When protocol buybacks are handed to market makers, on-chain verification is still possible—just with a few more steps than looking directly at a treasury address. What you need to track is whether the market maker, after buying tokens on an exchange, eventually transfers those tokens into a publicly known on-chain wallet. That transfer action is recorded on-chain and can't be hidden.
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Step 1: Find the official buyback wallet address announced by the project
This is where verification starts. Without a publicly disclosed receiving address, on-chain verification is impossible.
What to do: Look for the wallet address publicly linked to the buyback plan in the project's official announcements, governance forum, or documentation.
How to do it: Movement Network clearly published the official on-chain wallet address for holding repurchased MOVE tokens when announcing its buyback plan:
0xA14C8e3eBb2Da43d027dC2c1b763387B9D59cACe. MyShell also promised in its announcement that it would "disclose wallet addresses related to the buyback for community verification." If a project doesn't even provide an address, it's not about whether verification is possible—it's that they don't want you to verify at all.Completion standard: You have a clear on-chain address that is labeled in the announcement as the dedicated buyback address.
Step 2: Track the address's token balance changes on a blockchain explorer
Next is the most direct verification step—checking whether the token balance at that address is increasing.
What to do: Enter the official buyback address from Step 1 into Etherscan or the block explorer for the chain in question.
How to do it: Check the balance of the relevant token (e.g., MOVE, SHELL) at that address. Also check the address's token transfer records to see if the source of funds is an exchange hot wallet. This proves the tokens were actually bought on the open market, not just moved from another project wallet to fake a buyback. Raydium's documentation explicitly lists the public holding address for repurchased tokens and explains that anyone can check its balance and transfer history.
Completion standard: You confirm that the token balance at the address has been steadily increasing after the buyback announcement and that the sources of funds are mainly exchange addresses.
Step 3: Compare the buyback amount with the public promise to see progress
Simply seeing tokens in the address isn't enough. You need to compare "how much was promised" versus "how much actually arrived."
What to do: Match the newly added tokens at the address against the total buyback amount promised in the announcement.
How to do it: The SHELL project promised an $8 million buyback. On-chain analysts tracked its buyback address and found that "since March 13 it has bought and withdrawn 20.95 million SHELL (worth $5.84 million) from Binance, completing about three-quarters of the buyback." This is a typical way to cross-check on-chain data against the stated commitment.
Completion standard: You calculate the current buyback completion percentage and see if the pace matches the announced timeline.
Common reasons for failure
The project announcement only says "the buyback will be executed by market makers" but never publishes the market maker's wallet address or the final storage address for the repurchased tokens. In this situation, on-chain verification cannot even start. Fewer than 1% of crypto projects voluntarily disclose their market maker agreements. In the vast majority of cases, how the market maker buys, how much they buy, and where they put the tokens afterward—it's all a black box. If a project doesn't even have a publicly announced buyback storage address, its buyback plan is essentially unverifiable.
Even if the project does publish a buyback address, watch out for "announce only, no transfer." The address is public, but the market maker never actually sends the repurchased tokens there, and the balance stays flat. In this case, the announcement doesn't match the on-chain data, and the project's buyback promise hasn't really been carried out. Additionally, some buybacks may happen entirely within a centralized exchange (with no on-chain transfer), and those funds truly cannot be verified through public on-chain data.
How to verify completion
Open a blockchain explorer and add the buyback address to your "watch list." Over the next month, check the address's token balance changes and transfer records every 3–5 days. If the balance grows steadily and transfers come from exchange hot wallets, the buyback is running as planned.
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Next steps
If you hold the project's tokens, tie the frequency of changes at the buyback address to the timeline in the buyback announcement (e.g., "completed within 90 days") and use that as a monitoring checkpoint. If by the deadline the token increase at that address is noticeably below the promised amount, or the source is not an exchange, you can publicly question the transparency of the execution in the community or on the governance forum.
