StandX’s decision to shut down and cancel its planned token launch has sharpened a difficult question for decentralized perpetuals platforms: can they retain users once trading rewards and airdrop expectations fade? The platform said it would distribute a one-time DUSD airdrop to users as it winds down, despite having reported 237,000 users. Its closure follows a period in which several on-chain trading venues have relied on incentives to acquire customers and generate volume, only to confront the cost of sustaining those programs.
The withdrawal places more weight on platforms that can show recurring fee income rather than activity driven primarily by token rewards. Hyperliquid and Pump.fun offer two very different examples of that test. According to DefiLlama’s protocol revenue data, Pump.fun generated $65.63 million in revenue over the past 30 days, close to Hyperliquid’s $71.05 million. Yet their circulating market values remained far apart: roughly $2.33 billion for PUMP and $18.2 billion for HYPE.
Using those revenue figures on a simple annualized basis puts Pump.fun’s circulating market capitalization at about three times annualized revenue, compared with roughly 21 times for Hyperliquid. The comparison is imperfect—revenue can change rapidly and the two products serve different markets—but it shows how traders are assigning sharply different expectations to platforms with similar recent fee generation.
Subsidies face a harder test
StandX said subsidies had pushed customer-acquisition costs higher, while airdrops generated trading activity without creating enough underlying demand. That diagnosis echoes a recurring problem in perpetual futures markets, where incentives can attract highly active users but fail to build a stable customer base willing to pay meaningful fees.
Perpetual contracts are derivatives with no expiry date, allowing traders to maintain long or short positions while periodic funding payments help keep contract prices near the underlying asset’s spot price. The structure can support substantial volume, but it also gives traders a strong reason to move quickly between venues when rewards change.
PaperTrade illustrates the risks attached to more aggressive versions of that model. The platform has advertised leverage of up to 1,000 times and distributes its PAPER token to users who experience losses or liquidations. Its trading design places users against a shared USDC liquidity pool: losses flow into the pool, while profitable positions are paid from it.
That arrangement gives liquidity providers direct exposure to sudden profitable trading by users, particularly when highly leveraged positions are involved. The weekly market roundup said PaperTrade’s position size declined after heavy activity on its first day, suggesting early participation did not necessarily translate into durable use.
Pump.fun, meanwhile, has paired its revenue with token buybacks. The roundup estimated its monthly buyback spending at about 1.27% of circulating market capitalization and said that large token unlocks did not produce concentrated selling, with selling pressure later easing. Buybacks can reduce the amount of tokens available in the market, but their long-term effect depends on whether the platform can preserve revenue through changing market conditions.
Public chains confront a survival filter
Raoul Pal, co-founder and chief executive officer of Real Vision, argued that public blockchains without durable economic defenses are likely to struggle over the coming decade. In comments cited by the roundup, Pal described block space—the capacity to process and record transactions—as the core product of a blockchain network, with token issuance and distribution often becoming the more immediate operational weakness.
Pal grouped the chains he sees as having clearer paths to survival into four categories: self-contained economies such as Ethereum and Solana; vertically focused networks such as Hyperliquid; layer-2 networks that extend larger blockchains; and BNB, which he characterized as a centralized platform token operating with the presentation of a layer-1 network.
The framing places greater scrutiny on chains whose valuations rest largely on technical capacity rather than a defined source of transaction demand. A network that can attract payments, trading, stablecoin settlement, lending, or another recurring use case has a clearer route to fees than one built around spare throughput alone.
Token issuance can complicate that picture. Unlock schedules, incentive emissions and reward campaigns can add supply to the market while masking whether users are staying for the product itself. StandX’s shutdown provides a recent example of how quickly the economics can deteriorate when subsidized volume fails to become regular demand.
Tokenized equities expand, but remain small beside traditional holdings
On-chain equity products have emerged as another source of blockchain activity, with the roundup estimating that traders hold more than $6 billion of exposure to stocks through tokenized and synthetic products. These instruments can represent shares, price exposure, or related claims, depending on the issuer and jurisdiction.
The market remains small relative to the conventional U.S. equity system. U.S. Treasury data showed foreign holders owned $19.86 trillion in U.S. equities at the end of June 2025, equal to 18.3% of the total U.S. stock market’s value. The roundup calculated that tokenized stocks represented only about 0.016% of that foreign-held total.
RWA.xyz, a platform tracking tokenized real-world assets, has recorded growth in tokenized equity products across multiple networks. The appeal is straightforward: these products can offer around-the-clock transferability and give users outside the United States another route to dollar-denominated equity exposure. Their scale will depend on issuer structure, legal protections, liquidity and the ability to move money into and out of the products reliably.
AI infrastructure meets tighter financing conditions
The same weekly discussion identified financing, rather than electricity or chip availability alone, as a growing constraint on AI infrastructure. Higher borrowing costs and tighter credit can delay data-center construction, especially for operators that need large upfront spending on land, power capacity, networking equipment and graphics-processing units.
The roundup warned that a weaker conversion of AI demand into actual hardware purchases could produce a semiconductor supply-chain “order cliff” in 2027 or 2028. That scenario would affect projects whose tokens are tied to physical compute infrastructure, because revenue expectations often depend on machines being financed, delivered and utilized on schedule.
Pearl, a layer-1 network using what it calls Proof of Useful Work, represents one attempt to connect token rewards with AI computation. The project says it combines AI training and inference workloads with GPU mining that generates PRL tokens. The roundup said PRL had risen threefold and cited daily net income of 50 yuan for an Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU, while also noting that the token had not yet captured the commercial value created by AI work on the network.
Across perpetual trading, public chains and AI-linked infrastructure, the pressure is moving toward measurable cash flows, durable users and financing that can withstand higher capital costs. Platforms able to produce fees without continually paying users to appear are likely to face a less fragile operating environment than those dependent on incentives, leverage or hardware expansion plans that require cheap credit.
After StandX’s shutdown, sustainable growth matters more than subsidies—explore perpetuals fundamentals before chasing the next on-chain derivatives platform.
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