Hashcats minting slows, reducing buyback support for HASH

Hashcats, the browser-based mining project that lets users solve hash puzzles to mint pixel-cat NFTs, is hitting a wall. Minting activity has dropped significantly as the project enters its tenth epoch, and that slowdown is pulling the rug out from under the buyback mechanism designed to prop up the $HASH token. The numbers paint a clear picture: 4,566 mints recorded in recent days, well below the pace needed to hit the project’s 16,376-cat target. With only 9,109 cats mined so far, roughly 55% of the way there, the project’s economic engine is sputtering at a critical moment. The economics of slowing miners To understand why fewer mints matter for $HASH, you need to understand how the plumbing works. Hashcats operates on a flywheel: users pay ETH to mine NFT cats, 30% of those mint proceeds feed into a buyback mechanism that purchases and burns $HASH tokens, and 5% of swap fees on the token do the same. More minting means more ETH flowing into buybacks, which means more tokens getting permanently destroyed. That flywheel has been spinning reasonably well up to this point. The buyback mechanism has burned 1.8 million $HASH tokens, wiping out 41.3% of total issuance using approximat...