Drift Protocol, Solana’s largest perpetual swap futures exchange, recently launched a points program. The points program comes ahead of an upcoming airdrop in which Drift distributes governance tokens to community members as part of its efforts to decentralize the protocol.
Until now, Drift has Trading volume: $5 billion From approximately 90,000 users, the total value locked in the protocol amounts to over $120 million. The company closed its $23.5 million Series A in October, with contributions from Polychain Capital and Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, among others.
Drift points are distributed to users every week, and 100 million points are paid out every week. The protocol team has not yet released information on how many tokens in total will be distributed through the points program.
Points are mainly generated by users’ trading activities. This is based on the user’s prorated trading volume as well as other activities such as availability of liquidity.
How to earn points
Drift Points represent your role in the growth and success of Drift.
You will be awarded drift points each week based on your trading activity and can see your ranking on the leaderboard.
Hint: Your trading activity will earn you the most points
— Drift Protocol (@DriftProtocol) January 23, 2024
The program will last for three months, but the Drift team has reassured the community that past behavior will also be rewarded and that several snapshots have already been created to reward “OG users.” One team member also took to Twitter (aka X) to let users know that the program could end within three months, but not longer.
How do you farm?
Drift has publicly stated that points will be tied to prorated trading volume and that points will be distributed once a week. This means that if your activity accounts for 1% of Drift’s total volume in a given week, you will receive 1% of the points distributed for that week.
When trying to figure out how a protocol will evaluate various activities in a points program or airdrop, a good rule of thumb is to think about what the goals of the protocol are.
At this stage, Drift Protocol appears to be focusing on four key metrics: total transaction volume, number of users, cumulative transactions, and total value locked (TVL). With that in mind, we’d like to take steps to increase that number to secure this airdrop.
In this case, it’s safe to say that volume is the name of the game here, as these values all increase as volume increases. Drift is a perpetual futures exchange, so it only takes a few transactions to do it!
One final consideration: Drift Protocol does not serve US residents, so if you are in Red, White, or Blue, you should not use this service.
Editor: Andrew Hayward