JST Price Lags Despite JustLend’s Massive 11% Supply Burn & $40M Buyback - What’s Holding It Back?

JustLend just torched 11% of its total JST supply and deployed a $40 million buyback war chest—yet the token's price refuses to catch fire.

The Deflation Play

Supply cuts and aggressive buybacks are the classic crypto playbook for juicing token value. Scarcity drives demand, demand drives price—or so the theory goes. JustLend executed the mechanics flawlessly: a double-barreled blast of deflationary pressure designed to send JST soaring.

Market Indifference

But the charts tell a different story. While the announcement sparked a flicker of activity, sustained momentum remains elusive. It's a stark reminder that even textbook tokenomics can't always override broader market sentiment or trader skepticism. Sometimes, the market reacts to a major buyback with the enthusiasm of a Wall Street banker at a blockchain conference—polite applause, then back to checking the stock ticker.

The Waiting Game

So, is the move a dud? Not necessarily. These maneuvers are long-term bets, planting seeds for future growth. The buyback permanently removes tokens from circulation, and the burn ensures they're gone for good. The pressure is building in the system; it just needs a catalyst to release it.

The real test isn't today's price action, but whether this foundational shift can turn JST from a laggard into a leader when the next market wave hits. The mechanics are primed. Now, we wait for the spark.

How the JST token responded to the buyback effort 

The subdued reaction was a disappointment, and it further adds credence to the point other projects have made regarding buybacks — that it is no longer as effective as it used to be at triggering pumps, even for the short term.

The token’s market cap had surged past $400 million in recent times, but it is currently hovering around $361M while its trading volume has gone up about 22% to $31 million since the buyback and burn occurred. 

On X, despite the token’s lackluster response to the announcement of the second major buyback by the lending protocol, the community has remained optimistic. The deflationary shift will see more burns happen this year at a quarterly interval to keep the trend going. 

How much did JustLend spend on buybacks?

According to an official post from the JustLend DAO, the team spent a total of $21 million on the second phase, a couple of million more than what it spent during the first phase of the buyback. 

That $21 million was funded entirely from the protocol’s Q4 2025 net income as well as from its accumulated reserves. Combine this recent buyback with the first one, which occurred in October 2025, and destroyed about 560 million JST tokens, and the total reduction now stands at over 1.085 billion JST tokens, nearly 11% of the original total supply of 9.9 billion. 

Meanwhile, the cumulative value of both buybacks is hovering at almost $40 million. In the official post announcing the second buyback, the JustLend DAO boasted about walking the talk, implying that not all project buybacks were as effective or consistent as theirs. 

“In DeFi, many talk about burns,” the post read, “Few actually reduce supply, repeatedly and at scale.” 

The buyback mechanism was approved in October 2025

JustLend announced on October 21, 2025, that the JustLend DAO community had officially adopted the Proposal on JST Buyback & Burn Program. 

According to the official announcement, all of JustLend DAO’s net revenue, along with the portion of USDD’s multi-chain ecosystem revenue above $10 million, WOULD be dedicated to the JST buybacks with transactions executed transparently on-chain. 

The announcement was met with a warm welcome from the community, who recognized that it was more than just another buyback program. Until then, JST was a passive utility token, but the approval turned it into a deflationary asset powered by real revenue.

The burns are designed to not only create scarcity, but also reduce sell pressure and reward holders by reallocating ecosystem profits back into token buybacks. The project’s TVL has grown to over $7 billion, providing a robust foundation for the new revenue-driven model. 

The first burn, which happened swiftly after the approval, was executed using JustLend DAO’s existing revenue, which totaled 59,087,137 USDT. As outlined in the proposal, 30% of that amount, about 17,726,141 USDT, was used to buy back and burn 559,890,753 JST, accounting for about 5.66% of the total supply.

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