How are buybacks becoming the new meta in crypto? crypto has

How are buybacks becoming the new meta in crypto? crypto has had one fundamental problem for a while: good project ≠ good token a protocol can have god-tier tech, millions of users, and print massive revenue, but if that value isn't captured by the token, business growth doesn't mean positive price action. that's exactly why the market is looking beyond vanity metrics like revenue or fees and focusing on value accrual - how the yield actually flows back into the token. in 2024 alone, projects have spent around $820m on token buybacks, with almost 70% of that coming from Hyperliquid and Pumpfun. But what's more interesting isn't the pump itself, but why buybacks became a meta in the first place. in TradFi, the logic is simple: a company prints money and returns it to shareholders via dividends or buybacks. historically, most crypto projects lacked this connection. a protocol could generate millions in fees, while the governance token holder basically just got the right to vote. buybacks change this: the more a protocol earns, the more tokens it can sweep from the market. $HYPE was one of the first major examples of this model, and now we're seeing similar mechanics from Aave, Uniswap, and others. but here’s the catch: $10m in buybacks means nothing in isolation. if a project is dumping $30m worth of tokens through emissions and unlocks at the same time, holders are still getting rekt by inflation. so it makes sense to evaluate crypto buybacks like we do in equities: Buyback Yield = annualized buyback volume / market cap, or even better, adjusted for emissions and unlocks. and this is where the real repricing begins: the market is slowly shifting from asking "how much does the protocol earn?" to "how much of that revenue actually flows back to the holders"