dYdX ends contentious promo claiming 'overwhelming demand'

cointelegraph.com:

Decentralized crypto derivatives exchange dYdX says it has ended its short-lived and contentious $25 first deposit bonus promo, amid a wave of backlash over its facial recognition requirements for new users.

The exchange however simply cited “overwhelming demand” as the reason for its short-lived promotional campaign, which ended on Sept. 1 “effective immediately.”

Due to extremely overwhelming demand of the $25 deposit bonus promotion, we are ending the campaign, effective immediately. Thank you to the many thousands of new users that onboarded to dYdX today. We truly underestimated the amount of interest the campaign garnered.

The promo in question launched on Aug. 31 and it offered new users a $25 bonus if they deposited $500 or more into the platform.

The only catch was that they had to agree to do a “liveness check” via webcam to verify their identity, which didn’t go down well with certain sections of the community.

Around 24 hours later, dYdX tweeted that it would end the campaign “due to extremely overwhelming demand” after purportedly onboarding thousands of new users.

Give me my $25 dollars pic.twitter.com/5n4r5GA6os

The team behind the DEX didn't outline how long the promo campaign would last during the initial announcement, but stated that it “truly underestimated the amount of interest the campaign garnered.”

Related: Are non-KYC crypto exchanges as safe as their KYC-compliant peers?

dYdX notably made no mention of the community pushback in the most recent tweet, but doubled down on its use of the facial recognition software in an earlier post, stating that it was only used to make sure users weren’t doubling up on accounts to claim the bonus.

Some in the community aren’t buying it, with some believing the