Etherex on Linea Crosses $120 Million TVL Mark Through (3,3) Mechanism

Decentralized exchange (DEX) Etherex crossed the $120 million total-value locked (TVL) mark today after launching its token on Aug. 6.

The REX token was released five days ago and is trading at a $155 million fully diluted valuation, but the token release sent the exchange’s TVL flying thanks to what it’s calling “x(3,3) tokenomics”.

Since the token generation event, the Etherex TVL is up 435% to $123 million from just $23 million, due to its incentivized xREX staking mechanism, with an 84.35% APR. For users to instantly exit with the xREX stake and earnings, they incur a 50% penalty, where the other 50% is redistributed to other stakers.

Etherex TVL – DeFiLlama

The token launch comes less than two weeks after Linea unveiled a series of announcements, including a 75% token allocation to ecosystem development and a 10% user airdrop.

(3,3)’s Controversial History in DeFi

The (3,3) mechanism refers to a game theory scenario where participating parties look to collaborate to achieve the best financial outcome for everyone involved. In crypto the mechanism became particularly popular thanks to Olympus DAO, though that project didn’t fare well, as the OHM token cratered while some called it a “ponzi.”

Olympus DAO has modified its protocol since and trades at a $370 million market capitalization, but is down 91% from its all-time high market cap of $4.2 billion.

DeFi degens took another crack at (3,3) game mechanisms during social-fi dApp Friend Tech’s rise to prominence. In this scenario users would buy other users’ keys under the guise that they would reciprocate, and then neither one would ever sell the other’s keys, thus ensuring maximum points for each user.

This iteration resulted in smaller Friend Tech users often buying up their own keys, agreeing to (3,3) with other farmers who would subsequently pump the original key price, and then they would sell all the shares and fleece their counterparties.

Friend Tech’s FRIEND token followed a similar path to Olympus DAO’s OHM, and after a controversial launch that saw 100% of the token emitted on its opening day, FRIEND plummeted from its opening price of $3, $0.1 in just two months. FRIEND now trades at a $4 million valuation, a 99% drop from its $233 million opening price.

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