Pyth DAO commits all its revenue to PYTH as monthly purchases shrank 75% in five months

The Pyth DAO has approved a proposal to use 100% of the money it earns from Pyth’s commercial products into buying PYTH on the open market.

The change, passed as OP-PIP-136, now means that the amount of PYTH the DAO collects now depends directly on the network’s fast-growing data revenue.

What is Pyth DAO changing?

In a blog post published by Pyth Network on October 8, the DAO said that it has approved a new rule called OP-PIP-136 which will use 100% of the money the DAO gets from Pyth’s commercial products to buy back PYTH. 

Before this, the DAO moved one-third of its non-PYTH treasury into token purchases every month. That rule came from OP-PIP-87 in December 2025, which also required that each monthly transfer would have its own vote. That meant twelve votes a year for something the DAO had already agreed to do.

The new policy ends the monthly vote. Now, one standing approval sends the DAO’s share of revenue from Pyth Pro subscriptions, Listing as a Service, the Data Marketplace and Pyth Indices straight to the PYTH Reserve. DAO contributor KemarTiti filed the proposal, and it passed on September 24.

The policy also moves the DAO’s existing non-PYTH treasury assets into the same process. The first step was a transfer of 323,428 USDC and 90 SOL to the Pythian Council’s execution multisig.

The council still can’t sell, borrow against or give away the PYTH without a separate DAO vote.

The PYTH Reserve holds about 41 million tokens, but following the first purchases under the new rule on September 30, Pyth’s live tracker showed 42 million tokens. 

Why did Pyth DAO’s old rule stop working? 

The old rule was buying less and less PYTH each month. A September 9 Ideas Bank post, which led to this proposal, listed that about 2.75 million PYTH was bought in March 2026, roughly 1.80 million in June, around 1.14 million in July, and about 669,662 in August. That is a drop of about three-quarters in five months. 

During the same time, Pyth’s business was growing.

The post gave two reasons why less Pyth was being bought each month. First, the non-PYTH treasury balance was getting smaller. Second, Douro Labs was paying the DAO more in PYTH and less in USDC, so there was less stablecoin to convert. 

Douro Labs gained the option to pay in PYTH earlier in 2026, after an April forum proposal. The DAO’s share is 60% of Pyth Pro subscription revenue, 90% of Listing as a Service and 60% of the Marketplace, so more of that revenue was already arriving as tokens instead of cash. 

The author said the old method was “increasingly disconnected” from the network’s revenue growth. Pyth reported $11.5 million in annual recurring revenue in September 2026, up 86% from the last quarter. Pyth Indices added $1.81 million in fixed ARR. 

The company says much of the growth comes from perpetual futures on real-world assets such as stocks, gold, oil and indices. It says more than 94% of tracked RWA perp volume over the past three months used Pyth data. 

Kalshi named Pyth as the only price source for its CFTC-cleared gold and silver perpetual futures, which began trading in September. Pyth says Coinbase named it days later in an SEC filing for single-name equity perps.

Mike Cahill, CEO of Douro Labs and a core Pyth contributor, said in the October 8 post that the DAO committing all of this revenue to the Reserve is “the strongest alignment this network has had.”

However, not everyone is hot on the token buyback trend. Allium’s head of research, Elton Shehdula, warned that buybacks, even though they reduce supply and add demand, they don’t guarantee price gains.

Allium Labs data shows that crypto projects spent a record $638 million buying back their own tokens in 2026.