The perp DEX airdrop playbook is now a genre: launch a points season, reward trading and liquidity, convert points to tokens at TGE. Hyperliquid wrote the canonical version, and AFX, short for Anti-Fragile Exchange, is running it with unusual transparency about the meter itself. The points math is public, the settlement schedule is public, and the token commitment is in the team's own program materials rather than in a leak.
Backfill entry Dating honesty: the AFX points program launched on May 25, 2026, weeks before we added this entry. We are backfilling it now because Season 1 closes on July 20 and the program will run two more seasons, so the tracker should carry it while eligibility is still open, not because the launch is news this week.
What AFX is
AFX is a perpetuals exchange built on its own layer 1 chain rather than deployed on an existing network, a design choice it shares with Hyperliquid, whose season 2 question we track separately. The pitch is a fully on-chain order book with sub-100ms finality and no gas on trades, which is to say centralized-exchange execution with on-chain settlement. Whether the venue earns durable volume is the open competitive question; the space it is entering already contains the largest airdrop success story in crypto and a crowd of imitators, including Lighter, whose own program has already ended.
How the points program actually works
Season 1 opened on May 25, 2026 and closes on July 20, an eight week window with a defined pool of 3.8 million points. The split is documented: about 2.89 million points for trading and the ALP liquidity vault combined, and about 0.91 million for the Guild league, the community layer. Settlement is weekly, every Monday at 00:00 UTC, so participants can watch their share accrue instead of guessing at a black box.
Scored on execution, holding, diversity.
Liquidity depth, shared 2.89M pool.
0.91M point community pool.
All seasons merge into AFX tokens, no date.
Three details matter more than the totals. First, trading points are scored on execution quality, position holding and market diversity rather than raw volume, which is the standard anti-wash framing and should be taken at face value: manufactured flow is the first thing these formulas are built to discount. Second, points never reset or expire between seasons, and the team says all seasons will be merged and redeemed together at a unified rate at TGE. Third, that TGE sentence is the token confirmation: points that redeem for AFX tokens require AFX tokens to exist. Coverage puts the community's share at roughly 65 percent of supply, a Hyperliquid-shaped number, though the full tokenomics remain unpublished and we hold every unpublished figure loosely.
The honest cost accounting
We list most airdrops on this board as free because the eligible behavior costs nothing beyond time. AFX is not that. Participation starts with a USDC deposit, and the three earning channels all put capital to work: leveraged trading can lose the deposit outright, the ALP vault carries the counterparty and drawdown risks every LP vault carries, and even the Guild track presumes an account with skin in the game. The rule from our farming guide applies with extra force on a derivatives venue: if you were not going to trade perps this month, a points meter with no published token value is not a reason to start. Traders who already live in this product category are accruing eligibility as a side effect, and that is the only participation profile with positive expected value.
What would move this entry: a published TGE date or tokenomics document moves it toward a dated event, Season 2 terms will show whether the meter stays generous, and any exchange listing chatter gets tracked on the listings board, not here. Until then, confirmed and dateless, with real capital at risk in the meantime.
How to position yourself
- Only participate if you already trade perps: connect a wallet, deposit USDC you can afford to risk, and let points accrue from trading you would do anyway. Farming a derivatives venue with money you cannot lose is the worst trade on this board.
- Know the three channels: trading (scored on execution, position holding and market diversity, not raw volume), the ALP liquidity vault, and the Guild community league. Points settle weekly on Mondays at 00:00 UTC.
- Do not wash-trade for points. AFX says trading is evaluated beyond volume alone, which is exactly the framing teams use before filtering manufactured flow.
- Ignore any page selling early AFX allocations or claiming the TGE is live; the team has published no token date, so no legitimate claim exists yet.
Reality check None of these steps guarantee an allocation. Teams change criteria late, add anti-sybil filters, and sometimes never ship a token at all. Only spend time and gas you are fine writing off.
