dYdX’s latest promotional campaign flops

dYdX’s latest marketing campaign, launched on Wednesday this week, has been terminated. The short-lived campaign promised new users of the platform who deposit at least $500 to it, a one-time bonus of $25. However, there was a catch – users were required to do a so-called “liveness check”. This included using a webcam to provide biometric data.

Naturally, since the project is promoting itself as a DEX, its community wasn’t too happy about the use of facial recognition software. While many took it to Twitter to express their dissatisfaction, dYdX announced the campaign is terminated due to “extremely overwhelming demand”. Not many believed the statement, one of the biggest dYdX advocates and Yearn Finance’s contributor – Adam Cochran even tweeted he will be moving off the platform and selling his DYDX tokens.

DyDx doubles down on claiming that this is ok by saying it’s just if you want the reward program.

In their eyes your data privacy is a commodity and an acceptable risk if they get growth. https://t.co/Dndpnn3Jh2
— Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) (@adamscochran) September 1, 2022

dYdX made an attempt to convince the community, that it doesn’t require personal information from its users, and that the biometric data required for the campaign was only meant to ensure there are no fraudulent actors taking part in it. Nevertheless, this attempt failed and the exchange was forced to end the promotion.

At the time of writing this article, the majority of the community’s opinion is that the campaign was ended due to the bad publicity it brought upon the platform, and not due to the “overwhelming interest” in it.