Airdrops can't make you rich, edgeX doesn't need a community

Author: Gu Yu, ChainCatcher

Last week’s BackPack “anti-scam” catastrophe was vivid and unforgettable; today, another decentralized perpetual contract trading protocol, edgeX, is facing a surging wave of criticism.

This morning, edgeX officially released the token airdrop lookup and claim URL, and plans to list on exchanges this evening. As a project incubated by Amber Group and strategically invested in by Circle Ventures this year, edgeX was once highly anticipated by the “haircutters.”

Since August 2025, edgeX’s trading volume has entered a fast growth track. To date, the total number of user wallet addresses has exceeded 470k, total transaction volume has surpassed $87.7 billion, and current total TVL is above $360 million. In addition, edgeX has earned more than $180 million in fee revenue from these transactions.

The edgeX team previously promised the community that they would absolutely not check for sybils. If there are points, there are coins—this has been the source of confidence for many edgeX users. But what everyone didn’t expect is that this time, edgeX indeed did not remove sybil accounts; however, they tampered with the “point weight.”

According to community feedback, many users receive the same number of points from trading, but the number of airdropped tokens they receive is not the same. Some users get 4 airdropped tokens per average 1 point, while some users get only 0.5 tokens, and some users can receive 11 tokens. In response, the project team only said that points from different sources do have different weights.

Even if calculated at 11 tokens per point, its current value is only $5.5. Last year, the price of each edgeX point in the secondary market was $30–$40, which means secondary-market buyers are taking a huge loss.

Even worse, multiple KOLs including He Bi have exposed that the edgeX team engaged in insider trading. Multiple related addresses with low points collectively received a quarter of the total airdropped tokens.

As questions from the community kept rising, edgeX directly shut down the comment section on its X account in an attempt to suppress the spread of negative comments, but it was of no avail.

“Why does the same score lead to different outcomes, and why do they arbitrarily change the rules? Why do they delete posts, kick people, and suppress discussion? Because a project that from the very beginning was prepared to stack data with fake trades, tell stories by inflating valuations, and complete benefit transfers by cooperating with the behind-the-scenes market-making group fundamentally can’t respect users, and it can’t respect the community either.” A well-known KOL, Bingwa, wrote in a post on X.

Bingwa also said the most恶劣 part of edgex is that it was never meant to build a real project from the start—it was meant to set a scheme. And they tried to destroy this industry with manipulation and harvesting.

There’s no doubt that this “rule-after-the-fact” handling directly pierces the most core premise of users’ trust in the airdrop mechanism—predictability. Once users can’t evaluate their potential gains based on public rules, the so-called “point farming strategies” lose their game-theoretic foundation. And one large-scale “anti-scam” and “malicious behavior” incident after another continues to shake users’ confidence.

In fact, the trading volume and user activity of many DeFi protocols that have not yet issued tokens come from airdrop expectations. The seemingly large community size and trading volume are built on this foundation. Once these project teams complete token issuance, the appeal of potential gains for users will quickly collapse, and the fake boom will fall just as quickly. And if the expected returns from trading to get airdrops are no longer certain—even turning negative—overall DeFi market activity could drop significantly as well.

Take edgeX as an example. In the last few days around the completion of the project’s airdrop snapshot, the number of new deposit users per day fell rapidly from above 2,000 to below 50.

After edgeX’s anti-scam actions, the market is left with a string of unanswered questions: How many people will continue to believe in “get rich by farming”? When anti-scam becomes the new normal and a large number of farmers leave, will DeFi’s trading activity and user stickiness continue to decline?

When “anti-scam” evolves from isolated incidents into an industry consensus, the myth of getting rich by farming may already be over. For participants in the post-airdrop era, protecting the cash flow in hand may be more important than chasing those “airdrop expectations” that are hard to tell apart as real or fake.