Originally published at mrnasdog.com/research/ray/inflation by MrNasdog.
Raydium releases about 0.51M RAY over 90 days from a fixed mining reserve, while the buyback funded by 12% of every pool's trading fee took 2.33M RAY off the open market and held it. RAY minting is permanently disabled, so the buyback outpaces the emission and the Pressure Framework reads −0.68% net on the active float. Our supply monitor reads +0.24% because it still counts the held buyback wallet as circulating — a 0.92-point gap that is mechanical, not an error.
The verdict, in one paragraph
For the 90-day window ending Jul 19 2026, the MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads RAY at −0.68% net: 0.51M RAY of sell pressure against 2.33M RAY of buy pressure on a circulating base of 269.31M RAY. Our supply monitor reads the realised change over the same 90 days at +0.24%, a gap of 0.92 percentage points. That exceeds the framework's half-point tolerance, so a monitor-gap chip ships on the RAY overview. The gap resolves cleanly: the Raydium buyback does not burn RAY, it accumulates it in a public wallet that the monitor's upstream classification still treats as circulating supply. The 2.33M RAY absorbed is worth 0.87 points of the gap on its own, and the small difference between the framework's emission read and the monitor's realised float growth covers the remaining 0.05 points. RAY is best read as structurally deflationary on the active float, with the held buyback stack sitting behind it as a governance-reversible overhang.
Sell pressure: where new RAY comes from
Sell #1, protocol inflation, is the only live sell row and it is small: about 0.51M RAY over 90 days. Raydium's RAY mint authority is disabled, so no new RAY can ever be created — on-chain total supply sits at 554.998M against a 555M hard cap and cannot rise. What reads as inflation is the fixed mining reserve paying already-issued RAY out as staking and farming rewards. Raydium's single-sided RAY staking pool emits at 0.065 RAY per second, or roughly 2.06M RAY a year, which lands at 0.51M RAY over a quarter. Raydium's own documentation puts current emissions at approximately 1.9M RAY a year — the two figures agree within eight percent, which is why this row ships as a measured value rather than an estimate.
Sell #2, vesting unlocks, is zero and permanently so. Raydium's team and seed allocations, together 25.9% of total supply, were locked for twelve months after the token generation event and then released daily from month 13 to month 36; that schedule concluded on Feb 21 2024. RAY has been fully unlocked ever since, so no vesting cliff can reach the market in this window or any future one.
Sell #3, foundation and unscheduled unlocks, is zero because nothing moved. Every project-held allocation wallet was read directly on-chain for this build and every one was flat across the full 90 days: the mining reserve at 123.3M RAY, partnership and ecosystem at 138.6M, team at 7.3M, advisors at 11.1M, community and seed at 2.3M, and the liquidity wallet at zero. The Raydium mining reserve token account has not changed balance since March 2024. Sell #4, long-term locked or bankruptcy, is zero for the simple reason that Raydium has no bankruptcy estate and no court-ordered distribution schedule.
Buy pressure: where new RAY goes
Buy #1, the programmatic buyback, carries the whole buy side at 2.33M RAY over 90 days. Raydium routes 12% of every pool's trading fee into automatic open-market RAY purchases — the same share on concentrated-liquidity pools, constant-product pools and legacy AMM v4 pools, applied to the trading fee rather than to the trade size. This build measured the row the hard way: the Raydium buyback accumulation wallet held 80.99M RAY on Apr 20 2026 and 83.32M RAY on Jul 19 2026, a clean 2.33M RAY of accumulation with no outflow. Cross-checked against the mechanism, trailing 90-day Raydium trading fees of $15.9M imply a $1.91M buyback, which at the window's average RAY price of $0.69 buys 2.75M RAY — within twenty percent of the on-chain figure, and the on-chain figure wins.
Buy #2, protocol fee burn, is zero, and this is the single most misread fact about RAY. Raydium does not burn its buyback. Bought-back RAY is transferred to a public accumulation wallet and held there; RAY total supply has not moved, which proves nothing was destroyed. Buy #3, foundation buy, is zero — Raydium does no discretionary open-market buying outside the automatic fee buyback. Buy #4, new long-term lock, is zero as well: RAY staking is user-initiated and withdrawable at any time, so it locks nothing structurally, and no new escrow or multi-year lock was announced in the window.
Foundation and overhang
RAY's overhang is large and fully enumerable. Roughly 285.7M RAY sits outside circulation, and this build accounted for almost all of it by address. The Raydium mining reserve holds 123.3M RAY with no published release schedule beyond the staking emission tail. Partnership and ecosystem holds 138.6M, advisors 11.1M, team 7.3M and community and seed 2.3M. All five are read by chain RPC on every rebuild, and all five were unchanged across this window.
The sixth and most consequential overhang is the buyback wallet itself, now 83.3M RAY — about 31% of circulating RAY, bought with well over $200M of cumulative Raydium protocol fees. Because Raydium holds rather than burns, that stack is a real, reversible supply overhang: a future governance decision could redeploy it, sell it, or burn it, and only one of those three outcomes is good for holders. It is tracked on-chain daily. If the buyback wallet's balance falls between refreshes, that outflow enters Sell #3 at the next refresh. The same trigger applies to each of the five Raydium allocation wallets.
How RAY compares to other fee-funded DEX tokens
The useful comparison for RAY is not other Solana assets but other tokens whose supply story is a fee-funded buyback. Exchange tokens that run quarterly buy-and-burn programmes convert revenue into permanent supply destruction: the coins leave the ledger, total supply falls, and an aggregator and a mechanism-level framework end up agreeing on the number. Raydium sits one step short of that. The revenue conversion is identical — arguably better, since it runs continuously at 12% of every fee rather than quarterly at management discretion — but the destination is a wallet, not a burn address. The effect on the tradable float today is the same; the durability is not.
Against uncapped, emission-driven DeFi tokens, RAY looks structurally strong. Raydium has a 555M hard cap, a disabled mint authority, a vesting schedule that ended in Feb 2024, and an emission tail of roughly 2.06M RAY a year that is being outrun more than four to one by the buyback. Very few DeFi tokens can claim all four at once. The genuine risk is not dilution, it is revenue: Raydium trading fees ran at $181M over the trailing year but only $3.9M in the last 30 days. Because the buyback is a fixed percentage of fees, a fee collapse is a buyback collapse, and the deflation this framework measures is a function of trading activity Raydium does not control.
What to watch in the next 90 days
First, the Raydium buyback wallet balance — the cleanest single number on RAY, read directly on every rebuild; a flattening curve would show the fee decline reaching the buyback before any dashboard reports it. Second, the fee run rate: at the current 30-day pace the next quarter's buyback would come in below this window's 2.33M RAY, compressing the net toward flat. Third, the Jul 22 2026 AMM v4 upgrade removing the legacy OpenBook dependency, and the May 18 2026 concentrated-liquidity release that added limit orders, single-sided fees and dynamic fees — both change how much fee revenue Raydium captures, and therefore the size of the buyback. Fourth, any governance move on the held RAY stack: a decision to burn it would be the largest deflationary event in RAY's history, and a decision to redeploy it would be the largest supply event. Fifth, the aftermath of the Jun 10 2026 exploit of five retired 2021 Raydium pools, which took 150,177 RAY plus SOL and USDC and is being reimbursed from treasury — that reimbursement moves already-circulating coins, not new supply, but the treasury drawdown is worth tracking.
Summary
The MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads RAY at −0.68% net over 90 days: a 0.51M RAY mining-reserve emission against a 2.33M RAY fee-funded buyback, on 269.31M RAY circulating. Raydium's supply mechanism is unusually clean — a 555M hard cap, a permanently disabled mint, vesting closed since Feb 2024, and a buyback that outruns the emission more than four to one. The key risk is not dilution but revenue: the buyback is a fixed 12% slice of trading fees that have fallen hard, and a weaker quarter mechanically shrinks the deflation. The second risk is that the buyback holds rather than burns, leaving 83.3M RAY — about 31% of the float — parked in a wallet that governance could one day reverse.
MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of Raydium (RAY), Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Updated Jul 19 2026.
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