Governance Update: A Strategic Plan to Restore Price Discovery

GMX DAO has greenlit a strategic overhaul aimed at restoring price discovery for the GMX token, directly tackling the limited effectiveness of the ongoing buyback program and the overhang from centralized exchange (CEX) supply.

Starting this week, all GMX staking rewards will be redirected to the Treasury effective March 4, 2026, rather than being distributed directly to stakers. The Treasury will hold these funds—representing 27% of protocol fees—and use them for open-market buybacks. However, stakers will only receive accumulated rewards once the GMX token price exceeds $90. Payouts will be proportional to each staker’s “Staking Power,” calculated by the product of staked amount and staking duration. Governance will determine the exact release schedule after the price trigger is hit.

To remain eligible for these accumulating rewards, stakers must maintain at least 80% of their peak staked GMX balance at all times. If the balance drops below that threshold, all accumulated rewards are forfeited and Staking Power resets without exception. Users can freely unstake up to 20% of their peak amount without penalty, but unstaking more than that triggers forfeiture. New stakers can join at any time and immediately begin building Staking Power.

Liquidity Consolidation and Buy-Wall

Approximately 600,000 GMX tokens are being withdrawn from Treasury-controlled Uniswap and Trader Joe liquidity pools and redeployed into GMX’s own GMX-USDC pool on the native platform and into GMTrade.xyz (the rebranded GMX-Solana). The DAO stated that liquidity for the GMX token “primarily belongs on GMX.”

As a one-time measure, a Treasury-backed buy-wall of 1,000,000 GMX will be placed at the $5 level on onchain exchanges for one week following implementation. This is intended to absorb any extreme selling pressure and accumulate tokens for the Treasury. After that window, buybacks will follow a weekly Deposit-Buy-Withdraw cycle, keeping Treasury assets off exchanges between executions.

The Buy Back & Distribute (BB&D) program has repurchased over 2 million GMX tokens since the end of 2024, roughly equal to the entire CEX and DEX circulating supply at the program’s inception. Despite that scale, the DAO noted that structural CEX dynamics and liquidity fragmentation limited the buyback’s price impact.

The GMX dApp’s Portfolio dashboard will be updated to display Staking Power, share of the total reward pool, total pending Treasury rewards, and estimated payout at the $90 trigger. The DAO emphasized that these changes are part of a broader set of adjustments intended to strengthen the link between the GMX business and its token.