Yesterday, the decentralized derivatives exchange AEVO airdropped their tokens. They had previously stated that users could earn tokens by increasing their trading volume. However, after the token airdrop, many users felt “cheated” and expressed their strong dissatisfaction in the community.
Last week, AEVO, which was announced by Binance Launchpool, gained a lot of attention in the market. However, after the token airdrop was made available at 17:00 today, the community gave unanimous negative reviews, and participants’ frustrations were evident on social media:
“One user spent nearly $8,000 to generate a trading volume of $60 million, but only received 2,000 AEVO tokens (currently worth about $6,000 USDT). This kind of situation is really frustrating.”
“Even a trading volume of over $100,000 is considered ‘witchcraft’?”
“After a trading volume of $300,000, I only received over 90,000 coins. It’s unexpected that institutional users would also feel cheated.”
“There are a few accounts that didn’t participate in Snapshot 2, but they had aeUSD in Snapshot 1 and placed orders, and they didn’t receive anything.”
The Aevo project has sparked controversy on social media. Why did it receive such negative criticism after the token airdrop? We will start by examining the Farm Boost program and go through the entire user experience with Aevo to understand how users’ frustrations accumulated and eventually exploded.
From Farm Boost to AEVO Token Airdrop
On February 14, 2024, the official AEVO X Pandora:Farm Boost event was announced in the Mirror document. The event emphasized that trading volume would affect the allocation of token airdrops. The more trading volume a user generated, the faster the future trading would be boosted.
At the bottom of the document, the frequently asked questions clarified once again that the increased trading volume during Farm Boost would affect the quantity of AEVO tokens received in future airdrops.
Source: Official Mirror document
With the official announcement, users started aggressively increasing their trading volume on the platform. Some institutional users and studios used scripts to generate large trading volumes, while others manually conducted relatively frequent buy and sell transactions. Discussions on “how to minimize losses and maximize trading volume” and similar topics were prevalent in various communities, and the project gained immense popularity.
At 5:00 PM today, the AEVO token airdrop officially began. However, users were disappointed when they realized that their efforts in generating trading volume had been in vain. The majority of users felt cheated as the total value of the airdropped tokens did not cover their trading losses. Users who had contributed liquidity and traffic to the platform, helping the project gain impressive data when it was listed on Binance, now felt abandoned.
Unacceptable Official Explanation
AEVO’s official Mirror document updated the details of the token airdrop, including the following reference criteria:
– Trading volume before the Farm Boost event
– Trading volume during the Farm Boost event
– aeUSD balance in the account
– First transaction conducted on Aevo
– Active usage of Aevo
Additionally, it is worth noting that the official statement claimed that two types of accounts would be penalized in order to reward genuine trading users: accounts that abused deep OTM options and accounts engaged in wash trading (opening and closing positions within a short period of time).
Source: Official Mirror document
As soon as the content about “penalizing users who generate fake trading volume” was released, the community’s frustrations quickly spread. The Farm Boost event was meant to encourage trading volume generation, but now it penalized users who had done so, leading to dissatisfaction among users, studios, and institutions that had engaged in significant trading volume manipulation. This frustration even extended to other projects invested by Paradigm — “Stay away from all projects associated with PUAdigm.”
Tonight, both Binance and OKX opened AEVO trading. The current reported price is 2.9 USDT, with a circulating market value of $330 million and a FDV of $3.076 billion. Despite being heavily criticized by the community, would you buy AEVO at this price?
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