ASTER Token Plunges to All-Time Low - Then Comes the Buyback Cavalry
ASTER just cratered to its lowest price ever. The charts aren't pretty.
The Buyback Gambit
Right on the heels of the nosedive, the project team announced a buyback program. It's the classic crypto playbook move—deploy treasury reserves to sop up supply and signal confidence when the market's losing theirs. Whether it's a strategic masterstroke or a desperate Hail Mary depends entirely on your level of cynicism.
Reading Between the Lines
Buybacks can stabilize a token, sure. They can create artificial scarcity and pump the price temporarily. But they don't fix broken fundamentals. They're financial engineering, not product development. For every successful turnaround story, there are a dozen projects that burned through their war chest only to sink anyway.
The Verdict
This is a high-stakes moment for ASTER. The buyback is a bold counter-punch, a bet that the market has overreacted. It shows the team isn't just watching from the sidelines. But remember—in crypto, a buyback announcement often says more about a team's panic than its prospects. True recovery needs more than just clever accounting; it needs real utility and adoption. Otherwise, it's just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
ASTER moves into ‘sell’ zone
ASTER has moved into the ‘sell’ zone based on its current sentiment. The token has not recovered from the all-time lows even hours after the buyback news. As a token linked to a perpetual DEX, ASTER expected an effect similar to HYPE. However, even with buybacks, ASTER saw significant selling pressure, leading to unraveling over the past three months.
ASTER is not the only perpetual DEX token to slide. HYPE is also under $24, with sell indicators flashing. As the market slowed down again, the previously hot tokens are responding with a deeper downturn.
Open interest also crashed for ASTER, down to $215M NEAR an all-time low. Only around 25% of positions are short, meaning ASTER may not hope for a short squeeze. The recent downturn also came with relatively smaller volumes of around $283M in the past 24 hours, within the token’s usual range.
Why is ASTER sliding?
The current ASTER buybacks are not destroying the supply. The tokens are merely held in the treasury, with a decision to be taken in the future about the final supply. The Aster community is also calling to burn the tokens and potentially salvage the asset through scarcity.
ASTER did not immediately react to the buybacks, as the price is weighed down by an even bigger unlock coming in February. | Source: CoinGecko.
One of the major factors for the ASTER price weakness is the upcoming unlock in February. A total of 96M tokens will Flow into the market in February, as Aster enters a stage of regular unlocks. The upcoming unlock is expected to trigger even bigger selling, which may not be entirely offset by the buybacks.
More ASTER will enter the market each quarter until 2035, potentially freeing up whale wallets to sell. ASTER has traditionally dropped even lower during airdrop periods, which trigger large-scale selling of the available supply.
The Aster DEX is also still trying to outcompete Hyperliquid and Lighter, which retain high trading volumes. The high leverage on Aster makes the exchange riskier. Despite the expectations of a slide, traders are even reluctant to open short positions, as the volatile token can also rally unexpectedly and cause liquidations.
ASTER may attract some traders into buying the dip. However, the token remains risky and volatile, recently dipping as low as $0.53 during extreme trading. In the short term, ASTER is reacting with significant dips as whales realize profits.
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