I was talking to a friend recently who trades with six figs. He mostly trades on CEXs, has basically never traded perp DEXs, and has zero interest in perp DEX airdrops.

At the same time, among the CEXes he uses is BingX, even though they don’t have a token.

I got curious why he trades there. In theory, perp DEXes could adopt the same model of opportunities that BingX offers users, so people wouldn't have to care about some future token in the first place, let alone an airdrop.

Over the last six months, he gave me three examples of trades he made on BingX that together made him more than $150k.

The oil case in March, when the US and Israel went to war with Iran.

BingX has isolated margin with 100x leverage. The war started while the markets were closed, so you could open a long with $1,000 margin and a short with $1,000 margin. That’s $2,000 locked up for a $200k position.

When the markets reopened, with all the volatility, the maximum you could lose was $1,000 on one side because of isolated margin, while making a lot more on the other. Oil went up to $120 while it had been around $90 over the weekend, so the long made about $26k with only a $1k loss on the short.

This worked several times during those weeks because of the ongoing escalation and the markets closing over the weekends. My friend made more than $100k on this.

In April, some tokenized stocks on Binance, like TSLA and NVIDIA, suddenly rose 15-20% because of a bug, even though the actual stocks didn't move at all. The price on BingX also went up, while prices on perp DEXes didn’t change. So you could short basically any size on BingX, wait for the bug to be fixed and the price to come back down, and make money on the short. My friend made $40k on this.

Then there was a 20% spread on
$ARIA
between BingX and Bybit. You could short on BingX, go long on Bybit, wait for the prices to converge and make money on the spread. My friend made $12k on this.

So in the first case, it was an isolated-margin dual-position strategy. The second was probably closer to bug exploitation, although that's more of an exchange problem than a user problem. The third was classic arbitrage.

Can perp DEXes offer something like this? Unlikely. Oracles, 24/7 markets and lower liquidity make these kinds of opportunities much harder to reproduce.

Just out of curiosity, I asked him afterwards: why aren't you interested in perp DEX airdrops? There are cases like Lighter and Hyperliquid, and it seems like a more reliable way to make money than what you just described, especially since an exchange can block your account and freeze your funds.

He answered:

"What's the point if, out of a bunch of scam stories, you can only name a couple of good cases? The rest of these perp DEXs just screwed their users. I'm interested in making money here and now, including the risk of losing money because of an account block, like you said. Why would I farm some points just to maybe get rewards for them in a year or two? And it's not even clear whether those rewards are guaranteed or whether they'll be worth my time. What, do I have nothing better to do? I value my time, and I'm not going to waste it on this shit."

Do you agree with him?
https://x.com/muarmemuar/status/2089269512918978752