I
Crypto protocols spent $638 million buying back their own tokens in the first eight months of 2026, up from $545 million in the same stretch of 2025 and from a few hundred thousand dollars in all of 2024. Nearly nine dollars in ten of that came from two names, Hyperliquid and Pump.fun. The reason is simple: both earn real fees and both have decided that the cleanest way to pass fees to a token is to buy the token and destroy it.
PROSPER, which launched today on Pharos Network, takes that mechanism and attaches it to something much smaller than a protocol. It attaches it to a single trading strategy. Any curator with an onchain track record can now deploy a vault, let investors buy shares in it and, alongside those shares, launch a separate token whose only link to the strategy is a promise written into the contract: when the strategy makes money above its previous peak, part of the fee buys the token back and burns it. The company calls the framework MemeRWA.
Every Performance Market begins with a curator, a trader or firm with a strategy they are willing to run in public. The curator builds a vault around that strategy using PROSPER's infrastructure. The vault issues shares, which are what they sound like: direct exposure to the strategy's net asset value, rising and falling with the positions inside. So far this is the model that Morpho, Hyperliquid and Kamino already run at scale.
The new part is the second instrument. Alongside the shares, the vault launches p{VAULT}, a token with a fixed supply of 1 billion, sold entirely through a public bonding curve, with nothing set aside for the curator, the team or any early backer. p{VAULT} does not represent ownership of the vault, does not track its NAV and gives its holder no claim on the vault's assets, performance or profits. Its price is whatever the bonding curve and, after graduation, whatever external markets say it is. The vault's performance sits next to that price as a public reference, in the way a company's published results sit next to a stock, except that here the token is explicitly not a share.
What connects the two instruments is a single rule, each vault carries a high-water mark, the standard hedge-fund device that says a manager only earns performance fees on gains above the fund's previous peak, so that a strategy which falls 30 percent and recovers 30 percent has earned nothing. When a PROSPER vault clears its high-water mark and performance fees become eligible, a predefined portion of those fees is used to buy p{VAULT} on third-party decentralized exchanges and the purchased tokens are burned permanently.
That is the entire economic bridge. A strategy that keeps setting new highs keeps generating fees, so a share of those fees keeps shrinking the p{VAULT} supply. A strategy that stalls generates nothing; the token is left to whatever the market thinks of it. PROSPER is careful about what this is not. The buyback is an automated protocol function fired by smart-contract logic; it is not a price-support, stabilization or market-making programme; the company neither controls nor guarantees its timing or outcome. The distinction is not decoration. It is the line between a token whose value is derived from a business and a token whose value is set by a crowd that can see the business.
The tokenization industry has spent three years bringing ownership onchain: Treasury bills, private credit, gold, now stocks, with $33.5 billion of it live by July. Every one of those tokens is a legal claim on something, which means every one of them drags the underlying asset's rulebook onchain with it, including who may hold it and where.
MemeRWA inverts the model. It does not bring ownership onchain. It brings performance data onchain, as a public reference, then lets a separate crypto-native token trade against that reference without any claim attached. Laura Shi, chief business officer at Pharos, frames it as the meeting of two things crypto has already proved: open markets are good at pricing collective conviction, while onchain finance has made economic performance transparent in a way that offchain funds never were. Put the verifiable signal in one place and the freely priced token in another. The result is a market in a strategy's reputation rather than a security in its returns. Whether regulators read it the same way is a question for later in this piece, but the design intent is unmistakable: p{VAULT} is built to be the thing people trade; Vault Shares are built to be the thing people invest in.
None of this would matter if there were no strategies to wrap. There are. Onchain vaults have become the default packaging for managed capital in DeFi. The managers now have names. Morpho alone holds about $4.6 billion in curated vaults as of late July, with Steakhouse Financial, Sentora and Gauntlet curating $2.5 billion, $2.1 billion and $1.4 billion respectively across venues. Hyperliquid's protocol vault runs around $250 million and its user-created trading vaults another $80 million; Kamino and Jupiter on Solana manage roughly $500 million and $400 million.
What every one of those vaults lacks is a way for someone with no capital to deposit, or no wish to take the strategy's drawdown risk, to express a view on the manager. Vault shares are for investors. PROSPER's second instrument is for everyone else. The pitch to curators is direct: a strategy with no record, no attention and no capital can have price discovery from its first day, because the token gives the market something to trade before the track record is long enough to attract deposits.
PROSPER is the first market-structure application on a chain that is five months old and has been built, from the seed round on, for this category. Pharos was founded by former Ant Group and AntChain leadership, raised an $8 million seed led by Lightspeed Faction and Hack VC in November 2024, unveiled a testnet in May 2025 targeting 30,000 transactions per second with one-second finality, then closed a $44 million Series A led by Sumitomo Corporation and Chainlink at a $1 billion valuation in April 2026. Its Pacific Ocean mainnet launched on 28 April with native USDC and Circle's CCTP, after a testnet that processed 4.3 billion transactions from 209 million wallets.
Its first yield product, the pAlpha vault, filled a $50 million cap within days. A $10 million incubator launched in February and produced its first graduate, Faroo, in July. The point of the sequence is that Pharos has been building a compliance-ready RWA settlement layer for institutions; PROSPER is the first application on it aimed at the other end of the market: the crowd that wants to trade performance rather than custody it. A chain that can do both is a chain with two customer bases.
Three things decide whether this becomes a category or a curiosity. The first is the fee share. PROSPER says a predefined portion of eligible performance fees funds the buyback, but the portion itself, together with the performance fee rate it is a portion of, is what sets the strength of the link between a strategy's results and its token. Curators will set those numbers vault by vault; the market will learn quickly to read them. The second is graduation. p{VAULT} starts on a bonding curve and moves to external liquidity once it graduates.
The industry's experience with bonding curves is that the threshold and the liquidity arrangement at graduation are where most of the risk lives. The third is the line PROSPER has drawn around itself. The company describes itself as a technology provider, not a broker, adviser, exchange or custodian; it does not touch user funds; and it states plainly that p{VAULT} is not an investment contract. That is a coherent position. It is also one that a regulator in any major jurisdiction will eventually test against a token whose supply shrinks when a specific manager outperforms. The strength of the design is that all the facts a regulator would want, the NAV, the fees, the reserves and every buyback, are onchain for anyone to check.
PROSPER has taken the two things crypto does best, open price discovery and transparent performance, then put them side by side without letting one own the other. The vault is for people who want the returns and will carry the risk. The token is for people who want to say, with money, that they believe in the manager. That split has existed in traditional finance for decades in the form of fund shares and the listed stock of the firm that runs them; it has just never been available for a single strategy, launched by one person, on the day it starts. If curators show up and the first few strategies clear their high-water marks in public, MemeRWA will stop sounding like a joke and start sounding like a market.
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Vested Interest Disclosure: HackerNoon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. #DYOR.
PROSPER, which launched today on Pharos Network, takes that mechanism and attaches it to something much smaller than a protocol. It attaches it to a single trading strategy. Any curator with an onchain track record can now deploy a vault, let investors buy shares in it and, alongside those shares, launch a separate token whose only link to the strategy is a promise written into the contract: when the strategy makes money above its previous peak, part of the fee buys the token back and burns it. The company calls the framework MemeRWA.
Two instruments, one strategy
Every Performance Market begins with a curator, a trader or firm with a strategy they are willing to run in public. The curator builds a vault around that strategy using PROSPER's infrastructure. The vault issues shares, which are what they sound like: direct exposure to the strategy's net asset value, rising and falling with the positions inside. So far this is the model that Morpho, Hyperliquid and Kamino already run at scale.
The new part is the second instrument. Alongside the shares, the vault launches p{VAULT}, a token with a fixed supply of 1 billion, sold entirely through a public bonding curve, with nothing set aside for the curator, the team or any early backer. p{VAULT} does not represent ownership of the vault, does not track its NAV and gives its holder no claim on the vault's assets, performance or profits. Its price is whatever the bonding curve and, after graduation, whatever external markets say it is. The vault's performance sits next to that price as a public reference, in the way a company's published results sit next to a stock, except that here the token is explicitly not a share.
The buyback
What connects the two instruments is a single rule, each vault carries a high-water mark, the standard hedge-fund device that says a manager only earns performance fees on gains above the fund's previous peak, so that a strategy which falls 30 percent and recovers 30 percent has earned nothing. When a PROSPER vault clears its high-water mark and performance fees become eligible, a predefined portion of those fees is used to buy p{VAULT} on third-party decentralized exchanges and the purchased tokens are burned permanently.
That is the entire economic bridge. A strategy that keeps setting new highs keeps generating fees, so a share of those fees keeps shrinking the p{VAULT} supply. A strategy that stalls generates nothing; the token is left to whatever the market thinks of it. PROSPER is careful about what this is not. The buyback is an automated protocol function fired by smart-contract logic; it is not a price-support, stabilization or market-making programme; the company neither controls nor guarantees its timing or outcome. The distinction is not decoration. It is the line between a token whose value is derived from a business and a token whose value is set by a crowd that can see the business.
Why RWA needed a meme
The tokenization industry has spent three years bringing ownership onchain: Treasury bills, private credit, gold, now stocks, with $33.5 billion of it live by July. Every one of those tokens is a legal claim on something, which means every one of them drags the underlying asset's rulebook onchain with it, including who may hold it and where.
MemeRWA inverts the model. It does not bring ownership onchain. It brings performance data onchain, as a public reference, then lets a separate crypto-native token trade against that reference without any claim attached. Laura Shi, chief business officer at Pharos, frames it as the meeting of two things crypto has already proved: open markets are good at pricing collective conviction, while onchain finance has made economic performance transparent in a way that offchain funds never were. Put the verifiable signal in one place and the freely priced token in another. The result is a market in a strategy's reputation rather than a security in its returns. Whether regulators read it the same way is a question for later in this piece, but the design intent is unmistakable: p{VAULT} is built to be the thing people trade; Vault Shares are built to be the thing people invest in.
The strategies already exist; the market for them did not
None of this would matter if there were no strategies to wrap. There are. Onchain vaults have become the default packaging for managed capital in DeFi. The managers now have names. Morpho alone holds about $4.6 billion in curated vaults as of late July, with Steakhouse Financial, Sentora and Gauntlet curating $2.5 billion, $2.1 billion and $1.4 billion respectively across venues. Hyperliquid's protocol vault runs around $250 million and its user-created trading vaults another $80 million; Kamino and Jupiter on Solana manage roughly $500 million and $400 million.
What every one of those vaults lacks is a way for someone with no capital to deposit, or no wish to take the strategy's drawdown risk, to express a view on the manager. Vault shares are for investors. PROSPER's second instrument is for everyone else. The pitch to curators is direct: a strategy with no record, no attention and no capital can have price discovery from its first day, because the token gives the market something to trade before the track record is long enough to attract deposits.
The chain underneath
PROSPER is the first market-structure application on a chain that is five months old and has been built, from the seed round on, for this category. Pharos was founded by former Ant Group and AntChain leadership, raised an $8 million seed led by Lightspeed Faction and Hack VC in November 2024, unveiled a testnet in May 2025 targeting 30,000 transactions per second with one-second finality, then closed a $44 million Series A led by Sumitomo Corporation and Chainlink at a $1 billion valuation in April 2026. Its Pacific Ocean mainnet launched on 28 April with native USDC and Circle's CCTP, after a testnet that processed 4.3 billion transactions from 209 million wallets.
Its first yield product, the pAlpha vault, filled a $50 million cap within days. A $10 million incubator launched in February and produced its first graduate, Faroo, in July. The point of the sequence is that Pharos has been building a compliance-ready RWA settlement layer for institutions; PROSPER is the first application on it aimed at the other end of the market: the crowd that wants to trade performance rather than custody it. A chain that can do both is a chain with two customer bases.
What to watch
Three things decide whether this becomes a category or a curiosity. The first is the fee share. PROSPER says a predefined portion of eligible performance fees funds the buyback, but the portion itself, together with the performance fee rate it is a portion of, is what sets the strength of the link between a strategy's results and its token. Curators will set those numbers vault by vault; the market will learn quickly to read them. The second is graduation. p{VAULT} starts on a bonding curve and moves to external liquidity once it graduates.
The industry's experience with bonding curves is that the threshold and the liquidity arrangement at graduation are where most of the risk lives. The third is the line PROSPER has drawn around itself. The company describes itself as a technology provider, not a broker, adviser, exchange or custodian; it does not touch user funds; and it states plainly that p{VAULT} is not an investment contract. That is a coherent position. It is also one that a regulator in any major jurisdiction will eventually test against a token whose supply shrinks when a specific manager outperforms. The strength of the design is that all the facts a regulator would want, the NAV, the fees, the reserves and every buyback, are onchain for anyone to check.
PROSPER has taken the two things crypto does best, open price discovery and transparent performance, then put them side by side without letting one own the other. The vault is for people who want the returns and will carry the risk. The token is for people who want to say, with money, that they believe in the manager. That split has existed in traditional finance for decades in the form of fund shares and the listed stock of the firm that runs them; it has just never been available for a single strategy, launched by one person, on the day it starts. If curators show up and the first few strategies clear their high-water marks in public, MemeRWA will stop sounding like a joke and start sounding like a market.
Don’t forget to like and share the story!
Vested Interest Disclosure: HackerNoon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. #DYOR.