from buyback optionality.
The question is how much of that business eventually reaches LDO.
11. $STONK StonkFun
I’ve talked about this one a lot recently.
StonkFun has quickly become one of the stranger launchpads on Solana because it lets people build markets around much more than SOL.
Basically: find an asset, build a market around it and somehow CT will trade it.
$22.9M in cumulative revenue, with $8.3M generated over seven days, while the protocol’s widely cited model directs 60% of revenue toward purchasing STONK and burning it.
This one needs more scrutiny because many of those figures come from project dashboards and ecosystem reporting, and there is currently plenty of FUD around reward tokens and sell pressure.
But that also makes it easy to know what to watch.
Revenue.
Actual capital spent buying STONK.
Actual tokens sent to the burn address.
If those three keep moving together, there is a real economic mechanism underneath the speculation.
12. $NET NetNet Capital
NET is different from almost everything else here because the buyback has a reference price.
NetNet is building an onchain treasury on Robinhood Chain.
The treasury holds USDG and other assets, deploys capital across products like Morpho and has increasingly accumulated tokenized equities.
Every NET represents a share of that balance sheet through the protocol’s NAV calculation.
And below NAV, the protocol can buy NET at approximately NAV minus 1.5% and burn what it purchases.
That means the treasury isn’t blindly buying NET every day regardless of price.
The buyback becomes relevant when the market values NET below the assets attributable to it.
Above certain NAV multiples, the mechanism actually moves in the opposite direction: NetNet can issue new NET through bonds and add the proceeds to its treasury.
Buy below NAV.
Issue above large premiums to NAV.
Grow the assets sitting between those two mechanisms.
NET was recently trading at a substantial premium to NAV, so the buyback isn’t the reason I’m interested in it today.
That is ultimately what determines whether the treasury is compounding faster than holders are being diluted.
CONCLUSION
I think “buyback” is about to become one of the most abused words in crypto.
And I want to know where the money goes.
annual buybacks / market cap.
If a $500M protocol can sustainably spend $50M every year purchasing its own token, that deserves my attention.
If a $10B token announces a $5M buyback while unlocking $500M of supply, I really don’t care.
Crypto finally figured out how to make protocols generate revenue.
Now I want to see which ones actually make that revenue matter for the token.
Its revenue meta my dear brother, take a look and let me know, remember to follow me if you enjoyed the read!
StarPlatinum.
