Flow Foundation to Buy Back and Burn 50M Tokens
The Flow Foundation has announced a plan to buy back and burn 50 million FLOW tokens. The initiative is part of a broader strategy to strengthen the token's economics, which also includes continuous token acquisition to improve liquidity and long-term inflation management.
- 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 create counterfeit FLOW tokens. - The 50.34 million tokens, representing approximately 3% of the total supply, were acquired via open-market purchases and treasury funds between December 2025 and February 2026. - This action follows two previous on-chain burns in January that destroyed over 87 billion counterfeit tokens seized after the security incident. The latest burn addresses counterfeit tokens that were mixed with valid ones on decentralized exchanges. - The recovery plan initially considered a network rollback, but the idea was rejected after community backlash to avoid compromising the blockchain's immutability and reversing legitimate transactions. - The price of FLOW declined significantly following the breach, dropping from about $0.45 in September 2025 to around $0.035 by late February 2026, with exchanges like Upbit delisting FLOW pairs due to security concerns. - Despite the incident, the Flow network reports surpassing 40 million user accounts and 950 million transactions, citing major brand partnerships with the NBA, NFL, and Disney as key drivers of user adoption. - Prior to the incident, in May 2022, Flow had announced a $725 million ecosystem fund to support growth and development on the blockchain. - Flow's DeFi ecosystem has been growing, with protocols like Trado surpassing $10 million in monthly swapped volume and integrations with LayerZero and Axelar expanding cross-chain interoperability.
