Recently, a vote on protocol fee activation at a major DEX is about to be finalized, which could be one of the most critical decisions in the DeFi ecosystem this year. Essentially, this vote will determine whether the related tokens are just empty voting rights or assets capable of generating real cash flow.

What is the current situation? 100% of the transaction fees generated go to liquidity providers, with the protocol itself taking nothing—purely "powering the network out of love." Token holders have nothing but voting rights. But this proposal aims to break that status quo.

The core logic is simple: take a small portion of the trading fees for the protocol itself.

How exactly to do this? Taking the v2 pool as an example, the original 0.3% fee rate might be split into: LPs receive 0.25%, and the protocol collects 0.05%. But this money doesn't go into the team’s wallet; instead, it is directly used to buy back and burn tokens. This is true deflation—value is directly returned to all token holders.

The more aggressive move is hidden in the details. The proposal immediately announces: burn 100 million tokens, accounting for 16% of the circulating supply. This is like a "sincerity compensation" to the community—admitting that no dividends were distributed before, and this time, a portion of the debt is being repaid.

There’s also a fancy rent-collecting method: launching an "protocol fee discount auction," where traders can bid to get free fee discounts. The proceeds from the auction are used for token burning. This not only extracts value from high-frequency traders but also recovers some of the value siphoned off by MEV.

With this entire set of measures, the token’s economic foundation is being thoroughly revamped—from purely governance rights to a truly cash-flow-backed asset. Compared to mainstream assets like Bitcoin and ETH in the DeFi ecosystem, this could cause some ripple effects.