India, Oct. 11 -- On 29 November 2024, a decentralised exchange called Hyperliquid distributed tokens worth over a billion dollars to roughly 94,000 people. The company had no marketing department, no advertising budget, and had never raised money from venture capital. It simply handed nearly a third of its total token supply to the users who had traded on it during the previous year. Within months the token had risen several times over, and some early users found themselves holding allocations worth more than a house.

To anyone outside crypto this looks like madness. Arbitrum did something similar in 2023, distributing over a billion tokens to 625,000 wallets. Uniswap started the trend in 2020. Dozens of projects have since given away s...