Exchange Tokens Are Being Redesigned Around One Question: How Do You Stop People Leaving?

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure The airdrop cycle of 2024 and 2025 produced a repeatable pattern, and everyone in the market can recite it. A protocol announces a points programme. Volume climbs. Wallets multiply. The token generates, the airdrop lands, and within weeks a large share of the supply has been sold and a large share of the activity has moved to whichever protocol announced points next. The mechanism worked exactly as designed. It bought attention and volume for a period, at a price paid in supply. What it did not buy was anything that stayed after the payment stopped. Perp DEXs have been the most aggressive users of this playbook, and they now have the most reason to move past it. The sector is no longer small enough for growth-at-any-cost to be the only objective: on-chain perpetual volume has climbed from roughly 2% of the total perpetuals market in January 2024 to over 10% by early 2026, with monthly volumes crossing a trillion dollars, and the centralised share of open interest falling from 96.4% at the start of 2025 to 86.5% by April 2026 according to CoinGecko’s research. A sector at that scale i...