Where the revenue goes

Part of a series covering all 72 Ekubo DAO proposals. This post follows the money the protocol earns.

Period covered: September 2024 – May 2026.

The unlock: give the core contract a smarter owner

Protocol revenue accumulates inside Ekubo Core. Only Core’s owner can withdraw it. When the owner is a DAO, every withdrawal is a governance vote — which makes automated revenue handling impossible.

September 2, 2024’s Transfer ownership of the core contract to the buyback contract is the hinge of this entire thread. Ownership moved to a buyback contract: a proxy owner, itself owned by the DAO, that lets anyone trigger a buyback. Withdraw revenue, buy the configured token, proceeds stay with the DAO.

The DAO gave up the need to vote on each withdrawal without giving up ownership. Everything after this is configuration.

Adding tokens, one vote at a time

With the mechanism in place, expanding it became routine. October 2024 enabled WBTC, USDT, wstETH, LORDS, DAI and DAIv0. February 2025 added wstETH alongside an oracle pool. June 2025 added CASH, against roughly 365 CASH of accumulated revenue and a $7.3k DCA-enabled CASH/EKUBO pool. April 2026 added TBTC, against about $2.5k of fees. May 2026 added strkBTC.

The amounts are small and getting smaller — a few thousand dollars per token. The DAO kept voting on them anyway, because each one is a config change on a contract holding real money, and there is no lower tier of authority to delegate it to.

The USDC.e migration is the clearest example of the friction. A December 8, 2025 proposal to migrate the position and enable USDC buybacks did not pass; a fuller version with a Discord discussion link passed two weeks later.

Changing what revenue is

January 20, 2026 is the most consequential vote in this group, and it happened twice on the same day.

The first version failed — a calldata problem, as the repost explains. The second version passed, shipping v4.0.1: remove the withdrawal fee, replace it with a 20% swap protocol fee.

This changes who pays and when. A withdrawal fee taxes liquidity providers on exit — it is a charge for leaving, which is exactly the wrong incentive for a venue competing on depth. A swap protocol fee takes a share of what traders already pay, and it accrues continuously rather than at the moment an LP wants to go.

The migration completed eighteen months of plumbing in July 2026, when v5.0.3 moved protocol fees from Core-collected to Positions-collected: Core stops accruing fees, Positions applies a fixed 20% when position fees are collected, and a new RevenueBuybacks instance sources from Positions.

Buying the token back on purpose

Two proposals spend treasury rather than revenue. Both are titled “Execute additional EKUBO buyback”, both propose the same $100k, and the February 9, 2026 version failed while the February 23 version passed.

The mechanism is worth reading closely. Withdraw 100k USDC from the DAO’s Ethereum USDC/USDT position, bridge to Starknet, buy EKUBO over two weeks — and simultaneously place a 10k EKUBO sell order “to help guarantee a safe execution.”

Buying and selling the same token at once is not a hedge; it is a liquidity provision. A two-week DCA buy into a thin book moves price against itself. The paired sell keeps the pool two-sided so the buy can actually execute near fair value. The DAO is using its own TWAMM against its own order — the same tool that caused the 2024 refunds, now used deliberately.

May 2026 then extended buybacks to Ethereum entirely, transferring the Ethereum instance’s ownership to RevenueBuybacks so accumulated ETH, USDC, USDT, WBTC, USDe and BOLD fees could buy EKUBO.

The one where revenue went back

March 2025 — Refund all EVM v1 revenue. The Ethereum V1 deployment was short-lived; all LP liquidity had already been withdrawn. The DAO returned roughly $2,500 of protocol revenue to the users who paid it, distributed via Disperse.

$2,500 is not a material sum against a $1.5M services contract. Voting to give it back anyway is the same instinct visible in the DCA refunds and the Recovery Fund.

The proposals

Next: oracles and protocol-owned liquidity.