🏵️Favour

Favour is the court’s currency of merit.

Preface

When we first designed Jester’s reward model, our plan was to combine fee discounts with buybacks. Discounts would have given users a small, predictable benefit, while the majority of fees were still destined for buybacks and redistribution. But as we refined the system, it became clear that discounts were a distraction. They cap user benefit at pennies on the dollar, while also draining strength from the treasury. The real compounding effect always came from the buybacks.

By removing discounts entirely and channeling fees exclusively into buybacks and Spoils, the system became stronger, cleaner, and more reflexive. Every dollar of fees now works twice: first, by lifting the entire market cap through price impact on thin liquidity, and second, by handing Spoils to users at the lower pre-buyback price. It is the same phenomenon we saw during Hyperliquid’s airdrops: shallow liquidity meant every fee dollar pushed price disproportionately higher, while distributed tokens arrived already marked up in value. Jester’s model embraces that reflexivity — ensuring that both whales and smaller traders receive more net value than rebates could ever deliver.

At today’s depth (Sept 8, 2025; $5.2m market cap, $522k liquidity split into $261k base-side WETH and $261k JEST), a purely mathematical AMM model suggests that ~$3.36m in cumulative base-side buybacks could move price enough to imply a $1B market cap. This example assumes static liquidity and is provided only to illustrate the reflexive effect of buybacks in thin pools. It is not a projection or guarantee of future outcomes.

The result is a system that is not only fairer and more sustainable, but also places us in a credible position to scale to $1B and beyond.