It is feasible to buy back tokens without distributing them. However, distributing them through staking after reaching a new high is unreasonable, as short hedging could lead to a sharp drop in the GMX token. If possible, it is recommended to switch to burning, destruction, or sending to a black hole address.
Regarding seizing pricing power from CEXs, I support our high-quality project in achieving independent pricing.
90 will not be a liquidation line: those who sell along the way will not receive any reward distribution; those who hold through the entire move — who truly do not care about short-term fluctuations, like I do — will receive substantial reward allocations. Comparison with BB&Burn: BB&Burn is essentially a mechanism where returns are realized continuously. After the change, there is no longer a need to stake, no future incentive to remain locked, and participants can sell at any time. Under the current mechanism, the longer you persist, the greater your reward. This creates alignment and collective force.
Does this proposal account for the chances of survival for those for whom GMX is their main/only source of income?
In the event of a total shutdown of yield, such people will simply be forced to sell the GMX they hold, no matter how much they believe in the project or sincerely wish to hold tokens long-term.
Is there any strategic options for them ?
It’s completely impossible, but let’s assume the plan will work- $90 price reached and all accumulated GMX distributed to “super loyal long-term” holders. And what will happen after that? How will that high GMX price be maintained in the future?
I apologize for saying this, but this proposal is completely absurd and will definitely not work. Besides, couldn’t you have waited a couple of days with this proposal about BBD model changes until the current vote on same topic is over? Without interfering voters opinions and expectations.
Saulius, I am trying to understand why you are so categorically opposed. I know that you have always been positive about ideas with a long-term positive effect for GMX, but here something went wrong.
Please tell , do you agree that IF the hypothesis about a manipulation strategy by CEXs is correct, then the token is DOOMED to a near-infinite downtrend, given that this obviously gives ‘them’ essentially guaranteed income?
(I should specifically note that hypothesis not saying Binance is doing this! It could just be an affiliated market maker… with special connections and conditions, and the exchange itself might not know the details of the games its “fifth leg” is playing).
If you agree with this reasoning, it leads us down one branch of further discussion.
If you disagree, then the dialogue needs to continue in a completely different direction in an attempt to better understand you and your reaction.
This is quite a radical proposal. It resembles starting to manipulate prices. However, in the cryptocurrency market, price manipulation is actually the best form of advertising. A sharp price increase will improve our fundamental performance, similar to HYPE. After implementation, we will face significant short-term selling pressure. Q also pointed out that purchases could be made through the treasury. (If we cannot withstand the selling pressure, GMX could drop to $1.)
This is essentially a high-stakes gamble: either win everything back or lose it all, with considerable risk.
Such a strategy would never succeed in a regulated market because later buyers would have no reason to buy in—real yields would temporarily disappear. We can only hope that bots will drive up the price. However, in the crypto market, gamblers might actually push the price up.
I do not recommend implementing such a radical reform directly on GMX. Instead, I suggest starting with GT, the token from GMTrade. First, conduct the TGE for GT, then execute the above plan. Since GT is not listed on CEXs and its price isn’t manipulated there, we can observe how things play out more safely.
awesome proposal. i hope it passes
Sorry it took me a bit of time to respond to this very interesting and quite significant post. I didn’t want to rush through a response — wanted to collect my thoughts first.
Before I jump into the details of the proposal, I want to address a few strong comments that have come up in response — around the idea that “this is a distraction and the main reason for GMX token price decline is its underperformance against competition. Contributors shouldn’t be distracted with this and should rather focus on improving fundamentals and getting back into growth.”
First of all, while there is some truth in this statement, I want to point out that both personally and as an overall labs team, we are fully focused on growth and improving the fundamental metrics. The described issue is not a new one — it has come up many times, pushing us to investigate and evaluate our current buyback program and reward distribution to see if there is any manipulation or subversion happening. While it is important, we didn’t think this was the most critical thing to be focusing our energies on. This proposal is not coming from labs but from one of the key DAO members themselves. I dismiss the idea that somehow discussing this and doing something about this hypothesis means ignoring or not doing work on the main issues around growth. It is not an either-or situation — it can be both.
There are some very interesting and bold ideas presented in this proposal. Overall I am leaning toward supporting some of them, but I also think the proposal needs to embody more of a “try and test” approach rather than trying to do too many things at once. I also think some important implementation details need to be fleshed out and some questions answered before it goes to vote. I will describe what I mean as we go through each part of the proposal.
1. Withdraw All On-Chain GMX Liquidity
I agree with the intention here, but let’s get into more specifics. What is the exact type of on-chain liquidity available right now — where is it, what are the ranges, fee buckets, what is owned by the protocol versus others, etc.? There has already been some very valuable feedback around this, especially by X, Coin and others. Let’s incorporate that feedback and refine the proposal:
What are the exact changes we want to make to protocol-owned Uniswap liquidity?
Any POL addition to GMX V2?
Let’s also set up a process for evaluation and monitoring after the changes are made.
Let’s have a defined duration for the experiment. How long should we try this, what does success look like, and at what point do we consider adding back liquidity?
2. Redirect Buybacks to CEX (Binance TWAP)
This is the core of the proposal and the main mechanism to counter the “manipulation” thesis. While the solution seems straightforward, it needs the details fleshed out. Here are some things that come to mind:
This also needs a defined timeframe — it cannot be open-ended — along with clear criteria for evaluation.
The current buyback mechanism is automatic, decentralized, and anyone can participate. We need to design a new process to execute what has been described here. Will it be a manual process managed by someone at labs? A new DAO committee? Or a market maker we hire to handle it?
5. Deploy Treasury Buy Wall at $5
Yes, I like this and support it. I assume this is also executed on the CEX? Let’s clarify the operational details. I assume funds for this are separate and coming from Treasury reserves, not from weekly fees. Let’s also establish some rules for this program — limits on weekly deployment, etc. And GMX acquired through this buy wall should go back to Treasury and be kept separate from GMX acquired via regular buybacks.
3 & 4. Temporarily Suspend Staking Rewards / Introduce Staking Power Mechanism
These I am not fully convinced about. I’m not sure why they have to be part of this proposal or how they tie to the CEX overhang thesis. I’d say this part hasn’t been fully thought through — a lot of detail and rationale is missing for such a big and bold change.
I am sympathetic to the idea of pausing large weekly dividend distributions while GMX price is so depressed, and letting the buybacks continue so the protocol can accumulate supply back. This is not unprecedented — companies have done this many times in stock markets, where dividends are stopped and buybacks are increased (and vice versa) based on the state of the business and market expectations.
What I don’t like is the arbitrary $90 price target and a new, complicated, hastily designed mechanism for distributing pending rewards — which feels eerily similar to another version of the previous MP program that we dismantled. No wonder there is so much noise about this proposal, considering how bitter the fight was around the MP discussion. My suggestions:
Let’s not bundle this with the rest of the proposal. Take some time and come up with a much more thorough plan around this. This part is too significant a change to be combined with the rest without proper details and discussion.
That said, if the DAO wants to be really bold, I am not opposed to the idea of stopping rewards completely to stakers for a brief, fixed period. Let’s just leave the flexibility of when and how to restart and redistribute rewards to the DAO at a later date.
A more conservative option would be to proceed with Saulius’s proposal, which addresses the same issue differently by spreading out the rewards. That approach combined with the rest of these suggestions could itself be very powerful.
I’m sure folks can come up with other great ideas if we really want to pursue this direction.
Finally — I like these bold ideas. Let’s work through the details, establish timelines and milestones, and set up much clearer monitoring and success criteria so we can properly evaluate and test the hypothesis.
very excellent opinion. My view is:
1.Regarding BBD
GMX has been able to consistently maintain a very high staking ratio, and this is directly related to the BBD mechanism. If it were changed to BBB (or to the Dynamic BB&D Adjustment scheme proposed by Saulius), there is a risk that the project could face selling pressure.
2.Regarding BBB or BB
The selling pressure from BBD does suppress the token price to some extent. While the fundamental driver of token price is increasing platform revenue, introducing BBB or BB would objectively help reduce the selling pressure coming from BBD.
3.My suggestion
Keep the current BBD model unchanged for the existing product lines in order to maintain staking stability for the project. Use the launch of the new GMX-MEGA product line as an opportunity: allocate a portion of its revenue to introduce a BBB or BB mechanism for the project. This way, it does not affect the current stakers’ willingness to hold, while at the same time adding BBB or BB to help mitigate the selling pressure from BBD.
Imho Buybacks should happen on chain (not CEX) where they are:
Otherwise I agree
@Ekliptor it seems you dont get whole idea unfortunately.
The most important part of whole thing is that protocol need to acquire as much as possible GMX tokens from CEX . Thats why BB need to be done on CEX and then tokens should be moved out from there onchain.
We need to force them to maintain an exchange balance such that the number of tokens they sell into the order book does not exceed the tokens they actually have on their trackable onchain balance.
Otherwise, they won’t be able to provide for withdrawals, which will lead to scandal.
The hypothesis assumes that CEXs are currently trading uncollateralized GMX tokens. And there is no way to check this except by one of ways:
official audit
execution of proposal idea.
To check this, we need to, roughly speaking, buy up ALL available (on CEX) GMX tokens and create a withdrawal request for these tokens. (This is a simplified description of what the discussed proposal suggests.)
right now we at the point when the price is SO RIDICULOUSLY low compared to SO RIDICULOUSLY good GMX performance as a business, that we can afford to buy all these tokens, because we have money from generated platform revenue (which currently used for onchain buybacks)
If the hypothesis is correct and, let’s say, “they” printed 10x more tokens than ‘they’ actually have on their balance, the picture would look like this:
Given that they currently have approximately 800k GMX on their balance, this means the virtual total supply on the exchange is 8,000,000 GMX. We buy up 10% of this current CEX supply (which is only 800k GMX) and withdraw them.
At that moment, the exchange will see that we are effectively zeroing out their real supply, and they will have (roughly speaking) two paths:
1. Give us the tokens per the request. In this case, their public on-chain wallet will show ZERO tokens, and the exchange will effectively be forced to suspend GMX trading due to the inability to provide further withdrawals.
2. Freeze our withdrawal request indefinitely and start making excuses to buy time.
Obviously, neither option 1 nor 2 is acceptable for the exchange. Therefore, with 99% probability, the situation will not reach the described scenario. The exchange will catch on much earlier and start taking measures. And the measures are very simple—they will need to hedge these risks and will be FORCED to replenish their stock of real tokens themselves! There are only two ways to do this:
1. Incentivize other users to deposit their tokens to the CEX (effectively, they would be saving the exchange’s skin).
2. Start making on-chain token purchases themselves!
This is exactly why the proposal suggests introducing anti-incentives for participants so they don’t help the exchange or deposit their tokens to the CEX. It also suggests minimizing available GMX liquidity on the market so that the ELEPHANT (the CEX) is forced to make FAT purchases on an ILLIQUID on-chain market, thereby driving the price to the moon—and they essentially have NO other choice.
as simpol as that.
ps:
And looking back, I realize the oversight that was made in the original @gmsolq proposal when we were discussing his idea of activating the BB&D mechanism. We should have been doing this on CEXs from the very first days, not on-chain. That is, so that all generated income would be directed towards buying up tokens on Binance, with subsequent withdrawal of the tokens from the exchange and their distribution.
But that would have complicated the entire process, I understand that as well 
what if after 3 years the $90 target still isnt hit but we still get new stakers will it be a case of the noobs get staking pay outs as normal while the rest of us just have to hope and wait? Do you have any verifiable proof that Binance is suppressing the price? And why $90? Whats going to stop people dumping @ $90 to free up some liquidity and sending the price straight back down? I still say reverting back to the original ETH/AVAX and so on methods would solve this problem by creating buy pressure and getting rid of sell pressure
Thank you! You are the one totally understand this proposal!
Believe me will be crowds of such CEX “supporters” who will unstake and deposit to Binance if price increase 2-3x from current. So max you can achieve with this stupid proposal is artificial GMX price pump from current $6.5 to ~$20, spending most of valuable treasury funds on it. This would create the perfect exit liquidity for whales and deplete (bankrupt) the treasury.
Alright, let’s channel this assumption into a constructive direction.
Can you provide specific figures that, in your opinion, might be deposited onto CEXs by the participants you mentioned?
Please write three assumptions:
And let’s estimate what the consequences would be for us and what we can expect.
So, let’s assume the price has reached $20 and “everyone” has rushed to load their tokens onto CEXs. Give us the figures, please.
This phrasing shows that you have a distorted understanding of the current proposal.
The current proposal does not assume that even a single cent from the treasury will be spent on these purchases (at a price of $20).
All purchases will be made at our expense, using the money that we would have otherwise received as weekly staking rewards.
Essentially, this proposal is one large TWAP buy order for GMX on behalf of us—those who are long-term stakers on the platform.
Last week fees for staking rewards amounted to around $180k. I heard that a major holder is considering selling at $12+. Let’s say he’s patient and sells at a slightly higher price of 18. Based on the current weekly fees, this means that you will only be able to buy back 10k GMX from him, whereas he has 620k. So, it would take you 62! weeks to buy up all his bags. Not to mention other sellers or higher selling prices! Good luck with your “bold” trading strategy!
I don’t know anything about the plans of the mysterious holder you’re talking about. But let’s start from the assuption that the average weekly revenue of GMX is $1 million. Taking into account that 27% of this goes into the payout pool for staked GMX, we get that the protocol will weekly buy back tokens worth $270,000.
That is a $12,960,000 buy & “burn” mechanism throughout the year NON-STOP.
13 MILLIONS BUY AND 
. LOL.
“Burn” is in quotes because it’s a virtually-burn, as all purchased tokens will effectively be removed from circulation (to later reward those who are long-term oriented).
Anyone who DOES NOT BELIEVE that GMX will continue to develop successfully over a horizon of at least two more years will obviously consider it a blessing to sell all their tokens as soon as possible.
ANYONE who BELIEVES that GMX will continue to develop successfully over a horizon of at least two years—if they are in their right mind—will not want to sell their tokens, seeing such an annual roadmap on the table and seeing GMX’s current business metrics.
I’d like to play devil’s advocate.
Since I support this proposal, let me be the “tenth man” (even though there are already some opposing voices).
First, let me state clearly:
a) I support Q if he can be the leader GMX needs.
b) I support stronger marketing efforts and more developers to accelerate execution.
c) I support the Board’s overall decision — even when I disagree. That’s the essence of decisive and responsive management.
In World War Z, there’s a concept called “The Tenth Man.”
“If nine of us, using the same information, arrive at the exact same conclusion, it is the duty of the tenth man to disagree. No matter how improbable it seems, the tenth man must assume the other nine are wrong.”
So let me attempt that.
Let’s apply Occam’s Razor.
What if the market values GMX fairly? What if the current price is simply what the market believes GMX is worth?
Markets are forward-looking. They price assets based on expected future returns to holders. Capital seeks yield — this is the core of how markets function.
Why does OpenAI have such a high valuation despite zero profits? Because investors believe in its future income potential. They are buying future expectations.
GMX reached $90 because the market embraced the potential of on-chain perpetuals. Arbitrum was on fire. The narrative was strong. Everyone believed Arbitrum and GMX were the future.
Over time, capital may have “realised” that this potential was mispriced. And whether we like it or not, capital is often smarter than we are. The market aggregates information better than any single participant.
Look at $ARB. It has declined alongside $GMX. That correlation matters.
Our fee APR has averaged around 15–20%.
That’s comparable to strong dividend stocks.
But GMX is not yet established or durable enough to be considered a “Dividend Aristocrat.” So if we think of GMX as a yield-generating asset, perhaps its valuation is simply… normal.
Not undervalued. Not suppressed. Just normal.
And markets rarely overpay long-term for “normal.”
We may have 101 good reasons why we move at the speed we do.
Security. Audits. User safety. Caution.
All valid.
But competitors are moving faster.
The market does not reward intention. It rewards results. It does not “babysit” projects that move slowly, even if they are responsible.
At our current speed, perhaps the price reflects exactly that.
Our strategy:
Arbitrum L2
Multichain expansion
Made perfect sense in 2020.
But does it still make sense in 2026?
Building copper wire for landlines made perfect sense in Europe and America decades ago.
Then newer countries skipped landlines and built telecom towers.
Now even newer markets are skipping towers and going straight to cheap satellite infrastructure.
Technology leapfrogs.
If we are wrong, it would be painful — but necessary — to pivot hard.
It is not embarrassing to adjust strategy. We made decisions with the best information available at the time.
Did America and Europe regret laying copper wires? No — it was rational at the time.
But industries that double down on legacy infrastructure while the world shifts risk stagnation.
We need to take a hard, honest look at whether our strategic positioning still matches where the market is going.
For what it’s worth, I will vote for this proposal.
I understand this proposal is not standalone. There are parallel marketing and development efforts meant to push GMX forward.
But we need balance.
We need optimists when skies are grey.
And we need realists when rainbows appear.
There is a very real possibility that GMX is priced low simply because the market values it fairly.
That possibility deserves consideration.
IF SO, then lets stop tokenomics and focus on changing our engine, our tyres, our tracks and roar to a new track!