I dont know if this has been used by anyone but i'm going to coin a new term I think is appropriate. I call it the Incentive Token. Its the latest scheme in the crypto land slash industry that has taken the exchange world by storm.
What is an incentive token ? It is a reward scheme that is structured in a precise way to provide strong incentives to achieve a particular goal for the founders. Instead of directly profiting off a token, siphoning off the dev funds or other well known schemes, the incentive token provides
clean and legal revenue for a company in the USA regardless of crypto restrictions.
Arguably the first real large-scale incentive token is the DYDX token. This token is not emitted by the dydx corporation, but by the dydx foundation. Nevermind the fact that the foundation awards tokens to the corporation, and that it is called a governance token. It is certainly not in the pure sense of the word, since the dydx corporation maintains a deciding vote at all times and so no decision can be made against its interests. It is not designed to provide governance, democracy (1$-1 vote ? not even, we are beyond that) or a mechanism to provide change. No ! It is designed for one, and only one precise goal : To drive legal and clean revenue into the dydx corporation, regardless of SEC considerations.
And it works. Soon, all new exchanges (or even old ones), DEX's, or other projects will copy paste the business model. If they do not, they will surely fail vs the competition that does. So lets take a look at how it all works.
DYDX token started as a massive airdrop, but this is not the point of the following article.
Lets talk about DYDX and why there is so much volume. Also how to make insane amounts of money with little risk, if that's what you are into. Its all about dydx token farming - and you get it by generating fees and by having Open interest. I would call this a scheme by dydx team, since all fees go in their pockets. 35 Million last month, much more this month. Lets get started !
Open as many account pairs as you are able to. One account is long bitcoin or ethereum, the other short. Using very high leverage, say 10X or more you are able to create high open interest. The formula is Fees(^0.7) X Open Interest (^0.3). Your score/total score of everyone = your dydx tokens out of the monthly total of 3.8million or so. Now when the market moves up or down, you need to have orders set up to reduce leverage so you dont get liquidated. If the market moves too much, then you rebalance your USDC. Simply withdraw USDC from 1st account, to the 2nd account. Resume high leverage. Do this for 1 full epoch and your Open Interest will be at maximum for your capital. Now for the fees, for this it is better to get hummingbot for algorithmic trading, but not necessary.
During the month, you can have a strategy to build up fees paid by market making/arbitrage, or scalping. But you dont have to. In the last 3 days of the epoch (lasts a month), you now have your estimated rewards. Now is the time to reduce open interest and focus on fees.
Since the Bitcoin market spread is very low (due to token farming people, like you), you can buy/sell for a 0.01% loss at will. Spend all your capital if you have to, simply calculate your estimated trader score vs total and see what 1$ in fees will return you in dydx tokens. Last epoch an 1$ extra in fees got you about 10-15x minimum extra dydx tokens. This month will be less, but still interesting. So you maximize fees, literally losing money on purpose to get fees paid to dydx team. Just to increase score.
Now you wait a few days and are able to claim your dydx tokens from your 20-30-40-50 account pairs or how ever many you have. Just dont use an USA IP and you are good to go. The system was designed this way to make dydx team massive amounts of money in fees.
Another interesting aspect is that everyone is currently sending their capital on dydx, TVL has increased by over 100% in a few days to now almost a billion $. They call dydx a governance token, but your vote has no weight, since the team/investors have 50% of all tokens, and only about 8-10% of tokens are available to users. It literally takes quadruple the amount of existing tokens to pass a vote, so not going to happen unless the team/investors decide that's what they want.
So happy token farming, its a minimum 10% a month, at best a lot more capital a month. Risk is dydx token price which seems to be priced just right to have fees come in
Welcome to the age of the "Incentive Tokens". Mr. Gensler/SEC might want to step in front of this, because this is the new thing that replaces everything. The Incentive token age is upon us all. Adapt or die, all other exchanges.
In order for the scheme to continue, the dydx token price will have to increase dramatically for each further epoch - as more people come in, rewards per person/$ goes down. So far people have made over 1000% return in two months with this strategy, and although returns are down a lot, it is still very viable. Now you see that the dydx token price and distribution are very closely aligned with driving TVL, open interest and trading fees in the platform. Such is the success of this strategy that dydx now is pretty much in the top ranking of all exchanges, from pure obscurity only 3 months ago.
The dydx team has collected 35 million in fees in september, and expect that to be probably above 100 million in October. Pure, clean, legal revenue. Unless of course, you decide that the dydx foundation and corporation arent actually seperate entities. If you are american, you cannot trade in dydx (most use vpns, those are not banned in practice). If you partake in this strategy, do not "wash trade" to save the spread when you buy/sell for the only purpose of generating fees. This will get you banned. But having accounts with a neutral position offset will not. Just be careful, the last few hours you will see people DDOSing the platform to prevent others from racking up their trader score at the last minute. Or simply platform overload from everyone doing this. The reason they wait until the very end is to have some predictability in the returns.
Til next sheme,