Crypto Projects Spent $638M on Token Buybacks in 2026, and It Is Becoming the New Way to Pick Coins

Crypto projects have poured roughly 638 million dollars into buying back their own tokens so far in 2026, a figure that edges past the 545 million spent over the same stretch of 2025 and dwarfs the barely-there 366,000 dollars logged across the whole of 2024, and on the surface it reads like a maturing industry finally learning to hand revenue back to holders the way listed companies return cash through share repurchases. Look one layer down, though, and a more useful story appears, because according to data compiled by Allium Labs and relayed by the Financial Times, just two projects, Hyperliquid and Pump.fun, account for nearly 90% of that entire buyback pile, which means the headline is less about a broad trend and more about a small handful of protocols that actually earn enough to fund one. That concentration is the real signal, and we think it is quietly becoming one of the sharpest lenses for deciding which tokens are worth holding into the next cycle.

The buyback boom is really a story about two protocols

The reason Hyperliquid and Pump.fun tower over everyone else is simple, because they are two of the very few on-chain businesses generating serious money and their token models are wired to feed almost all of it straight back into the market.