Trials and Tribulations: The Gate.io Listing Agent Incident
By DeHub Team — 2021-10-03
This is the worst thing that happened to DeHub in 2021, and it happened in the same quarter as our best numbers.
We list it here in full because a roadmap that only records the wins is not a record of anything.
What happened
We engaged an agent to handle our Gate.io listing. Part of the arrangement was a fundraise, and part was an airdrop to Gate users.
The agent took the fundraise. The airdrop to Gate users never happened. Instead, the allocation was dumped into our chart.
We raised it with Gate. Gate investigated and apologised. They were unable to identify the individual responsible, because the records covering the period had been lost.
That is the entire outcome. No recovery, no named party, no resolution beyond an apology.
Why we keep publishing it
Three reasons.
Our community lived through it in real time. The chart did what the chart did, and people who had been with us since the Telegram votes watched it happen. Quietly dropping it from the official history would insult everyone who was there.
Second, we ask people to trust an on-chain platform on the basis that things are checkable. A project that curates its own history is asking for exactly the trust it says it is trying to make unnecessary.
Third, it is genuinely useful to somebody else. Projects preparing a first centralised listing are routinely introduced to intermediaries by people they have every reason to trust, and the failure mode is not obvious in advance.
What we would do differently
Concretely, with hindsight:
- Never let an intermediary custody the raise. The single decision that made everything else possible was funds moving through a party that was not the exchange and not us.
- Insist on direct confirmation from the exchange. Every material term should be confirmed by the venue itself, in writing, not relayed by the person being paid to arrange it.
- Assume records are not permanent. Our recourse ended at "the records were lost". Anything you would need in a dispute has to be held by you at the time, not requested afterwards.
- Put distribution obligations on-chain. An airdrop that must be performed by a counterparty is a promise. An airdrop written into a contract is not.
What it changed
We did eventually resume v2 trading on Gate.io in Q1 2023, and then left voluntarily at the end of that year. That second decision is usually read as ideological. It was partly practical: our experience of centralised intermediation was that it introduced parties we could not verify, into a process we could not audit, with no recourse when it failed.
The rest of this archive is full of transparency work — published DEX policy, transparency reports, dhbscan.com. It is fair to read all of it as downstream of this quarter.
What we owe the people who were there
The community that watched this happen in real time had been with us since the Telegram votes on the token's fundamentals. They had chosen the chain, the price and the supply. Then they watched an allocation they had no part in arranging get sold into the market they had built.
A meaningful number of them stayed. We do not fully understand why, and we have never treated it as owed.
What we can do is keep the account accurate. This post has said the same thing since it was written, it names what happened without softening it, and it will not quietly disappear from the archive when it becomes inconvenient to have a failure this size in the record.