Jupiter’s token debate has reopened an old question in crypto: can buybacks work when supply keeps rising? Jupiter’s buyback plan was never large enough to keepJupiter’s token debate has reopened an old question in crypto: can buybacks work when supply keeps rising? Jupiter’s buyback plan was never large enough to keep

Solana co-founder weighs in on why Jupiter’s $70M buyback failed to boost JUP price

2026/01/05 12:32
3 min read

Jupiter’s token debate has reopened an old question in crypto: can buybacks work when supply keeps rising?

Summary
  • Large buybacks struggled to offset rapid growth in JUP’s circulating supply.
  • Ongoing unlock schedules kept steady sell pressure on the token.
  • Industry voices argue longer-term capital strategies may work better than short-term repurchases.

Jupiter’s buyback plan was never large enough to keep pace with the amount of new JUP entering the market.

The discussion picked up again in early January after comments from Jupiter (JUP) co-founder Siong Ong, followed by an explanation from Solana (SOL) co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, which triggered a wider debate over whether token buybacks make sense in high-emission crypto models.

A buyback overwhelmed by unlocks

Using about half of the protocol’s fee revenue, Jupiter spent over $70 million in 2025 to repurchase JUP. The effort appeared significant on paper. Jupiter processed billions of transactions and remained one of Solana’s most active decentralized finance platforms.

Price action told a different story. By early January 2026, JUP was trading near $0.20–$0.22, down close to 89% from its peak. The reason was not a lack of activity on the exchange, but the pace of supply growth.

Since launch, JUP’s circulating supply has increased by about 150%, while the buyback program has offset only a small fraction of newly unlocked tokens. Unlocks still happen on a set timetable.

Through June 2026, about 53 million JUP are scheduled to unlock each month, adding consistent sell pressure regardless of protocol performance. 

In this situation, the buybacks function more as a short-term buffer than as a long-term support. Ong acknowledged this fact and argued that it would be inefficient to continue allocating capital to buybacks, proposing a shift in focus to growth incentives instead.

Why Yakovenko says buybacks fall short

Yakovenko framed the issue in simpler terms. In markets with heavy emissions, short-term buybacks do not reset how sellers price risk. Tokens unlocked today are sold at today’s price, not at some future value implied by ongoing repurchases.

His alternative focused on time. Rather than buying back immediately, protocols could accumulate profits and deploy them later, or offer staking programs with longer lockups. Doing so forces unlocks to be valued against a future, post-buyback environment instead of spot demand.

It also encourages holders to think in longer cycles, similar to how balance sheets are built in traditional finance. The reaction across the Jupiter community has been mixed.

Some see buybacks as necessary for discipline and alignment. Others agree they lose impact when supply expansion is this aggressive.

Jupiter has already adjusted course by reducing its planned 2026 airdrop, cutting the allocation from 700 million to 200 million JUP. The lesson is harder to ignore. In token models where unlocks dominate, buybacks alone rarely change the outcome.

Market Opportunity
Boost Logo
Boost Price(BOOST)
$0.0003654
$0.0003654$0.0003654
-8.55%
USD
Boost (BOOST) Live Price Chart
Disclaimer: The articles reposted on this site are sourced from public platforms and are provided for informational purposes only. They do not necessarily reflect the views of MEXC. All rights remain with the original authors. If you believe any content infringes on third-party rights, please contact [email protected] for removal. MEXC makes no guarantees regarding the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the content and is not responsible for any actions taken based on the information provided. The content does not constitute financial, legal, or other professional advice, nor should it be considered a recommendation or endorsement by MEXC.

You May Also Like

HitPaw API is Integrated by Comfy for Professional Image and Video Enhancement to Global Creators

HitPaw API is Integrated by Comfy for Professional Image and Video Enhancement to Global Creators

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — HitPaw, a leader in AI-powered visual enhancement solutions, announced Comfy, a global content creation platform, is
Share
AI Journal2026/02/08 09:15
Journalist gives brutal review of Melania movie: 'Not a single person in the theater'

Journalist gives brutal review of Melania movie: 'Not a single person in the theater'

A Journalist gave a brutal review of the new Melania documentary, which has been criticized by those who say it won't make back the huge fees spent to make it,
Share
Rawstory2026/02/08 09:08
Facts Vs. Hype: Analyst Examines XRP Supply Shock Theory

Facts Vs. Hype: Analyst Examines XRP Supply Shock Theory

Prominent analyst Cheeky Crypto (203,000 followers on YouTube) set out to verify a fast-spreading claim that XRP’s circulating supply could “vanish overnight,” and his conclusion is more nuanced than the headline suggests: nothing in the ledger disappears, but the amount of XRP that is truly liquid could be far smaller than most dashboards imply—small enough, in his view, to set the stage for an abrupt liquidity squeeze if demand spikes. XRP Supply Shock? The video opens with the host acknowledging his own skepticism—“I woke up to a rumor that XRP supply could vanish overnight. Sounds crazy, right?”—before committing to test the thesis rather than dismiss it. He frames the exercise as an attempt to reconcile a long-standing critique (“XRP’s supply is too large for high prices”) with a rival view taking hold among prominent community voices: that much of the supply counted as “circulating” is effectively unavailable to trade. His first step is a straightforward data check. Pulling public figures, he finds CoinMarketCap showing roughly 59.6 billion XRP as circulating, while XRPScan reports about 64.7 billion. The divergence prompts what becomes the video’s key methodological point: different sources count “circulating” differently. Related Reading: Analyst Sounds Major XRP Warning: Last Chance To Get In As Accumulation Balloons As he explains it, the higher on-ledger number likely includes balances that aggregators exclude or treat as restricted, most notably Ripple’s programmatic escrow. He highlights that Ripple still “holds a chunk of XRP in escrow, about 35.3 billion XRP locked up across multiple wallets, with a nominal schedule of up to 1 billion released per month and unused portions commonly re-escrowed. Those coins exist and are accounted for on-ledger, but “they aren’t actually sitting on exchanges” and are not immediately available to buyers. In his words, “for all intents and purposes, that escrow stash is effectively off of the market.” From there, the analysis moves from headline “circulating supply” to the subtler concept of effective float. Beyond escrow, he argues that large strategic holders—banks, fintechs, or other whales—may sit on material balances without supplying order books. When you strip out escrow and these non-selling stashes, he says, “the effective circulating supply… is actually way smaller than the 59 or even 64 billion figure.” He cites community estimates in the “20 or 30 billion” range for what might be truly liquid at any given moment, while emphasizing that nobody has a precise number. That effective-float framing underpins the crux of his thesis: a potential supply shock if demand accelerates faster than fresh sell-side supply appears. “Price is a dance between supply and demand,” he says; if institutional or sovereign-scale users suddenly need XRP and “the market finds that there isn’t enough XRP readily available,” order books could thin out and prices could “shoot on up, sometimes violently.” His phrase “circulating supply could collapse overnight” is presented not as a claim that tokens are destroyed or removed from the ledger, but as a market-structure scenario in which available inventory to sell dries up quickly because holders won’t part with it. How Could The XRP Supply Shock Happen? On the demand side, he anchors the hypothetical to tokenization. He points to the “very early stages of something huge in finance”—on-chain tokenization of debt, stablecoins, CBDCs and even gold—and argues the XRP Ledger aims to be “the settlement layer” for those assets.He references Ripple CTO David Schwartz’s earlier comments about an XRPL pivot toward tokenized assets and notes that an institutional research shop (Bitwise) has framed XRP as a way to play the tokenization theme. In his construction, if “trillions of dollars in value” begin settling across XRPL rails, working inventories of XRP for bridging, liquidity and settlement could rise sharply, tightening effective float. Related Reading: XRP Bearish Signal: Whales Offload $486 Million In Asset To illustrate, he offers two analogies. First, the “concert tickets” model: you think there are 100,000 tickets (100B supply), but 50,000 are held by the promoter (escrow) and 30,000 by corporate buyers (whales), leaving only 20,000 for the public; if a million people want in, prices explode. Second, a comparison to Bitcoin’s halving: while XRP has no programmatic halving, he proposes that a sudden adoption wave could function like a de facto halving of available supply—“XRP’s version of a halving could actually be the adoption event.” He also updates the narrative context that long dogged XRP. Once derided for “too much supply,” he argues the script has “totally flipped.” He cites the current cycle’s optics—“XRP is sitting above $3 with a market cap north of around $180 billion”—as evidence that raw supply counts did not cap price as tightly as critics claimed, and as a backdrop for why a scarcity narrative is gaining traction. Still, he declines to publish targets or timelines, repeatedly stressing uncertainty and risk. “I’m not a financial adviser… cryptocurrencies are highly volatile,” he reminds viewers, adding that tokenization could take off “on some other platform,” unfold more slowly than enthusiasts expect, or fail to get to “sudden shock” scale. The verdict he offers is deliberately bound. The theory that “XRP supply could vanish overnight” is imprecise on its face; the ledger will not erase coins. But after examining dashboard methodologies, escrow mechanics and the behavior of large holders, he concludes that the effective float could be meaningfully smaller than headline supply figures, and that a fast-developing tokenization use case could, under the right conditions, stress that float. “Overnight is a dramatic way to put it,” he concedes. “The change could actually be very sudden when it comes.” At press time, XRP traded at $3.0198. Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
Share
NewsBTC2025/09/18 11:00