Four protocols I track describe themselves as buying back their own token, and the four promises have almost nothing in common. The word does a lot of hiding. A buyback can mean tokens are permanently destroyed, or that they are sitting in a vault someone still holds the keys to, or that a team has decided for now to spend some revenue this way and could decide otherwise next quarter. Those are different claims on future supply, and only one of them is irreversible. hyperliquid:native is the strict version. Protocol fees buy HYPE on the open market and the tokens go to an address with no private key, which makes the destruction provable rather than promised. Validators formalized the mechanism rather than leaving it as a team policy. That is about as binding as this gets. The catch is the buyback is denominated in dollars, so a rising price retires fewer tokens for the same spend. Tokens repurchased fell roughly 61% year over year while the dollars spent fell under 20%. The support mechanically weakens exactly when the price is working, and there is a separate overhang underneath it, with a large tranche of team tokens vested but unclaimed. ethereum:0x1f9840a85d5af5bf1d1762f925bdaddc4201f984 is the conditional version, and it is the newest. Governance had to vote the fee switch on, which it did in late July, and the mechanism itself is code rather than discretion. But the burn rate is a function of trading volume, and a meaningful share of that volume currently runs on a chain where gas is being subsidized. Day one spike burned 106,000 tokens. The 30-day mark lands Saturday, and the number that matters is the lowest sustained rate over the window rather than the average, because the average is still carrying the launch. solana:pumpCmXqMfrsAkQ5r49WcJnRayYRqmXz6ae8H7H9Dfn is the discretionary version. The share of revenue directed to buybacks was cut from most of it to half of it in April. The revenue is real and recovering, but the allocation is a dial the team controls, and it has already been turned once. A policy that has been changed is a policy that can be changed. Same dollar-denominated arithmetic applies here too. $LINK is the one most people misread. Chainlink converts revenue into LINK on the open market, including revenue from enterprise contracts that settle in dollars, which almost nobody else does. Then it puts the tokens in a timelocked reserve. A reserve is not a burn. The tokens still exist, and the contract permits them to move eventually. Scale is the bigger challenge as roughly $60 million a year of conversion against a market capitalization near $7 billion absorbs about 1% of supply, while team-managed unlocks have added multiples of that. Emissions are outrunning absorption by something close to ten to one. The business is winning its market. The token is losing the arithmetic. The ranking that matters is not which protocol buys back the most. It is which promise survives someone changing their mind. Provably unspendable beats code-executed beats team policy beats a vault with keys. The market frequently prices all four the same way. Observations, not advice.