The Unique Significance of Gate Contract Points: The Paradigm Evolution of the Trading Incentive Mechanism

Since its official launch on October 14, 2025, the Gate Contract Points System has evolved beyond a simple trading reward tool.

It creates a sustainable “behavior-value” closed loop by quantifying various behaviors such as trading, holding positions, and social invitations, and assigning them clear market value. This marks a new stage in the incentive logic of crypto trading platforms, shifting from pure cost competition to building a deeply engaged ecosystem.

01 System Design: From Single-Point Incentives to Ecosystem Value Circulation

The core innovation of the Gate Contract Points System lies in its multi-dimensional points generation mechanism. This mechanism breaks the traditional limitation of using only trading volume as the sole indicator and constructs a more comprehensive framework for evaluating and rewarding user contributions.

System points mainly come from three sources: trading volume, account asset balance, and effective invitations.

The calculation of trading points is clear and transparent: users earn 1 point for every 400 USDT of daily contract trading volume, with no upper limit.

Balance points reflect the platform’s emphasis on user asset retention. The system snapshots the value of USDT and BTC assets in the contract account daily and awards between 1 to 4 points based on the balance range. Even without trading, users holding coins can continuously accumulate contribution value.

Invitation points encourage users to expand the ecosystem. Successfully inviting 1 to 3 new contract traders and helping them reach a certain activity level allows the inviter to earn 1 to 3 points.

This combination mechanism’s design logic is profound. It no longer treats users as mere sources of transaction fees but integrates multiple behaviors—trading frequency, fund retention willingness, and social influence—into quantifiable “behavioral capital.” This lays a structural foundation for establishing long-term, stable relationships between the platform and users.

02 Paradigm Evolution: Beyond Short-Term Rebates to Long-Term Value Anchoring

Traditional exchange incentives, such as fee discounts or limited-time competitions, are essentially “external blood transfusion” short-term promotions. Once the event ends, the incentives stop, making it difficult to sustain user stickiness.

The Gate Contract Points System attempts to establish an internalized, institutionalized incentive protocol layer.

Its key features are the “timeliness” and “consumption closed loop” of points. Each point issued is only valid for 15 days, after which it automatically expires. The system also uses a “first-in, first-out” rule to automatically deduct expiring points.

This clever design creates a dynamic cycle: users need to maintain a certain level of activity (trading, holding, or inviting) to continuously earn new points, while actively using points to avoid resource waste.

It successfully transforms one-time promotions into an embedded engine that drives users to continuously participate in the platform ecosystem. User behavior shifts from passive “responding to activities” to active “managing personal behavioral assets on the platform.”

03 Value Realization: From Platform Points to a Bridge for Real Returns

If points can only be exchanged for limited internal platform benefits, their attractiveness diminishes significantly. Another unique aspect of the Gate Contract Points System is that through high-frequency, high-value airdrop activities, it anchors a clear market value for points, enabling a key transition from “benefit points” to “value carriers.”

According to industry media analysis of early activities, the return per point from exchanging points for airdrop rewards has stabilized around approximately 2 USDT.

As of December, this value realization mechanism remains active. For example, in the 36th contract points airdrop event launched on December 5, users can exchange points for rewards such as 750 MON Protocol (MON) tokens and 100 USDT holding coupons.

The normalization of such activities is highly significant. For users, points are no longer virtual numbers but hard currency that can be directly exchanged for mainstream or emerging crypto assets.

For project teams, the points system becomes an efficient channel for precisely screening active trading users and distributing tokens. For the platform itself, it builds a tripartite incentive closed loop connecting users, projects, and the platform, greatly enhancing ecosystem cohesion and vitality.

04 Ecosystem Positioning: Independent System and Future Potential

To understand the uniqueness of the Gate Contract Points, it is also necessary to clarify its precise positioning within Gate’s broader ecosystem. The official statement clarifies that contract points and Gate Alpha points, which are aimed at all site users, are completely independent and parallel systems, with no direct connection in acquisition methods, exchange items, or issuance rules.

This independence means contract traders can focus on accumulating exclusive benefits through their own trading behaviors and asset management without interference from other activities. It signifies that Gate is building a specialized, refined loyalty management sub-system for its different core business lines (such as contract trading, spot trading, and innovative project participation).

From a broader perspective, the successful practice of the contract points system may serve as an industry benchmark. It demonstrates a possibility: in the crypto world, user behavior data itself can become a tradable, quantifiable asset.

In the future, similar points-based incentive frameworks may extend beyond exchanges to DeFi (measuring liquidity contribution), NFTs (mapping creation and collection participation), and SocialFi (quantifying social influence), becoming a universal infrastructure for behavior capitalization.

Future Outlook

As of December 16, Gate’s platform token GT fluctuates around $10. Meanwhile, the contract points system is steadily progressing along another trajectory: quietly weaving each opening and closing of positions, each asset retention, and each effective invitation into a user-specific value network.

What this system has validated is far more than the effectiveness of an incentive mechanism. It hints that the role of crypto trading platforms is quietly evolving from simple asset matchmakers to complex ecosystem value definers and distributors.