Sky, the crypto protocol formerly known as Maker, has spent $75 million over the past six months on a token buyback program that has lifted SKY’s price by 8% since February.
In an update on Monday, the project revealed it used 5.5 million of its USDS stablecoin in August to repurchase 73 million SKY tokens. This brings the total spent on buybacks to 75 million USDS since the initiative began in late February.
Token buybacks are a common strategy among crypto projects to support prices by reducing circulating supply, thereby creating upward pressure on value.
SKY has climbed 8% since launching its buyback program.
The initiative began on Feb. 24, when the platform spent $4.28 million that month alone, according to its dashboard. At the time, SKY traded slightly above $0.063. Since then, the token has risen 8.1%, now changing hands at just over $0.0685, per CoinGecko data.
SKY reached a peak of $0.096 in late July, approaching its all-time high of just over $0.10 set in December. However, the token slid with the broader market afterward and failed to rebound during the mid-August recovery.
By comparison, tokens from similar platforms outperformed over the same period. Uniswap gained 6%, while Aave surged 25.8% since Sky’s buyback began, with both benefiting from August’s market rebound.
World Liberty Financial, Pump.fun roll out buyback programs
On Monday, World Liberty Financial — the Trumps’ crypto platform — proposed a buyback-and-burn scheme that would use all protocol fees to repurchase and permanently destroy its WLFI token. The token, which debuted on secondary exchanges less than a day ago, has already fallen over 16% to $0.23. Still, early buyers at $0.015 are sitting on gains of more than 1,400%.
Meanwhile, memecoin platform Pump.fun launched a buyback program in mid-July, allocating its revenue toward repurchasing its PUMP token. As of Tuesday, it has spent $66.5 million on the effort. The strategy appears to be paying off — PUMP is up nearly 30% in the past month and has climbed almost 70% from its July 29 all-time low, according to CoinGecko.
