Aster DEX redirects 99% of fees to ASTER buybacks and burns

The Aster decentralized exchange announced a major overhaul of its ASTER token economics on June 17, 2026, directing nearly all platform revenue to token buybacks and introducing a matching burn mechanism aimed at significantly reducing the token's total supply. The changes took effect at 12:00 PM UTC.

Under the new model, 99% of the platform's daily fees will be used to automatically purchase ASTER tokens from the market through a time-weighted average price process. All repurchased tokens will be distributed to veASTER stakers as additional rewards, layered on top of an existing base loyalty reward pool of 300,000 ASTER per epoch. Rewards are distributed according to a user's lock weight within the staking system.

Concurrently, the protocol will burn an equal amount of ASTER from its reserve holdings for every token bought back, creating a paired mechanism the project refers to as a "198" model. The burn program will start with tokens from the team allocation and be executed biweekly. The long-term goal is to reduce ASTER's total supply from its initial 8 billion tokens down to 3 billion, a potential reduction of 5 billion tokens.

The update also incorporates a secondary source...