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

Author: Gu Yu, ChainCatcher

Last week’s brutal back-rug episode involving Backpack is still fresh and vivid, and today another decentralized perpetual contract trading protocol, edgeX, has come under a wave of criticism.

This morning, edgeX officially announced the token airdrop snapshot and claim URLs, and it plans to list on exchanges tonight. As a project incubated by Amber Group and strategically invested in this year by Circle Ventures, edgeX once held high hopes among the rug-hunting crowd.

Since August 2025, edgeX’s trading volume has been on a fast-growth track. To date, the number of user wallet addresses has exceeded 470,000, 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 previously promised the community that it would absolutely not check for sybil accounts. If there’s activity, there are tokens—this has also been a source of confidence for many edgeX users. But what everyone didn’t expect is that this time edgeX did not remove sybil accounts; instead, it tampered with the “points weighting.”

According to community feedback, many users received the same number of points from transactions, but the number of airdropped tokens was different. Some users get 4 tokens per 1 point on average, some users can only get 0.5 tokens, and some users can get 11 tokens. In response, the project team only said that points from different sources do indeed have different weights.

Even if calculated at 11 tokens per point, its current value is only $5.5. Last year, the secondary-market price for each point on edgeX was $30–$40, which has caused severe losses for its secondary-market buyers.

Even worse, multiple KOLs such as He Bi have exposed that the edgeX project team had insider-rigged positions. Multiple related addresses with low points collectively obtained one quarter of the airdropped tokens.

As waves of questions rose from the community, edgeX directly closed the comment section on its X account in an attempt to suppress the spread of negative comments, but it was of no use.

“Why did ‘same points, different rewards’ show up, and why were rules changed arbitrarily? Why delete posts, kick people out, and suppress discussion? Because a project that was never meant to build a real product from the start—one that essentially planned to stack data with fake trades, to hype valuations and tell stories, and to complete benefit transfers in coordination with the market-making group behind it—by nature cannot respect users, and cannot respect the community either.” A well-known KOL, Bingwa, wrote in a post on X.

Bingwa also said that edgex’s worst aspect is that it was never trying to build a project at all from the beginning—it was setting a trap, and it tried to wreck this industry through manipulation and harvesting.

Undeniably, this “rules changed after the fact” handling directly shatters users’ most core premise for trusting the airdrop mechanism—predictability. Once users can’t evaluate their potential returns based on publicly available rules, the so-called “points-farming strategy” loses its game-theory foundation. And a series of large-scale “anti-rug” and “malicious behavior” incidents are also continuously undermining user confidence.

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. What looks like a huge community scale and trading volume are built on this basis. Once these project teams complete token issuance, the appeal of potential gains disappears for users; this false prosperity will collapse quickly. And once the expected rewards from trading to obtain airdrops are no longer certain—even turning negative—the overall activity in the DeFi market could drop significantly.

For example, in edgeX’s case, in the recent days after the airdrop snapshot ended, the number of new deposit users per day fell rapidly from over 2,000 to below 50.

After edgeX’s anti-rug, the market is left with a string of questions: how many people will continue to believe in “getting rich by farming”? If anti-rug becomes the new normal and large numbers of rug farmers leave, will DeFi’s trading activity and user stickiness keep falling?

When “anti-rug” evolves from isolated events into an industry-wide consensus, the myth of getting rich from rug-hunting 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 real from fake.