Yesterday, the decentralized derivatives exchange AEVO airdropped their tokens. In the past, they had stated that users could earn tokens by trading volume. However, after the token airdrop, many users felt “cheated” and expressed strong dissatisfaction in the community.
Last week, AEVO, announced by Binance Launchpool, attracted a lot of attention in the market. However, after the token airdrop was opened for claiming at 17:00 today, the community gave unanimous negative reviews, and participants expressed their anger on social media:
“One account traded approximately $8,000 and generated $60 million in trading volume, but only received 2,000 AEVO tokens (currently worth about $6,000 USDT). This kind of market manipulation is really frustrating.”
“Real trading volume over $100,000 is also considered ‘witchcraft’?”
“After trading volume of $300,000, only received slightly over 90,000 coins. Institutions also being manipulated is unexpected.”
“Some accounts did not participate in Snapshot 2, but had aeUSD deposits and opened orders before Snapshot 1, and still didn’t receive any tokens.”
In the screenshots posted on social media, most users only received 0.1 AEVO token.
Why did AEVO, which has been widely discussed on social media, receive such negative reviews after the token airdrop? We will start from the Farm Boost program and examine the entire user experience with AEVO, in order to understand how the users’ grievances accumulated and exploded.
From Farm Boost to AEVO Token Airdrop
On February 14, 2024, the official AEVO X Pandora: Farm Boost activity was announced in the Mirror document. This activity emphasized that trading volume would affect the token airdrop allocation. The more transactions, the faster the future trading boost.
At the same time, the FAQ at the bottom of the document once again explained that the increased trading volume during Farm Boost would affect the amount of AEVO tokens airdropped in the future.
In this activity, users were clearly informed that tokens would be airdropped based on trading volume. As a result, users began to aggressively increase their trading volume on the platform. Some used scripts to conduct large volume transactions, while others manually conducted relatively frequent buy/sell transactions. Discussions on how to minimize losses while maximizing trading volume and similar topics became popular in various communities, and the project gained immense attention.
At 5:00 PM today, the AEVO token airdrop officially began. Expectant users who had diligently increased their trading volume were disappointed to find that their efforts were in vain. The majority of users felt “cheated” as the total value of the airdropped tokens did not cover their trading losses. These users had contributed liquidity and traffic to the platform, helping the project gain impressive data during its launch on Binance. Now, they feel abandoned.
Unacceptable Official Explanation
AEVO’s official Mirror document updated the details of the AEVO token airdrop. The reference standards for this airdrop are as follows:
– Trading volume before the Farm Boost activity
– Trading volume during the Farm Boost activity
– aeUSD balance in the account
– The first transaction conducted on AEVO
– Active usage of AEVO
Furthermore, it is worth noting that the official claims to reward genuine trading users and penalize two types of accounts: those abusing deep OTM options and wash traders (accounts opening and closing positions within a short period of time).
Once the content about “penalizing users with fake trading volume” was released, the community’s anger quickly spread. The official had initiated the Farm Boost activity to encourage trading volume, but now penalizes users with high trading volume. This has caused dissatisfaction among many users, studios, and institutions that conducted significant trading volume. The frustration even extended to other projects invested by Paradigm – “avoid all projects associated with PUAdigm”.
Tonight, both Binance and OKX opened AEVO trading, with a reported price of 2.9 USDT, circulating market capitalization of $330 million, and FDV of $3.076 billion. Despite the extensive criticism from the community, would you buy AEVO at this price?
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