Today I ran into the team members of Aster DEX and intended to hitch a ride with them to the next event venue. However, during our conversation, I found out that they didn't even have a budget for taking a taxi.

Why? Because the project side invested all the liquid funds in two things: buying back $ASTER tokens and giving airdrops to community users. 😂 In the end, it was still me who paid for the ride.

But to be honest, this practice of directly investing resources into the token economy and user incentives is quite pragmatic. How many DeFi projects in the market are willing to use real money for buybacks and airdrops? Many teams spend more than half of their budget just on packaging and marketing.

Although Aster's operation has made their team a bit "poorer", it at least proves that they are serious about token value management and community building. This approach seems a bit unconventional in the current DeFi environment.