The Rise of Decentralized Cryptocurrency Exchanges : Evaluating the Role of Airdrops and Governance Tokens

This paper introduces the most comprehensive data available to date on centralized and decentralized exchanges run off of distributed ledger technologies. First, we document the rapid growth in decentralized exchanges and their differences in volume and price dynamics from centralized exchanges. Second, motivated by these differences, we investigate the role of airdrops and governance tokens as mechanisms for expanding the base of users and driving up the value of an exchange. Our results suggest that both mechanisms are effective for expanding and strengthening networks, particularly in decentralized exchanges