The Aster team announced a major tokenomics update on June 17. Now, 99% of the protocol’s daily fees will automatically be used to buy back ASTER tokens from the market.
In addition, each such buyback will be accompanied by an equivalent amount of tokens being burned from reserves. At Aster they call this a buyback and burn model with a coefficient of 198%. Following the announcement, the ASTER token rose by 17% in just a few hours.
Since the TGE , the team has already conducted six rounds of buybacks, purchasing over 266 million tokens totaling about $187 million.
The project, supported by YZi Labs, is finally moving away from irregular buybacks and switching to a permanent system operating under pre-set rules. Investors saw this as a strong positive signal for ASTER, which triggered a sharp price increase.
How Aster Plans to Use 99% of Platform Fees
According to the new model, 99% of all platform fees will automatically be used to buy back ASTER tokens through daily TWAP orders. This means the team will no longer be able to manually manage reserves for buybacks. The process is now fully governed by pre-written rules.
After the buyback, all ASTER tokens will be distributed among veASTER holders as rewards. In addition, in each epoch, participants will also receive a base reward of 300,000 ASTER.
At the same time, the protocol will burn from reserves the same number of tokens as were bought back from the market. Tokens allocated to the project team will be burned first. The process will take place every two weeks and will continue until the total supply is reduced to 3 billion ASTER.
See Also: The Tokenized Asset Market Exceeds $43 Billion
Currently, about 7.82 billion tokens are in circulation, with a maximum cap of 8 billion. This means that in the future Aster plans to destroy about 5 billion ASTER. How quickly this happens depends directly on user activity on the DEX platform and trading volumes.
The team has also made changes to the platform’s spot direction. Now, listing any token on the spot market at Aster will incur a fee of 50,000 USDT. These funds will also go toward buying back ASTER.
The collected fees will accumulate over the week, then be used to buy back tokens and, in about two weeks, be distributed among stakers as additional rewards.
How ASTER Buybacks Affect the Token Price
Interestingly, in October last year Aster had already announced the burning of half the tokens bought back from the market. However, at that time, the ASTER price did not react with growth and even fell by 2.8%.
A few weeks later, Aster completed the third stage of its program and burned 77.86 million tokens worth nearly $80 million, sending them to a special address for irrevocable destruction. Despite this, over the next day the token dropped another 2.7%.
For comparison, the Chainlink buyback program during the same period was accompanied by a LINK price increase of about 35%. This shows that burning tokens alone is not enough to increase an asset’s value.
By February, Aster CEO Leonard was already directly answering community questions about the weak price dynamics. In a post on X, he stated that token issuance and the buyback program are strictly following the approved plan, even if the market has not yet responded with growth.
He also confirmed the intention to suspend monthly token unlocks after the full launch of the staking mechanism.
