Prioritizing Principles: Voluntary Delisting from Gate.io for Decentralization
By DeHub Team — 2023-10-01
In Q4 2023 we voluntarily delisted DHB from Gate.io.
Projects work for years to get a centralised listing. Leaving one by choice is unusual enough that it deserves a proper explanation.
The immediate trigger
Gate.io ended UK support.
That is the specific event, and it matters because a UK-founded project with a large UK community does not have a functioning relationship with an exchange its own users cannot access. Alongside it, our multi-million dollar liquidity pool had been drained by arbitrage bots and other questionable activity for years, which forced a broader decision about where DHB should trade at all.
The practical reason first
Our history with centralised intermediation is not good.
In Q4 2021 our listing agent took the fundraise and dumped into our chart instead of airdropping Gate users as agreed. Gate investigated, apologised, and could not identify the individual because the records were lost. Our recourse ended there.
That experience is not an argument against exchanges as such. It is an argument about verifiability. The entire failure occurred in a process with no public record, involving a party we could not audit, and it ended with "the records are gone".
Everything we had spent years building — provably fair draws, on-chain leaderboards, published snapshots — was aimed at removing exactly that class of problem from our own operations. Continuing to route a large part of our market through a process with the opposite property was inconsistent.
The timing
We had resumed trading on Gate.io in Q1 2023 after the v2 relaunch, because at that point a meaningful part of our holder base had no practical route to a decentralised exchange and needed a functioning market.
By Q4 that had changed. Automated liquidity provision was running, our DEX policy was published, and on-chain depth was good enough that leaving was a choice about principle rather than a decision to strand people.
The order matters. We built the alternative first and left second. Doing it the other way round would have been a gesture at our holders' expense.
What it cost
Real things, and we knew it:
- Access for users who prefer or require a centralised venue.
- Visibility. Exchange listings are a discovery surface, and leaving one removes you from it.
- Perceived legitimacy. A section of the market reads a delisting as a negative signal regardless of who initiated it, and no announcement fully corrects that.
Why we did it anyway
Because we are asking people to use a platform whose central claim is that you do not have to trust the operator. That claim is weakened every time the most important parts of our own operation happen somewhere unverifiable.
It also simplified something. There is no ambiguity now about where DHB trades or under what conditions, and no counterparty in the middle whose conduct we cannot audit.
Two and a half years on, that is still the position. Whether it was the commercially optimal call is arguable. It is the one consistent with everything else in this archive.
The objection worth taking seriously
That decentralised exchanges are not actually more trustworthy — they have their own failure modes, and a user losing funds to a malicious contract or a bad approval has no recourse at all.
That is true and we would not argue otherwise. The distinction is not that on-chain venues are safe. It is that they are inspectable: the code is readable, the transactions are public, and a failure produces evidence rather than an apology and a note about missing records.
Recourse and verifiability are different properties. Centralised venues offer more of the first and almost none of the second. Given our specific history, we weight the second more heavily — but a holder who weights recourse higher is making a defensible choice, and we would rather say so than pretend the trade-off does not exist.