[16 April, 9AM ET] — The Drift Foundation announces DRIFT, the governance token for Drift,
the leading decentralized perpetual exchange on Solana. Launching the token will mark a
significant step towards decentralizing Drift, acknowledging its loyal users, and empowering its
community with a greater voice in the protocol’s future development. 10% of the tokens,
amounting to 100 million tokens, will be distributed to 180,000 of Drift’s users based on
their activity on the platform.
Beyond the token, Drift will move towards a first-of-its-kind, multi-branch DAO, which will be
responsible for shaping the future of the Drift ecosystem to ensure it meets the evolving needs
of traders within the Solana ecosystem. The Drift Foundation will facilitate the coordination of
decisions and initiatives from the token holders and the DAO.
Over the past three years, Drift has focused on developing a strong foundation, building
innovative features, and creating a seamless trading experience. With much of the growth being
organic, Drift has nurtured a robust community of active traders and developed features that
traders truly love. To date, Drift has facilitated $21 billion in trading volume, 15.8 million trades,
and has amassed over 178,344 traders, with more than $340 million in total value locked (TVL).
In recent weeks, Drift has observed weekly trading volume rise to well over $2.2 billion and has
the highest number of weekly users across any Perp DEX consistently exceeding 30,000.
The protocol has reached a pivotal point where both the product’s state and user activity have
gained critical momentum, marking the time for the next step. Launching the Drift DAO and
governance token will propel Drift into its next growth phase, enhancing community
empowerment and decentralization.
The philosophy behind the airdrop is to proportionately acknowledge users who have made
meaningful contributions to Drift through various activities on the platform. Those users should
be recognized for their effort and the risks they’ve taken, and the Drift Foundation has designed
the airdrop criteria to reflect this.
Multiple snapshots have been taken over the past three years and comprehensive activity
analysis has been done to alleviate sybils from the allocation. There will be a maximum supply
of 1 billion tokens with an initial launch airdrop of ~ 100 million tokens. The breakdown of the
token allocation is as follows:
- 53% for Community & Ecosystem
- 25% for Protocol Development
- 22% Strategic Participants
The launch of the airdrop will kickstart the formation of the Drift DAO. The multi-branch DAO will
consist of a Realms DAO for general protocol development, a council for governing protocol
upgrades, and a Futarchy DAO for funding technical grants. Token holders will be able to
actively participate and vote on key decisions, having a voice in the development and growth of
the Drift ecosystem.
For Drift, the airdrop isn’t the end goal but merely another step towards realizing their vision of
becoming the largest exchange in crypto. “Our aim has always been to elevate the potential of
DeFi and establish Drift as the go-to exchange for crypto traders,” says Cindy Leow, core
contributor to Drift Protocol. “We want to attract more traders on-chain by providing all the
advantages of trading on a centralized exchange, along with the unique benefits of a
decentralized exchange within a single platform.”
About Drift
Drift is the leading perpetual decentralized exchange on Solana with over $340M in TVL, $21B
in cumulative trading volume and 180,000 users. Traders are able to trade perpetual contracts
fully on-chain with leverage, earn yield by lending assets, insuring the protocol, and improving
liquidity on Drift. Visit https://www.drift.trade/ to find out more.
