Does Aethena Coin's $10 billion share buyback really involve market purchases?

Recently, there's a hot topic in the Aethena Coin community. It's about the large-scale share buyback program carried out over the past few months. On the surface, they claimed to be buying tokens on the open market, but digging into on-chain data reveals some oddities.

To put it simply, Aethena sold approximately $5.25 billion worth of discounted ENA tokens through two PIPE funding rounds, and officially announced that the cash would be used to buy tokens on the open market. However, on-chain tracking shows that of the 1.44 billion tokens "purchased" from exchanges, nearly 90% had already been transferred from Aethena's own wallets to exchanges before the actual buying activity took place.

The core of the Aethena Coin analysis is this: Is this genuine market accumulation, or a carefully planned redistribution of supply? According to official statements, Aethena Foundation's subsidiaries planned to buy ENA on public exchanges through intermediary market makers. But the actual on-chain flows show that a significant amount of tokens had already been gradually allocated to certain exchanges before the trades occurred.

Looking at the first funding round, between July 21 and 26, wallets associated with Aethena distributed about 150 million tokens across various exchanges. Then, about 1.5 months later, another cluster related to Aethena withdrew approximately 134 million tokens. The second funding round is even more interesting: the supply of ENA on exchanges surged right before the execution period, then returned to normal levels after the withdrawals.

What does this movement in Aethena Coin imply? Simply saying "open market purchase" doesn't capture the full picture. While the trades did happen through public exchanges, the key question is: where did that supply come from? Was it a genuine response to new market demand, or was it already pre-positioned supply being rerouted through exchange channels?

Overall, the observed volume is about 1.44 billion ENA, worth roughly $538 million at the time. This accounts for approximately 9.6% of the total supply and about 25% of the free float. On-chain analysts point out that the scale, timing, and distribution across exchanges all precisely match the official announcement schedule.

This doesn't mean Aethena lied. Rather, it's a matter of how one interprets the term "open market purchase." Is it truly absorbing net demand from the market, or reorganizing supply that was already positioned? The difference is significant. While not claiming perfect on-chain tracking, analysts agree that such a large-scale transaction can't go unnoticed.