Back in Action: DeHub V2 Trading Resumes on Gate.io

By DeHub Team — 2023-02-16

DeHub v2 trading resumed on Gate.io in Q1 2023.

What it took to get here

The previous quarter had been the worst in our history. The contract's tax triggers malfunctioned and froze the token and the liquidity pool, forcing a full relaunch, and more than 25,000 holders had to be migrated to a new contract.

Resuming trading on a major exchange after that is not automatic. A relaunched token is a new contract, and an exchange has to be satisfied that the thing they are listing is what you say it is, that holders have actually moved, and that whatever caused the first failure will not cause a second.

We had one advantage in that conversation: v2 ran on plain standard ERC-20 tokenomics, with nothing in the transfer path. There is very little to explain about a token that does nothing unusual, and that simplicity was worth more in the relisting process than any amount of argument would have been.

What resuming actually meant

Access, restored. Holders who had used Gate rather than a DEX could trade again. Price discovery was not confined to our own pool. The practical consequences of the freeze were over.

It also closed the loop for a community that had been asked for a lot in a short period — a migration, a relaunch, and a quarter with no functioning market.

The complicated part

Gate.io is where our listing agent stole the fundraise and dumped our chart in 2021. Gate investigated, apologised, and could not identify the individual because the records were lost.

Returning to that venue was not a comfortable decision and it is fair to ask why we did.

The answer is that at the beginning of 2023, a meaningful part of our holder base could not practically use a decentralised exchange, and refusing a listing on principle would have punished them rather than anyone responsible. The failure had been an intermediary, not the exchange's order book, and holders needed a market.

And then we left

Ten months later we delisted from Gate.io voluntarily.

Those two decisions look contradictory and are not. In Q1 2023 our holders needed a functioning market and we did not have the standing to be selective about where. By Q4, the DEX policy was published, automated liquidity provision was running, and the on-chain route was good enough that leaving cost holders access rather than depriving them of it.

We kept both posts because the sequence is the point. The right decision in January was not the right decision in October, and pretending we always intended the second one would be a rewrite.

What a relisting actually costs

More than the fees, and worth knowing if you are ever in this position.

An exchange assessing a relaunched token is doing diligence on the reason you relaunched, which means the failure gets examined in detail by people who are deciding whether to be exposed to you. That process is uncomfortable and it is entirely reasonable.

It also takes time you do not control, during which your community is asking daily when trading resumes and you cannot give a date.

The thing that shortened it for us was having an answer that did not require interpretation: the transfer path is empty, here is the audit, here is the migration record. Simplicity is not just a safety property. It is also considerably easier to explain to someone who has no reason to be generous.