Opening: Realistic Choices in the Market Winter

In July 2017, the hype in the crypto market began to cool down. On the Ethereum ecosystem, many ICO projects were struggling to sustain themselves during the bear market. At this moment, an unremarkable exchange made a seemingly ordinary but actually significant move — issuing a platform token.

The white paper straightforwardly defined it as: a utility token. Its functions included deducting trading fees (50% discount in the first year), voting rights, and paying for travel expenses. Simply put, it was an internal "fuel" within the exchange ecosystem. The fundraising cap during the ICO phase was set at $15 million. No one anticipated that this token, born in the winter with a total supply of 200 million, would trigger a series of upheavals across multiple market cycles.

Phase One: The Economic Engine Behind Fee Discounts (2017-2019)

The value logic of early platform tokens was quite pure — a burning mechanism. The exchange allocated 20% of its quarterly profits to buy back and burn tokens, continuing until the total supply halved to 100 million. This design was clever, directly tying the platform’s profitability to the scarcity of the token. In the history of cryptocurrency, this was the first large-scale validation of the "equity token" concept.

Users hoarded tokens for fee discounts, and the deflationary expectations created by the burning mechanism attracted investors, forming a positive feedback loop. The 2018 bear market instead became a stress test for the token — even amid overall market downturns, the resilience of this mechanism began to show.