The direct trigger for the delisting of Newton Protocol (NPT) by Bitget Exchange originated from its liquidity indicator falling below the platform’s operational threshold. According to Bitget’s revised listing standards in 2023, an automatic review mechanism will be triggered if the average daily spot trading volume of any token is below 2 million US dollars for 30 consecutive trading days. Data shows that in the first quarter of 2024, the average daily trading volume of NPT on the Bitget platform had dropped to around $720,000, merely 36% of the warning value. Among them, the trading volume was less than $500,000 for 22 consecutive trading days, with the lowest single-day trading volume being only $118,000. Historical cases can be used as a reference: In the third quarter of 2023, SingularityNET (AGIX) was suspended from trading by Bitget due to its trading volume being below 1.5 million US dollars for 15 consecutive days. What is more serious is that the spread of $NPT has been continuously expanding, with the depth of its buy and sell orders thinning to a critical point. The spread of the first buy and sell order in the order book has reached 3.7%, far exceeding the 1.2% upper limit set by Bitget, resulting in a slip loss of market orders as high as 0.8%. When the customer complaint rate rose to an average of 45 per month (accounting for 17% of the total trading users of this token) due to the deterioration of the trading experience, the risk control system initiated the delisting process in accordance with the terms.
The regulatory risks exposed by compliance audits constitute the core driving force for delisting. In March 2024, the Bitget legal team discovered two major compliance flaws in the quarterly token review of $NPT: First, the project party failed to provide valid proof of the MSB license issued by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Bureau (FinCEN) of the United States. The license number in its application materials was verified to only cover operations within Canada. Secondly, the on-chain tracking report shows that more than 18% of the token circulation (approximately 120 million) once flowed through the wallet addresses sanctioned by OFAC (specifically the addresses associated with the Lazarus Group), triggering the level 5 alert of the exchange’s anti-money laundering system. According to the pre-implementation requirements of the EU MiCA regulation, exchanges are required to increase the risk reserve by 300% for tokens with such risks, which is expected to increase the operating costs by an average of 80,000 US dollars per month. Compared with the case in November 2023, Shiba Memu (SHMU) was included in the list of unregistered securities by the UK FCA, resulting in Bitget’s trading being frozen within 48 hours. Its decision-making mechanism is highly consistent with this time.
The technical safety assessment also reveals multiple potential risks. In the security review of smart contracts in the first quarter of 2024, a report issued by the third-party auditing firm SlowMist pointed out that the NPT has three high-risk vulnerabilities: The reentry attack risk of cross-chain bridge contracts (CVE−2024−1092) and the signature verification defect of the governance module (which can cause the 99NTP node to experience three network outages lasting more than 60 minutes in February, resulting in a peak transaction confirmation time of 15 times the standard value of 42 seconds). There are precedents for similar incidents: In September 2022, Anyswap was hacked to steal $8 million worth of assets due to a cross-chain vulnerability. Bitget terminated the related trading pair within two hours after the incident.
Market factors and project operation issues have accelerated the decision-making process. Community activity monitoring indicates that the social media volume of $NPT has dropped by 73% within six months. The monthly post volume of the core Discord channel has sharply declined from 12,000 to 3,200, and the frequency of developer code submissions has decreased to less than twice a week. More importantly, the staking mechanism is out of balance. On-chain data shows that the actual annualized rate of return (APY) has plummeted from the designed 25% to 3.8%, triggering over 80% of stakers to withdraw their funds. The total amount of staking has dropped from a peak of 180 million to 15 million. The financial health warning was issued simultaneously. The project party disclosed that the balance of the reserve wallet was only 15% of the circulating market value, far below the 50% safety line required by Bitget. This operational decline pattern is highly similar to Alchemy Pay, which was delisted in 2023: When the ecological capital consumption rate of the latter reached 95%, its token encountered a liquidity crisis on the exchange, and the single-day selling pressure caused the price to plummet by 40%. Although investors continuously inquire about the real-time market conditions of newton protocol price, under the superposition of multiple risks, the strategic delisting executed by the exchange to ensure the safety of users’ assets has become an inevitable choice.