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

Author: Gu Yu, ChainCatcher

Last week, BackPack’s devastating “anti-scam” episode was vividly on display. Today, another decentralized perpetual contract trading protocol, edgeX, has drawn an overwhelming wave of criticism.

This morning, edgeX officially released a token airdrop inspection and claim URL, and plans to list on exchanges tonight. As a project incubated by Amber group and strategically invested in by Circle Ventures this year, edgeX once held high hopes among “rug-pull” victims.

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

The edgeX team once promised the community that they would absolutely not check for sybils—more users mean more tokens. This has also been the source of confidence for many edgeX users. But what everyone didn’t expect is that this time edgeX indeed did not filter out sybil accounts, yet it “tampered” with things in terms of “points weighting.”

According to community feedback, many users receive the same number of points obtained through trading, but they receive different amounts of airdropped tokens. Some users get 4 tokens for every 1 point on average, while some users only get 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 we calculate at 11 tokens per point, its current value is only $5.5. Last year, however, the secondary-market price of each point on edgeX was $30–$40—this also caused severe losses for secondary-market buyers of its points.

Worse still, multiple KOLs including He Bi have revealed that the edgeX project team allegedly engaged in insider trading. Multiple related addresses with low points combined have received a quarter of the airdropped token amount.

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

“Why do we see the same-score different rewards, and arbitrary rule changes? Why delete posts, kick people, and suppress discussion? Because a project that from the very beginning was prepared to pile up data with fake trades, tell stories by inflating valuations, and complete the transfer of benefits by cooperating with the market-making group behind it—by nature, it can’t respect users, and it can’t respect the community.” A well-known KOL, Bingwa, posted on X.

Bingwa also said that the most atrocious thing about edgex is that it was never meant to build a project from the start—it was meant to set a trap. And it tried to destroy this industry through manipulation and “harvesting.”

Undoubtedly, this kind of “rule-after-the-fact” handling directly breaks through users’ most core premise of trust in the airdrop mechanism—predictability. Once users can’t evaluate their potential gains based on publicly available rules, the so-called “points-farming strategy” loses its game-theoretic foundation. And as more and more large-scale “anti-scam” and “malicious behavior” events continue to hit users’ confidence, the damage keeps compounding.

In fact, a large portion of the trading volume and user activity of many DeFi protocols that have not yet issued tokens comes from expectations of an airdrop. Although the community scale and trading volume appear enormous, they are built on this foundation. Once the project team successfully issues tokens, the appeal of potential gains for users will quickly collapse, and the fake prosperity will rapidly fall apart. And once the expected profit from trading to secure airdrops is no longer certain—perhaps even negative—the overall activity of the DeFi market could drop significantly.

Taking edgeX as an example: in the recent days right after the project’s airdrop snapshot ended, the number of new deposit users per day fell rapidly from 2,000+ to below 50.

After edgeX’s anti-scam crackdown, the market is left with a series of question marks: How many more people will continue to believe in “getting rich by rug-farming”? If anti-scam becomes the new normal and large numbers of rug-farmers leave, will DeFi’s trading activity and user stickiness keep declining?

When “anti-scam” evolves from isolated incidents into an industry-wide consensus, the myth of getting rich through rug-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 from reality.