Jupiter Token Buyback Controversy, Vitalik's 2026 Vision, What's the Overseas Crypto Community Talking About Today?
Publication Date: January 4, 2025
Author: BlockBeats Editorial Team
Over the past 24 hours, the crypto market has displayed a trend of parallel evolution across multiple dimensions. Mainstream discussions have focused on a reevaluation of the token buyback mechanism's effectiveness, defining protocol actual revenue, and the discussion of Ethereum's long-term scalability roadmap; in terms of ecosystem development, Solana has explicitly shifted towards a "utility and privacy" narrative, community-friendly ICOs have garnered attention, and Perp DEX race competition has intensified.
I. Mainstream Topics
1. Discussion on Halting Token Buybacks
Controversy Surrounding Jupiter's Halting of Token Buybacks
Jupiter Exchange founder Siong initiated a discussion on X proposing to halt the JUP token's buyback plan. Over the past year, Jupiter has allocated over $70 million to buybacks, but the token price has seen little substantial improvement. Siong believes that these funds should be redirected towards user growth incentives, such as new user subsidies, active user rewards, to drive ecosystem scalability.
This proposal quickly drew community attention and sparked discussions with other projects (such as Helium halting HNT buybacks), gradually evolving into an industry-level reflection on "whether the buyback mechanism is still effective."
Community feedback has been highly polarized, but the majority of views do not advocate for "completely abandoning buybacks" but rather call for more structural reforms.
Anatoly Yakovenko (Toly) proposed converting profits into future claimable assets and rewarding long-term holders through a one-year staking incentive to extend the fund's life cycle and strengthen token value anchoring. Some users also suggested providing staking incentives in stablecoin form (e.g., USDC, 25% APY) to try to reduce short-term selling pressure. Opponents pointed out that the root cause of price weakness is team unlocks and continuous selling, rather than inadequate buyback efficiency. Jordi Alexander and others further proposed introducing a dynamic buyback model based on the PE ratio to avoid "buying high and inefficiently consuming" during high valuation stages.
Overall, the consensus gradually forming in the community is that buybacks themselves are not ineffective, but their effectiveness is severely diluted in a structure where tokens and equities are highly misaligned and selling pressure persists. Some are concerned that halting buybacks will accelerate price declines, but more voices believe that, compared to defensive bottoming out, prioritizing growth is a more realistic path forward.
HNT Buyback Suspension Discussion
Helium founder Amir announced the suspension of HNT token buybacks, citing the market's "almost no response" to the project's buyback actions.
Helium and Helium Mobile collectively generated about $3.4 million in revenue in October, but Amir stated that rather than continuing buybacks seen as "ineffective consumption," he prefers to invest the funds in user growth, including expanding the mobile user base, increasing network coverage, and promoting carrier offload usage. It is important to note that Helium's Data Credits continue to burn to support network offload demand, but the token buyback itself has been temporarily put on hold until market conditions improve.
There is a clear community split. Individuals like Foobar criticized this decision as equivalent to admitting a "lack of revenue sharing with token holders" and questioned the project's long-term commitment. Some also suggested exploring revenue sharing or dividend mechanisms to enhance holding incentives, but Amir responded that such designs face practical hurdles at the regulatory level. Supporters, on the other hand, believe that using funds for real growth instead of "throwing into a black hole" is more practical.
Some users pointed out that tokens from projects like DePIN are often seen by the market as "usage tokens" rather than equity instruments, leading to their long-term systemic undervaluation; buybacks are only likely to be effective when there is virtually no selling pressure, otherwise, they are more of a short-term "optical effect." This discussion is also frequently juxtaposed with Jupiter's proposal, becoming a typical case of "buyback mechanism failure in a bear market."
Does "Solana Culture" Render Buybacks Ineffective?
In the Jupiter and HNT buyback dispute, user Stoic Savage put forward a more radical view, suggesting that the issue lies not in the buyback itself but in a structural flaw in the Solana ecosystem. He described Solana as a highly "internalized" ecosystem, with internal transactions, team unlocks, and extractive tokenomics continuing to offset any positive impact buybacks might bring.
This view has resonated strongly in the community, with many agreeing that the Solana ecosystem has long-term issues of "moral bankruptcy" and "insider prioritization," making buybacks almost doomed to fail in such an environment. However, some users oppose simply attributing buyback failures to the mechanism itself, pointing out that Solana's issues stem more from high emissions, frequent unlocks, and team sells, rather than inherently invalid buyback logic. Individuals like Wow Im Farming criticized that some founders turning to the buyback narrative are just masking deeper token design flaws.
The overall sentiment is leaning towards pessimism, with some users starting to use ecosystems like Hyperliquid as a benchmark, emphasizing that "repurchases can only have real value in the absence of structural selling pressure."
2. Controversy Over DEX Revenue Data Comparison
Hayden Adams publicly criticized Aerodrome's revenue data as misleading: Aerodrome categorizes 100% of LP fees as "protocol revenue," then returns it to LPs through token emissions, greatly inflating recorded income. The data shows that Aerodrome reported approximately $4.34 billion in "revenue" last year, but during the same period, it needed to pay about $8 billion in incentive costs.
In contrast, Uniswap adopts a more conservative strategy, only extracting a small amount of protocol fees (about $60,000 daily on average), emphasizing long-term sustainability rather than short-term optical numbers. Tervelix refers to Aerodrome's revenue as an "illusion," pointing out that it is closer to gross revenue, while Uniswap is more like a net profit model, and LP earnings come directly from real fees rather than token dilution.
Supporters of Aerodrome counter that Uniswap Labs itself relies on approximately $120 million in token emissions to sustain operations, essentially diluting holders as well; while also noting that Uniswap had significant early investments and has been in a "high-cost, low-revenue" state for a long time.
The Uniswap camp emphasizes that its model is closer to infrastructure logic, where LPs can receive returns without relying on subsidies, suitable for long-term existence; while Aerodrome is more like "TVL leasing," which may face rapid liquidity depletion once incentives stop.
The overall consensus is gradually becoming clear:
Aerodrome is more "friendly" to current holders, but inflation and incentive dependence pose significant risks;
Uniswap has a slower growth pace, but the model is closer to long-term infrastructure.
The discussion then expanded to include other DEXs like Meteora, Jupiter, raising more questions about fee metrics and the definition of "real income."
3. Vitalik's Outlook for 2026
Vitalik Buterin released a lengthy New Year post, reviewing Ethereum's key developments in 2025, including gas limit increases, zkEVM performance breakthroughs, and PeerDAS's improvements to data availability. However, he also emphasized that Ethereum still needs to continue advancing in terms of usability and decentralization.
Vitalik once again positions Ethereum as the "world computer," with its core goal being to build an application ecosystem that is trustless, censorship-resistant, and free from third-party intervention. He emphasizes the importance of privacy protection and "walkaway resilience" (i.e., the system's ability to continue running even if developers disappear). He describes Ethereum as a "rebellion" against the subscription platform trend, focusing on serving the infrastructure layer of finance, identity, and governance.
The community's response has been positive. Gabriel Shapiro and others express gratitude to Vitalik for upholding cypherpunk values; the Milady meme resurfaces once again as a cultural response.
However, there are differing views, with Richard Heart taking the opportunity to promote PulseChain and emphasize the decentralized advantages of a standalone chain. There are also discussions pointing out that chains like ICP have potential in terms of "on-chain applications."
Some users note that Ethereum's success is also attributed to the cultural and liquidity foundation brought by meme assets (such as $PEPE). The overall sentiment is optimistic, but there are also calls to further promote decentralization at the application layer, especially in terms of front-end censorship resistance. Figures like Rip.eth once again summarize, stating, "Ethereum fundamentally remains a rebellion."
II. Mainstream Ecosystem Updates
Solana: 2026 Ecosystem Focus
The Solana team releases the 2026 Solana Ecosystem Outlook, clearly shifting the growth focus from speculation to utility-driven development. The report highlights upcoming upgrades, record-breaking stablecoin and RWA adoption, inflows of ETF-related funds, and a series of catalysts stacking up.
The core narrative is broken down into six directions:
1. Payments and Stablecoins: USDC, PYUSD, etc., focusing on cross-border remittances and e-commerce payments
2. RWA Tokenization: Involvement of institutions like Ondo Finance, BlackRock, emphasizing compliance and institutional capital
3. AI Oracles and DeFi: Nosana, io.net, supporting low-latency AI inference and compute scheduling
4. Privacy Infrastructure: Arcium, Umbra, building privacy capabilities through ZK and confidential computing
5. Prediction Markets: Kalshi, Drift, serving as real-time information infrastructure
6.x402 Micro Payment Protocol: Proposed by Coinbase for programmatic and machine payments
Overall Goal Clear: Propel Solana from "transaction- and speculation-driven" to "executable application-oriented network," positioning 2026 as the execution year.
Community widely acknowledges this pragmatic approach. Users like cryptod0n see privacy as the core narrative for 2026, forming a clear "privacy stack" around projects like Arcium, Magicblock, and others. Discussions also extend to cross-chain interoperability (e.g., Base-Solana via Chainlink connection), seen as potentially introducing billions of dollars in DeFi liquidity.
Overall sentiment tends toward optimism. Some users (e.g., ray) look back on 2025 achievements—stablecoin supply growing to around $16 billion, Visa settlement implementation—and consider 2026 more as continuity than a reversal. Privacy-related projects receive the most interaction, with ZeraLabs, Nulltrace, and others being continuously added. The emerging consensus is that Solana is transitioning from the "fastest chain" to the "private and practical chain." A few voices remind of unresolved structural issues like high emissions, but this does not affect the overall bullish view.
MetaDAO's New ICO: Ranger Finance
MetaDAO announces its latest ICO project, Ranger Finance, will take place on January 6–10, 2026, with a fundraising target of $6–8 million.
The token distribution structure emphasizes "user-first": ICO allocates 39.02 million RNGR tokens (39.02% of total supply), with 100% unlock at TGE; team and investor TGE with 0% unlock, setting an 18-month lockup period and 2x–32x price milestones; ambassadors with 50% TGE unlock, the remainder released linearly over 6 months; Ranger Points holders have an exclusive allocation pool; excess funds used for 90-day buy wall support; Ranger positioned as the DeFi command center, integrating cross-chain liquidity, automated strategies, and cross-chain execution capability. This ICO also marks MetaDAO's first handling of projects with existing VC funding background.
Market feedback significantly leans positive. Individuals like sacha believe this structure strikes a balance between fundraising efficiency and holder trust, with the founding team rated as "S-tier." Discussions focus on two key advantages: public before VC and team unlock, and priority for points holders.
Some users (like Bumblebee) anticipate a significant oversubscription, drawing parallels to the previous MetaDAO project, believing the total commitment amount could approach or even exceed $100 million; Polymarket-related bets are active. A few concerns focus on the token distribution mechanism and the token's actual utility, but the overall consensus is that this ICO has set a new benchmark for community-friendly launches, with MetaDAO seen as a representative of the "ownership supercycle."
Privacy Projects on Solana
Solana Sensei releases the 2026 privacy narrative outlook, outlining the landscape of privacy projects on Solana, covering various aspects such as communication, transactions, payments, and computation, including Arcium, Umbra, Magicblock, Nulltrace, PrivacyCash, Offgridcash, etc.
The report emphasizes that privacy is shifting from a niche feature to a default attribute, with ZK and secure computation becoming long-term moats.
The community response is highly concentrated, with privacy widely seen as the most deterministic narrative thread for Solana in 2026. Fitzy regards ZeraLabs as a potential major entry point, while Moonwave Master highlights Beldex's infrastructure-level privacy capabilities.
The main divide lies in "native privacy chain vs. layered privacy modules." Some users prefer plug-and-play shielded transaction solutions, while others value system-level anonymity tools like Nulltrace, IP isolation, etc. The overall consensus is shifting towards Solana moving from the criticized "internalized ecosystem" towards a "privacy-by-default" technical trajectory. Although a few are concerned about the "dark web label," the mainstream view is that this is a demand-driven inevitability.
Ethereum: Vitalik on ZK-EVM and PeerDAS
Vitalik Buterin posts an article systematically explaining the combination of ZK-EVM (Alpha stage, performance close to production but still needing security work) and PeerDAS (already live on the mainnet), aimed at steering Ethereum towards a high-bandwidth, decentralized consensus execution network.
He views this solution as a breakthrough for the "trilemma," transitioning from Bitcoin's low-bandwidth strong consensus, BitTorrent's high-bandwidth weak consensus to a combination of the two.
The roadmap includes:
2026: ZK-EVM Node Operation, Gas Limit Increase
2026–2028: Gas Repricing and State Structure Adjustment
2027–2030: Further Scalability, ZK-EVM as Primary Validation Mechanism
Emphasis is placed on building a distributed blockchain to reduce centralization interference and enhance geographic fairness.
Community sentiment is overwhelmingly positive. Nikolai Kotsofane sees this as a paradigm shift from a "settlement layer" to an "execution network." Discussions center around PeerDAS improving data capacity and the synergy of reducing redundant computations with ZK-EVM.
Optimists believe DeFi and blockchain games may undergo structural changes, but they stress that security remains a key constraint. Some are also concerned about the speed of blockchain decentralization. The overall consensus is that this marks a significant milestone in the ten-year roadmap, and 2026–2030 will be Ethereum's comprehensive expansion period.
Ethena DAT: S-4 Amendment
On December 29, Ethena DAT submitted the S-4 Amendment. The filing reveals that despite ENA enjoying a roughly 30% discount in the token purchase agreement, the structure will ultimately exit the SPAC, and most ENA tokens will remain in an unrealized loss position during the vesting period over the next few years.
Community feedback is notably negative. smac bluntly states "uh oh," D2 Finance criticizes the weak PIPE signal, suggesting that SPAC promoters focus more on transaction completion rather than long-term quality. Discussions revolve around the complexity of accounting rules (related-party transactions triggering GAAP impairment) and insufficient structural transparency. Some users question the former Celsius CFO's management background.
The overall assessment is that the structure is complex, compounded by regulatory and accounting constraints, making the risk significantly skewed to the downside. While some suggest supplementing with non-standard metrics like mNAV, there is general concern that retail investors may find them hard to understand, leading to an overall bearish sentiment.
Perp DEX: Extended Short-term Revenue Surpasses Lighter
Blur data shows that Extended briefly surpassed Lighter in 24-hour revenue and set a new high of around $2 billion in perpetual contract trading volume. Since its launch in December 2024, its 24-hour trading volume has risen to about $14 billion, with a TVL of $133 million and $197 million in open interest. Meanwhile, Variational has accumulated a total trading volume of $26 billion, with $646 million in open interest during the same period.
Market sentiment is leaning towards euphoria. Laxo believes it is still "undervalued," lyonzzzz emphasizes multiple ATHs such as trading volume, OI, TVL, fees, etc., and believes that the season incentives have not yet kicked in. The overall assessment is: Extended and Variational are emerging as the core players of the new generation Perp DEX, with a few users comparing them to Hyperliquid and Aster, seeing Extended as having more long-term potential.
Others: MegaETH 2025 Investor Memo
MegaETH co-founder released the 2025 Investor Memo, reviewing progress from seed round to testnet, raising approximately $1.5 billion, and launching Fluffle, Echo, and the public sale mechanism. Technological highlights include real-time EVM, around 100,000 TPS, and sub-millisecond latency.
The 2026 plan includes the mainnet launch, TGE, and expanding real-time applications in gaming and DeFi, while continuing to emphasize transparency and community first.
Overall feedback is positive. Users generally acknowledge its long-term communication and introspection, believing that 2026 will be the year of MegaETH mainnet acceleration and application realization; test experience sharing is mainly focused on sub-10ms latency and production-level performance.
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Before using Musk's "Western WeChat" X Chat, you need to understand these three questions
The X Chat will be available for download on the App Store this Friday. The media has already covered the feature list, including self-destructing messages, screenshot prevention, 481-person group chats, Grok integration, and registration without a phone number, positioning it as the "Western WeChat." However, there are three questions that have hardly been addressed in any reports.
There is a sentence on X's official help page that is still hanging there: "If malicious insiders or X itself cause encrypted conversations to be exposed through legal processes, both the sender and receiver will be completely unaware."
No. The difference lies in where the keys are stored.
In Signal's end-to-end encryption, the keys never leave your device. X, the court, or any external party does not hold your keys. Signal's servers have nothing to decrypt your messages; even if they were subpoenaed, they could only provide registration timestamps and last connection times, as evidenced by past subpoena records.
X Chat uses the Juicebox protocol. This solution divides the key into three parts, each stored on three servers operated by X. When recovering the key with a PIN code, the system retrieves these three shards from X's servers and recombines them. No matter how complex the PIN code is, X is the actual custodian of the key, not the user.
This is the technical background of the "help page sentence": because the key is on X's servers, X has the ability to respond to legal processes without the user's knowledge. Signal does not have this capability, not because of policy, but because it simply does not have the key.
The following illustration compares the security mechanisms of Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, and X Chat along six dimensions. X Chat is the only one of the four where the platform holds the key and the only one without Forward Secrecy.
The significance of Forward Secrecy is that even if a key is compromised at a certain point in time, historical messages cannot be decrypted because each message has a unique key. Signal's Double Ratchet protocol automatically updates the key after each message, a mechanism lacking in X Chat.
After analyzing the X Chat architecture in June 2025, Johns Hopkins University cryptology professor Matthew Green commented, "If we judge XChat as an end-to-end encryption scheme, this seems like a pretty game-over type of vulnerability." He later added, "I would not trust this any more than I trust current unencrypted DMs."
From a September 2025 TechCrunch report to being live in April 2026, this architecture saw no changes.
In a February 9, 2026 tweet, Musk pledged to undergo rigorous security tests of X Chat before its launch on X Chat and to open source all the code.
As of the April 17 launch date, no independent third-party audit has been completed, there is no official code repository on GitHub, the App Store's privacy label reveals X Chat collects five or more categories of data including location, contact info, and search history, directly contradicting the marketing claim of "No Ads, No Trackers."
Not continuous monitoring, but a clear access point.
For every message on X Chat, users can long-press and select "Ask Grok." When this button is clicked, the message is delivered to Grok in plaintext, transitioning from encrypted to unencrypted at this stage.
This design is not a vulnerability but a feature. However, X Chat's privacy policy does not state whether this plaintext data will be used for Grok's model training or if Grok will store this conversation content. By actively clicking "Ask Grok," users are voluntarily removing the encryption protection of that message.
There is also a structural issue: How quickly will this button shift from an "optional feature" to a "default habit"? The higher the quality of Grok's replies, the more frequently users will rely on it, leading to an increase in the proportion of messages flowing out of encryption protection. The actual encryption strength of X Chat, in the long run, depends not only on the design of the Juicebox protocol but also on the frequency of user clicks on "Ask Grok."
X Chat's initial release only supports iOS, with the Android version simply stating "coming soon" without a timeline.
In the global smartphone market, Android holds about 73%, while iOS holds about 27% (IDC/Statista, 2025). Of WhatsApp's 3.14 billion monthly active users, 73% are on Android (according to Demand Sage). In India, WhatsApp covers 854 million users, with over 95% Android penetration. In Brazil, there are 148 million users, with 81% on Android, and in Indonesia, there are 112 million users, with 87% on Android.
WhatsApp's dominance in the global communication market is built on Android. Signal, with a monthly active user base of around 85 million, also relies mainly on privacy-conscious users in Android-dominant countries.
X Chat circumvented this battlefield, with two possible interpretations. One is technical debt; X Chat is built with Rust, and achieving cross-platform support is not easy, so prioritizing iOS may be an engineering constraint. The other is a strategic choice; with iOS holding a market share of nearly 55% in the U.S., X's core user base being in the U.S., prioritizing iOS means focusing on their core user base rather than engaging in direct competition with Android-dominated emerging markets and WhatsApp.
These two interpretations are not mutually exclusive, leading to the same result: X Chat's debut saw it willingly forfeit 73% of the global smartphone user base.
This matter has been described by some: X Chat, along with X Money and Grok, forms a trifecta creating a closed-loop data system parallel to the existing infrastructure, similar in concept to the WeChat ecosystem. This assessment is not new, but with X Chat's launch, it's worth revisiting the schematic.
X Chat generates communication metadata, including information on who is talking to whom, for how long, and how frequently. This data flows into X's identity system. Part of the message content goes through the Ask Grok feature and enters Grok's processing chain. Financial transactions are handled by X Money: external public testing was completed in March, opening to the public in April, enabling fiat peer-to-peer transfers via Visa Direct. A senior Fireblocks executive confirmed plans for cryptocurrency payments to go live by the end of the year, holding money transmitter licenses in over 40 U.S. states currently.
Every WeChat feature operates within China's regulatory framework. Musk's system operates within Western regulatory frameworks, but he also serves as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This is not a WeChat replica; it is a reenactment of the same logic under different political conditions.
The difference is that WeChat has never explicitly claimed to be "end-to-end encrypted" on its main interface, whereas X Chat does. "End-to-end encryption" in user perception means that no one, not even the platform, can see your messages. X Chat's architectural design does not meet this user expectation, but it uses this term.
X Chat consolidates the three data lines of "who this person is, who they are talking to, and where their money comes from and goes to" in one company's hands.
The help page sentence has never been just technical instructions.
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