Hashcats minting slows, reducing buyback support for HASH

Hashcats, the browser-based mining project that lets users solve hash puzzles to mint pixel-cat NFTs, is hitting a wall. Minting activity has dropped significantly as the project enters its tenth epoch, and that slowdown is pulling the rug out from under the buyback mechanism designed to prop up the $HASH token.

The numbers paint a clear picture: 4,566 mints recorded in recent days, well below the pace needed to hit the project’s 16,376-cat target. With only 9,109 cats mined so far, roughly 55% of the way there, the project’s economic engine is sputtering at a critical moment.

The economics of slowing miners

To understand why fewer mints matter for $HASH, you need to understand how the plumbing works. Hashcats operates on a flywheel: users pay ETH to mine NFT cats, 30% of those mint proceeds feed into a buyback mechanism that purchases and burns $HASH tokens, and 5% of swap fees on the token do the same. More minting means more ETH flowing into buybacks, which means more tokens getting permanently destroyed.

That flywheel has been spinning reasonably well up to this point. The buyback mechanism has burned 1.8 million $HASH tokens, wiping out 41.3% of total issuance using approximately 194.6 ETH. About 29 ETH currently sits in the buyback queue waiting to be deployed.

The entry price for epoch 10 sits at roughly 0.164 ETH, double what it cost in the previous epoch. The problem is that doubling the price appears to have more than halved the enthusiasm. With $HASH trading around 0.0001275 ETH, the math on whether it makes economic sense to keep mining is getting tighter for participants.

A flywheel that needs momentum

The Hashcats project, built on the Ethereum-compatible Robinhood Chain, represents an interesting experiment in tying NFT scarcity directly to token economics. Users don’t just click a button to mint. They solve browser-based hash challenges, essentially performing proof-of-work computation to earn the right to create unique pixel-cat NFTs.

Trading of $HASH began around September 11, 2026, shortly after the 1,016th cat was minted. The launch was designed to cool speculation quickly: initial swap fees started at a punishing 50% and dropped to 2.5% within just 10 minutes.

With 41.3% of supply already burned, the deflationary mechanism has clearly been working. The question now is whether the remaining 7,267 cats can sustain enough minting activity to keep the buyback engine running at a meaningful clip.

What to watch from here

With 29 ETH sitting in the buyback queue, there’s still fuel in the tank for near-term burns. That pending amount represents a buffer that can continue reducing $HASH supply even if no new cats are minted tomorrow. But it’s a finite buffer, and at current minting rates, it won’t be replenished quickly.

The 1,698 cats that have been burned add another dimension to the supply dynamics, creating additional scarcity on the NFT side.

The project’s real-time tracking site, which displays hashrate and minting progress transparently, at least gives participants the data they need to make informed decisions.

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