Major DeFi Exchange Gifts Users Millions in Free Crypto on Christmas Day

Spend the entire year giving and you might get a lil’ something in return on Christmas Day. 

That hope rang true for early adopters of decentralized exchange aggregator 1inch, whom 1inch this Christmas gifted tens of millions in free cryptocurrency. One lucky trader got $27 million in their stocking.

The exchange aggregator, which combines order books from several decentralized exchanges to reduce price slippage, launched its own cryptocurrency, 1inch token, on Christmas Day. 

1inch then distributed 90 million tokens, or 6% of the token supply, to early adopters of the platform. Anyone who had used 1inch before Christmas Day (UTC) and had placed at least one trade before September 15, at least four trades or trades that totaled $20, received some money. 

So far, 26,175 wallets have claimed 75% of the airdropped 1inch tokens, according to a dashboard on Dune Analytics.

The top claimer received 9.7 million tokens, worth $27 million at the peak value of the token. This is because they were a power user on 1inch; the exchange rewarded them proportionately. The price of 1inch increased to highs of $2.6 shortly after its launch (before crashing 33% in the past 24 hours to $1.73).  

The token is similar to others minted by decentralized finance protocols: a so-called “governance token,” just like Uniswap’s $UNI, Compound’s $COMP or Aave’s $LEND, which HODLers can use to vote on proposals to tweak the network. 

Governance tokens are minted in the spirit of decentralization, but they also draw more users to the platform; traders earn them for using the DeFi protocol’s services (lending or borrowing crypto on Compound or providing liquidity for 1inch) and they can often be sold for profits on secondary markets.