Flow Foundation to Buy Back and Burn 50M Tokens
The Flow Foundation announced a series of actions to strengthen its native FLOW token. The initiatives include a token buyback and burn program for 50 million FLOW tokens. The foundation will also pursue continuous token acquisition and implement long-term inflation management strategies.
- This buyback and burn is the final step in a remediation plan following a December 27, 2025 security breach where an attacker exploited a vulnerability to mint fraudulent FLOW tokens. - While the Flow Foundation previously burned over 87.4 billion counterfeit tokens, approximately 50 million fake tokens were mixed with legitimate ones on decentralized exchanges, making them impossible to isolate and burn directly. - To counteract these remaining counterfeit tokens and their dilutive effect on the supply, the foundation is purchasing an equivalent amount of real FLOW tokens from the open market to permanently destroy them. - The security incident and its aftermath significantly impacted the token's value, with the price of FLOW falling from around $0.45 in September 2025 to approximately $0.035 by late February 2026. - As a result of the security concerns, major South Korean exchanges like Upbit and Bithumb announced the delisting of FLOW trading pairs, further impacting the token's liquidity. - Flow was created by Dapper Labs, the company behind CryptoKitties and NBA Top Shot, and its CEO is Roham Gharegozlou, who is also a board member of the Flow Foundation. - The FLOW token has a controlled inflationary model, with a target reward rate of 5% of the total supply distributed annually to network validators and delegators; this inflation can be offset by network transaction fees. - In addition to the buyback, the foundation has stated it will pursue continuous token acquisition to improve liquidity and plans to adjust the protocol to manage net deflation over the long term.
