Does Jup buyback even work? Why does it feel like everyone is overcomplicating a simple issue? Let’s look at the inequality: Buyback liquidity + natural buying < liquidity eaten by insider trading + natural selling + token unlock market cap + external liquidity withdrawal + team operating expenses If this inequality holds, the token price will drop. If the buyback amount is negligible and not enough to change this inequality, yet people still expect the token price to rise, isn’t that assuming retail investors don’t even understand basic math? Buybacks: If the buyback is done evenly over time, from a market-making perspective, isn’t that an extremely rigid and inflexible way to market-make? If information leaks, there will be a ton of insider trading around the buyback. If the buyback itself isn’t enough to crush all opposing orders, the buyback liquidity can easily become liquidity that gets eaten up. This involves the issue of capital efficiency—under different market scenarios, the efficiency of using different strategies like controlling supply, pumping, buybacks, and market manipulation. This is a more dynamic issue. The Jup team has all the data, and their conclusion that buybacks don’t work probably means the buybacks aren’t enough to reverse the inequality. It’s better to just let the price drop to the bottom and then, like other shady projects, manipulate the market in a more flexible and cunning way. That way, the capital efficiency would be higher.