Author: Gu Yu, ChainCatcher

Last week, the tragic aftermath of BackPack's exploit is still vivid; today, another decentralized perpetual contract trading protocol, edgeX, is facing an overwhelming wave of criticism.

This morning, edgeX officially announced the website for viewing and claiming token airdrops, and plans to launch a trading platform tonight. Incubated by Amber Group and strategically invested by Circle Ventures this year, edgeX was once highly anticipated by the exploiters.

Since August 2025, edgeX's trading volume has entered a rapid growth phase, accumulating over 470,000 user addresses and a total trading volume exceeding $87.7 billion, with a current total TVL of over $360 million. Furthermore, edgeX has earned over $180 million in fee revenue from these trades.

The edgeX team had promised the community that there would be no witch hunts; if there are points, there are tokens, which is also the source of confidence for many edgeX users. However, what everyone did not expect was that edgeX did not remove the witch account this time, but instead tampered with the “points weighting” aspect.

According to community feedback, many users received the same amount of points through trading, but the number of airdrop tokens received was different. Some users received an average of 4 tokens for 1 point, some could only get 0.5 tokens, while others could acquire 11 tokens. The project only stated that there indeed existed different weights for points from different sources.

Even if calculated at 11 tokens for each point, its current value is only $5.5, while last year the price of each point in the secondary market was $30-40, leading to significant losses for secondary market buyers of its points.

More seriously, KOLs like He Bi exposed that the edgeX team had a situation of insider trading, with multiple low-point related addresses cumulatively obtaining a quarter of the airdrop token amount.

As community questions arose, edgeX directly closed the comment section of its X account in an attempt to suppress the spread of negative comments, but it was futile.

“Why are there different weights for the same points and arbitrary rule changes? Why delete posts, kick users, and suppress discussions? Because a project that was prepared from the very beginning to rely on false trading to inflate data, to boost valuation through storytelling, and to collaborate with behind-the-scenes market-making groups for profit transfer fundamentally cannot respect users or the community,” renowned KOL Bing Wa stated on X.

Bing Wa further stated that the worst aspect of edgeX is that it did not come to do a project but to set up a scheme, and attempted to manipulate and harvest the industry.

Undoubtedly, this “post-rule” handling method directly undermines the users' core trust premise in the airdrop mechanism—predictability. Once users cannot assess returns based on public rules, the so-called “point brushing strategy” loses its gaming foundation, and a series of large-scale “counter-exploits” and “malicious acts” continue to impact user confidence.

In fact, a significant amount of the trading volume and user activity from unissued token DeFi protocols comes from airdrop expectations, and the seemingly vast community size and trading volume are built on this foundation. Once such project teams issue tokens, the potential attractiveness of gains for users diminishes, and the false prosperity will collapse rapidly; once the expected returns from trading for airdrops are no longer certain or even turn negative, the overall activity in the DeFi market could see a significant decline.

Taking edgeX as an example, in the days following the end of the project's airdrop snapshot, the number of new deposit users per day for the protocol plummeted from over 2000 to fewer than 50.

After edgeX's exploit, the market is left with a series of questions: How many people will continue to believe in “exploiting for wealth”? With counter-exploits becoming the new norm and a large number of exploiters leaving, will DeFi's trading activity and user retention continue to decline?

As “counter-exploit” evolves from an individual phenomenon to an industry consensus, the myth of becoming rich through exploitation may have come to an end. For participants in the post-airdrop era, protecting cash flow on hand may be more important than chasing those ambiguous “airdrop expectations.”

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