ASTER Flies 23% After DEX Redirects 99% Fees to Token Buybacks
The Aster DEX unveiled a huge change to its tokenomics on June 17, allocating 99% of fees generated through its platform to an ASTER token buyback, with one-to-one burns from its reserves for each token purchase.
The #48-ranked cryptocurrency witnessed a massive rebound shortly after the announcement but has since given back most of those gains.
DEX Pushes Token Buybacks to 99% of Fees
In a post on X, the YZ Labs-supported perp exchange said its upgraded tokenomics model went live at 12:00 PM UTC on June 17. Under the new framework, 99% of daily platform fees will be used to automatically buy back ASTER through time-weighted average price purchases executed throughout the day and settled on-chain.
Every token bought back will trigger an equal burn from Aster’s reserve, with the team allocation burned first, resulting in what they called a 198% buyback: 99% repurchased and 99% burned from reserve.
However, the coins that’ll be bought back won’t disappear. They’ll go directly to stakers after being added to the protocol’s Loyalty Reward pool, which already distributes 300,000 ASTER in every epoch.
And the burn target is quite significant. Recall that the DEX launched with a total supply of 8 billion tokens, and it intends to burn that down to 3 billion, meaning more than 60% of that supply has been earmarked for destruction.
CoinGecko states that the present circulating supply is at about 2.68 billion, while the total supply is 7.82 billion, so there’s still a long way to go before the burn target is reached.
Where ASTER Stands Now
News of the new tokenomics mechanism had an immediate effect in the market. It saw ASTER’s value jump 23%, going from around $0.64 to $0.79 per CoinGecko. But it has since given back a fair bit of that gain and was trading near $0.65 at the time of writing, almost 73% below its September 2025 all-time high of $2.41.
Back in December 2025, the exchange announced a similar repurchase program, but at the time, the plan was to allocate 80% of daily fees to hoover up the token.
That was split between automatic daily buys, which took 40% of the fees, while another 20% to 40% was to be held in a discretionary strategic reserve, allowing the platform to conduct targeted purchases based on market conditions.
That announcement also coincided with a brief price uptick, with ASTER spiking 30% to $1.30, buoyed by news that ex-Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao was holding more than $2.5 million worth of the cryptocurrency.
The new plan has removed the strategic reserve approach entirely and pushed allocation much higher, with nearly all platform fee revenue going into automatic buybacks.
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