Parrot Finance to Begin PRT Token Buyback on Monday, Capping Fiery Vote

Beleaguered DeFi protocol Parrot Finance is moving forward with an activist investor-led plan to phase out its PRT token and will begin redemptions on Monday, according to posts in its Discord server.

The Solana-based lending and stablecoin market plans to buy PRT tokens from all sellers at a price of $0.0045 apiece via a stablecoin market set up on the OpenBook decentralized exchange. This redemption period will last for eight weeks and conclude with the sunsetting of PRT, Parrot’s governance token.

The redemption program’s greenlighting is the result of a community vote to return a slice of Parrot’s treasury – valued north of $70 million – to token holders. It passed with a lopsided 99% in favor but faced backlash from small-time investors who feel Parrot’s developer team is keeping too much of the treasury for itself.

The vote "was a premeditated sham" that relied heavily on insider-connected wallets, said the pseudonymous Ashpool, an on-chain sleuth that focuses on the Solana ecosystem. He pointed to a seeming "dress rehearsal" vote the organizers held one week prior to the final proposal.

Original investors of Parrot and PRT can expect to recover about a tenth of the value they put in. Newcomers, particularly the activist investors who pressured Parrot’s leaders for a redemption program, could make many multiples, depending on when they bought in.

Parrot’s redemption program comes two years into the project’s unremarkable run on the Solana blockchain, where it has failed to catch fire despite raising an over $90 million warchest from retail and venture investors.

The token was trading slightly below its intended buy price at $0.004376 at press time.