Crafty DeFi farmers are claiming to be sitting on six-figure stashes after gaming the protocol’s recent airdrop, as dYdX’s governance token rises on speculation that Chinese traders may be flocking to the derivatives DEX.
According to sources, China’s crypto traders are converging on the decentralized margin trading protocol as Beijing seeks to further crack down on digital assets, DYDX has risen 85 percent in two days.
On September 8, users received an airdrop of the exchange’s governance token. Because the number of tokens individuals got was based on previous trading activity on the exchange, word of the airdrop sparked a frenzy of activity as farmers hurried to the platform to take advantage of the free tokens.
Many airdrop recipients have made huge profits, with DYDX tokens currently selling at $21 and a market valuation of over $1 billion.
Some users took to Twitter to brag about their airdrop gains, revealing how they tried to trick the system by exchanging the same assets on the network between multiple wallets under their control in order to qualify for hundreds of thousands of dollars in incentives.
My free $DYDX airdrop is worth $900,000. Good morning.— Carter (@moneywithcarter) September 23, 2021
Daniel Que, a Twitter user, stated that their airdrop is now worth $420K, stressing that he would have been unable to participate if he was still based in the United States.
“Moving to Taiwan (without obtaining a Green Card) was a wise decision,” he remarked.
Others were not so fortunate, with numerous users reporting that the US Securities and Exchange Commission had “protected” them from the airdrop.
7/ The SEC now wants to use this same system to “protect” you from crypto. If you were one of the many Americans “protected” from @dydxprotocol ‘s $1 billion airdrop, it’s because dydx doesn’t report information to the SEC like a company from the 1980s.— myss3lium industri3s (@mysselium) September 27, 2021
This year, DYdX has shown strong fundamental growth, with derivatives volume increasing 2,583 percent in the three months since June 30. For the first time on Sept. 27, the margin trading DEX’s daily volume surpassed that of the leading US spot exchange Coinbase.
According to L2beat, the platform’s total value locked (TVL) has just reached an all-time high of $503 million, making it the second-largest layer-two network behind Arbitrum. Currently, the exchange accounts for 20% of all second-layer TVL.
