dYdX Discontinues Promotion Claiming Overwhelming Demand

dYdX discontinues promotion after claiming that there was overwhelming demand making the promotion not viable for the company. The decentralized crypto derivatives exchange ended its short-lived $25 initial deposit bonus promotion. This also comes after a wave of criticism over its facial recognition requirements for new members.

The exchange, on the other hand, merely stated that “overwhelming demand” was the cause for their brief advertising campaign, which terminated on September 1 “effective immediately.” dYdX discontinues promotion after claiming that there was overwhelming demand and it may have done more bad than good with the promo campaign.

Due to extremely overwhelming demand of the $25 deposit bonus promotion, we are ending the campaign, effective immediately. Thank you to the many thousands of new users that onboarded to dYdX today. We truly underestimated the amount of interest the campaign garnered.

— dYdX (@dYdX) September 1, 2022

The promotion in question began on August 31 and gave new customers a $25 incentive if they invested $500 or more into the platform.

The only caveat was that they had to consent to a “liveness check” via webcam to authenticate their identity, which irritated several members of the group.

After allegedly onboarding hundreds of new customers, dYdX announced about 24 hours later that it will discontinue the promotion “due to highly overwhelming demand.”

Give me my $25 dollars pic.twitter.com/5n4r5GA6os

— King Ethan (@Kr3py) September 2, 2022

During the first release, the DEX team did not specify how long the promotional campaign would go, but noted that it “really underestimated the level of interest the campaign gained.”

dYdX made no note of the community backlash in its most recent tweet, but backed down on its use of face recognition software in an earlier post, claiming that it was simply used to ensure users weren’t claiming the bonus on multiple accounts.

Some in the community are skeptical, claiming that the cancellation was mostly due to the dispute, while others have voiced concerns over the platform’s use of such tools in the first place.

or the pushback from biometric data

— 0xBandito (@0xBandito) September 2, 2022

Yearn Finance writer Adam Cochran tweeted to his 153,100 followers that, despite previously being a strong supporter of dYdX, he will be leaving the platform and selling his DYDX tokens until he sees “real improvements there.”

“dYdX doubles down on claiming that this is ok by saying it’s just if you want the reward program. In their eyes your data privacy is a commodity and an acceptable risk if they get growth.”

“I’m hopeful for a decentralized perps market but I am worried about this behavior and think a company culture that prioritizes growth over users is dangerous,” he added.

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