Token buybacks are booming. But are they good for crypto projects?

As the industry matures and borrows more pages out of TradiFi’s playbook, crypto projects are starting to adopt some of the behaviors of public companies.The latest craze rocking cryptoville is token buybacks: using revenue to buy back your own token.So far in 2026, crypto projects have spent about $640 million on the practice, up around 17% from the same period the year prior, and an order of magnitude more than the $366,000 spent in 2024. Hyperliquid and Pump.fun accounting for almost 90% of the current spend.So what’s the sudden appeal? Buybacks can create demand for a token, while burns can reduce the supply making each token more valuable. That dynamic can cause upward pressure on the token price.It also gives holders a more tangible connection to the economic activity on the underlying protocol. Orest Gavryliak, chief legal officer at decentralized exchange aggregator 1inch, tells Magazine:“When projects implement revenue-funded buybacks and burns, they typically have one of two objectives in mind: either to decrease the token supply in circulation or to demonstrate the rationale for investing in protocol revenues.”Gavryliak says that telling users a project has “bought and b...