Farewell to the Airdrop-Farming Business: Galxe Goes All-In on L1, but Gravity's Growth Story Won't Be an Easy Sell

Galxe (known in Chinese as Yinhe), once a go-to "magic tool" for airdrop farming, has now reached the point of shutting down its business.

From "reverse-farming" becoming the norm to a spreading wave of shutdowns, airdrop hunters had long sensed the chill. After POAP announced it was ceasing operations in August, this veteran quest platform that accompanied countless people has also pressed the stop button, drawing a close to the collective memory of one crypto cycle.

Bidding farewell to the airdrop era, Galxe is shifting its development focus to the L1 public chain Gravity in an attempt to open a new growth story. Yet, facing a crowded field of strong public chains and the reality that its own ecosystem still needs to be built out, Gravity's road to transformation is unlikely to be an easy one.

Galxe Presses Stop: The Airdrop Memories of 36 Million Users

36 million users, more than 7,700 partner projects and over five years — these numbers record Galxe's past glory and bear witness to the rise and ebb of the Web3 airdrop economy.

On November 9, Galxe officially announced that it will integrate its team and brand into Gravity. As part of this adjustment, Galxe Quest, Galxe ID, Galxe Passport and related services will gradually cease operations, while Gravity will continue to run normally, and the G token will not change as a result of this adjustment.

At present, Spaces no longer allows the creation of new campaigns, Galxe+ and Galxe Score no longer accept new subscriptions, and Galxe Passport has stopped minting. December 5, 2026 will be the last day for users to take part in campaigns, at which point the channel for claiming campaign rewards will also close, and the entire website will then enter read-only mode. Users need to claim any campaign rewards not yet credited before then.

Galxe said that Smart Savings balances, staked G that has not yet been withdrawn, and G tokens in Gravity Alpha mainnet wallets are all safe, and the claim process and timetable for the relevant assets will be announced separately.

Galxe's curtain call is a melancholy sight. For many airdrop farmers, Galxe was practically the representative entry point for Web3 quests and airdrop interactions over the past few years. From early check-ins and social tasks to later on-chain interactions and point accumulation, countless users once left their own interaction records here.

After the shutdown news was announced, some posted the Passport badges and high-score records they had accumulated over the years, some shared airdrop profits they had once earned, some reminisced about the days of grinding tasks late into the night and lamented that their youth was over; others said this was their first stop after entering the space and the first place where they seriously did tasks. Even if they never got a big result in the end, those experiences of participating and interacting have become part of their crypto careers.

Once Favored by Capital: Galxe's Five-Year Rise and Fall

Galxe's story began in 2021.

Originally named Project Galaxy, the project was initially positioned as an open credential data network that, by integrating on-chain and off-chain behavioral data, turned user behavior into a verifiable Web3 on-chain resume, helping projects identify users, build user profiles and use them to run community growth campaigns. At this stage, Project Galaxy rolled out products such as credential NFTs and OATs.

In September 2022, Project Galaxy was officially renamed Galxe, upgrading its positioning to Web3 community growth infrastructure, and continued to expand its product line with Quest, ID, Passport, Score and others, gradually forming a product matrix covering quest campaigns, identity verification, user data and community incentives.

For Web3 projects at the time, Galxe offered a relatively mature set of user growth tools that greatly lowered the barrier for projects to reach users, making it an important entry point for community operations and airdrop campaigns. Back then, many mainstream Layer2 projects and emerging public chains used Galxe to run early user growth campaigns. For ordinary users, Galxe was an important channel for discovering new projects, taking part in early interactions and capturing potential airdrops, and the platform also fostered a farming culture of multi-account interactions, task accumulation and credential collecting.

As the number of crypto users and projects grew rapidly, Galxe expanded at scale and became one of the representative pieces of Web3 quest and community growth infrastructure. During this period, Galxe raised at least $25 million in cumulative funding from well-known institutions including Dragonfly, Multicoin Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Spartan Group and Solana Ventures.

However, a growth model built on the airdrop boom could hardly sustain its early prosperity indefinitely. As the market environment changed, user demand shifted and industry competition intensified, the growth dividend Galxe relied on gradually faded, and the once-bustling quest ecosystem began to cool.

On one hand, airdrop expectations gradually weakened and the input-output ratio of farming kept declining. As participants increased and rewards were diluted, and as project airdrops shrank sharply or even turned into "reverse-farming," users might pour in large amounts of time and capital without any return, and their enthusiasm faded accordingly.

On the other hand, projects began to re-examine the actual conversion effect of quest campaigns. The proliferation of Sybil accounts and bulk interactions left quest data disconnected from real user demand; many users took part only for the rewards and did not stay after a campaign ended, and the traffic brought by quest platforms was hard to convert into long-term users and ecosystem value.

In addition, the crypto market kept cooling, project fundraising and ecosystem expansion slowed, and more and more projects cut back their business or even stopped operating. The growth flywheel once driven by airdrop incentives gradually lost the momentum to keep turning.

To some extent, Galxe's curtain call is also a microcosm of the Web3 airdrop economy moving from a traffic frenzy to an ebbing tide.

Betting Everything on L1: Can Gravity Take Up the Growth Banner?

This former Web3 growth star, after bidding goodbye to the airdrop era, is shifting its next stage of development focus to Gravity, hoping to open a new growth path by accelerating the development and ecosystem adoption of Gravity L1.

As early as 2024, Galxe announced the launch of the Gravity Alpha Mainnet built on the Arbitrum Orbit tech stack, and swapped the original governance token GAL for a new token G at a ratio of 1:60.

Initially, Gravity was mainly an underlying infrastructure that Galxe built to solve problems such as Web3 multi-chain interaction, cross-chain settlement and user experience, playing the role of providing technical support for the Galxe product ecosystem. To further drive ecosystem development, Gravity launched a $5 million developer grant program and a $50 million ecosystem fund, seeking to attract more developers and projects.

As the project advanced, Gravity also began gradually transitioning into an independent L1. Compared with the previous Alpha Mainnet, the new mainnet has upgraded its architecture in areas such as execution, consensus and data verification, with the core goal of improving the network's transaction processing capacity and finality.

Among these upgrades, the most closely watched is Grevm, Gravity's self-developed parallel EVM execution engine. The engine improves network execution efficiency by processing transactions in parallel. At the same time, Gravity has introduced the AptosBFT consensus mechanism and a native oracle, hoping to reduce reliance on external infrastructure while improving network performance. According to official plans, Gravity L1 targets a processing capacity of more than 12,000 TPS and sub-second finality.

In terms of technical direction, Gravity is no longer content with providing supporting services for Galxe; it aims to become a general-purpose high-performance public chain. In July this year, the Gravity L1 mainnet officially launched. Meanwhile, the original Alpha mainnet Layer2 network will officially cease running on November 1, 2026.

However, completing the technical and network architecture transformation is only the first step. Today, mature public chains already hold a considerable share of the market, and it will not be easy for Gravity to break through in the fiercely competitive L1 arena.

· An ecosystem highly dependent on Galxe, with independent growth capability yet to be established

The user and project resources Galxe has accumulated are an important advantage for Gravity compared with other emerging public chains. Through Galxe's quest platform, Gravity can draw platform users into on-chain interactions. This model can bring transaction activity to Gravity in the short term and provide a relatively low-cost cold-start channel for a new network. But quest-driven transaction activity does not equal real application demand, nor does it mean those users will stay for the long term.

At the same time, as Galxe's original quest business gradually stops, Gravity will lose an important channel for reaching users and driving growth, and will need to rebuild its own user growth mechanisms and ecosystem appeal.

How to convert the traffic accumulated in the past into real users, further attract developers and applications to build on it, and shift on-chain activity from short-term incentives to sustained real demand will be the key to Gravity achieving independent development.

· The real competitiveness of high-performance tech still needs to be tested by the market

Gravity presents high throughput, low latency and the parallel EVM as its core technical advantages, but the high-performance public chain race has long been fiercely competitive. In such an environment, simply raising TPS is not enough to form a long-term competitive barrier.

For developers, choosing a public chain depends not only on execution efficiency but also on user scale, capital depth, how complete the infrastructure is and the cost of acquiring users for an application. For users, technical parameters alone are hardly a reason to keep using a public chain; what really determines whether users stay is whether the chain has a sufficiently rich set of applications, liquidity and real usage demand.

· Token value capture remains to be fleshed out

For a public chain, network performance and ecosystem scale ultimately need to translate into real token demand to support its long-term value. The long-term performance of the G token likewise depends on the development of the Gravity network itself. But for now, Gravity has yet to establish a clear token value capture mechanism.

Meanwhile, the continued unlocking of G tokens may also put some supply pressure on the market. According to the token distribution and unlocking schedule, G's total supply is about 12 billion tokens, with roughly 15 million tokens currently still locked, and the unlocking process will continue until 2028.

In terms of market performance, the G token has kept retreating sharply from its 2024 high of $18.3, with a cumulative decline of more than 97.5%, and the price has now fallen to around $0.45.

In short, for Galxe, shutting down its old business may mean the end of one stage; but for Gravity, the real test has only just begun.

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