To the Moon: Gate.io Listing and $10M LP Milestone
By DeHub Team — 2021-10-02
Q4 2021 was, by every market measure, the best quarter DeHub has had. DHB ran close to 1000x from its launch price, our liquidity pool held close to $10 million, and we listed on Gate.io.
It is also the quarter our fundraise was stolen. Those two facts are the same story and we have never published one without the other.
What the numbers were
A near-1000x from a community-set launch price. Close to $10m of depth in the pool, which for a project barely two quarters past its first PancakeSwap listing is a genuinely unusual amount of liquidity. A tier-one centralised listing on top of that.
What a listing was supposed to do
The reason a project chases a centralised listing is access. In 2021 a large share of retail could not or would not use a DEX — no self-custody wallet, no comfort with the process, in some countries no realistic route to the chain at all. A CEX listing is how those people reach you.
It also brings depth, market makers, and price discovery that does not depend entirely on your own pool. All of that was real and all of it arrived.
What went wrong
The listing agent handling it was fraudulent. They took our fundraise and dumped into our chart instead of airdropping Gate users as agreed. Gate investigated, apologised, and could not identify the individual involved because the records were gone.
The full account is in its own post, and it belongs there rather than buried in a paragraph. The relevant point here is that the peak and the theft were the same weeks. Anybody reading this quarter as a straightforward success is reading half of it.
What we actually learned
The lasting lesson was not about market cycles. It was about counterparties.
We had spent that year auditing our contracts, publishing our snapshot rules and building verifiable game mechanics — enormous effort spent making our code trustworthy. The loss came through a person with a contract and a plausible introduction, in a process that had no on-chain component to verify at all.
Everything that followed reflects that. The voluntary delisting from Gate.io two years later, the published DEX policy, the transparency reports and eventually dhbscan.com all point the same direction: fewer places where you have to take somebody's word for it.
The 1000x is the number people remember from this quarter. The lesson we kept is that the parts of your operation with no public record are the parts that will hurt you.
On the number itself
A near-1000x is not an achievement and we have never presented it as one. It is a market condition, and the same conditions produced comparable charts for a great many projects that no longer exist.
What is worth reporting from Q4 2021 is the depth rather than the multiple. Close to $10 million in the pool meant ordinary holders could actually transact without the price moving against them, which is the part that affects real people and the part that does not appear in a screenshot of a chart.
We have been consistent about that framing since, including through periods when the multiple was a much less flattering number.