NeutralHYPEHyperliquidHyperliquidSUSHI

Today on

Revenue and buybacks are one of the biggest token narratives of the next cycle. We've already seen the attention Hyperliquid, Pump. fun, and other protocols have attracted by connecting actual business revenue to their tokens. If a protocol is generating millions in fees, why shouldn't some of that value flow back to its tokenholders instead of relying on endless emissions? I expect more projects to move in this direction. One example is @katana, which is making some pretty significant changes to how $KAT works. The biggest one is a shift toward revenue-funded buybacks. • Katana has acquired three pieces of its DeFi infrastructure: • Katana Swap (Sushi deployment) for spot trading • Katana Perps (IDEX) for leveraged trading • Vault Bridge for earning yield on bridged assets Add sequencer fees, and that's four revenue streams feeding into the ecosystem. Those fees help fund automatic $KAT buybacks, and 100% of the bought-back tokens go to avKAT stakers The old voting and locking system is also being phased out. You simply stake $KAT, rewards compound automatically, and the unstaking cooldown drops from 45 days to 7. Of course, buybacks alone don't make a token a good investment. The real question is how much revenue these products can generate and how consistently that translates into buybacks. But I do think the direction is worth watching. The next cycle might put more weight on what protocols actually earn, and how much of it reaches tokenholders.

RWA perps went from $18B to $2.23 TRILLION in one year. That’s 122x. Stocks and commodities are now 18% of all perp volume. A year ago it was basically zero. Crypto feels dead right now, but charts like this say otherwise. Real usage is exploding. https://t.co/efGjdTTnVn

Crypto’s revenue numbers look rough this year. Look closer though. Up to 30% of it could come from institutions and wider economic use, not just traders flipping tokens. That’s the adoption story the headline misses. My top 7 reads this week:

Venice burned about $1.06M of $VVV in October, its biggest regular month so far. The bad news is that total supply is still going up, because more new VVV came out in October than got burned. However... That math changes soon in January 2027. Right now about 19K new VVV hits the market every day from staking rewards and unlocks. Most of the scheduled unlocks end on January 1, so that drops to around 6K a day. If burns stay the same, they cover about a quarter of new supply instead of 7.5%, roughly 3x the impact. Usage is growing fast too. Venice says @AskVenice went from about 250B to over 1T AI tokens (the small chunks of text AI reads and writes) a day in October. There are two catches though, and both are bad for holders. 1, Usage isn't the same as paid revenue. Even after January, burns need to grow about 4x before supply really shrinks. 2. VVV holders don't own any of Venice's revenue. The company decides how much to burn, and it can change that. So I'm cautiously bullish, but only for a window. Investor tokens start unlocking in July 2027 and could add up to ~6K VVV a day, which is about as much as all the new supply after January. So January to July is the six months where burns face the least new supply they'll see for years, and if they can't catch up to it then, I don't think they ever will.

What are the biggest tokenized stocks? Circle sits at #1 with $370.9M. Strategy is #4 at $213.4M, and it started the year at about $11M. I think on-chain buyers want stocks from their own corner of the market. Two of the top four are crypto companies, and Tesla fell to #6. https://t.co/JFTtcmE8ZM