Recently, a major exchange partnered with ASTER, and the wallet interface now allows direct trading of Aster. The official announced an additional $200,000 incentive, which sounds promising.

I carefully calculated the rules and found several tricks. To qualify for the reward, there is a hard requirement — a trading volume of at least 5,000U, and the reward for this 5,000U must be greater than 1U. It sounds simple, but in practice, it's difficult to implement.

The real threshold is this: the $200,000 prize pool requires a total trading volume of 1 billion to be fully released. In other words, 5000/10 billion×200,000=1U. That means, when the platform's total trading volume reaches 10 billion, you need to trade 5000U to barely earn a 1U reward. The problem is—gas fees and slippage losses from trading make it impossible to recover that 1U.

So, the true purpose of this activity is clear: the platform wants genuine trading users to migrate from other places, not those who just want to manipulate volume for arbitrage or free rewards. It’s meaningful for real traders, but those looking to exploit the system can give up.