Liquidity Isn't Just Capital Anymore

The Limits of Competing on Capital

For much of the industry's history, centralized crypto exchanges have competed on a familiar set of metrics: trading volume, order-book depth, listing speed and fees. These metrics remain essential. However, they increasingly fail to differentiate one platform from another, as leading exchanges converge on similar asset coverage, fee structures and liquidity profiles.

At the same time, the profile of new market participants is shifting. A growing share of users enter digital assets through online culture — memes, characters, communities and short-form video — rather than through technical research or professional trading tools. For this cohort, deep liquidity is an expectation rather than a deciding factor.

This shift raises a strategic question for exchanges: if capital alone no longer constitutes a durable competitive advantage, what does?

LBank's answer is culture, operationalized through a model it calls IP Liquidity.

Defining IP Liquidity

IP Liquidity is LBank's model for converting cultural attention into participation, and participation into a lasting trading community.

Where traditional liquidity describes how efficiently capital moves through a market, IP Liquidity describes how efficiently users move from recognizing a culture to engaging with it, and from engaging with it to remaining on the platform. The model comprises three layers:

1. Attention Liquidity. An established intellectual property carries recognition and emotional affinity that paid acquisition cannot replicate. It lowers the barrier to entry for audiences with little prior exposure to digital assets.

2. Participation Liquidity. Interactive formats — games, creative challenges and community events — convert passive audiences into active participants before their first trade.

3. Identity Liquidity. When users encounter a culture they identify with inside the product itself, the exchange shifts from a utility to a community. This layer is the primary driver of retention.

The layers are interdependent. Attention without participation dissipates; participation without identity does not retain. A platform that develops all three builds an advantage that cannot be matched by fee adjustments alone.

Why the Timing Matters

Web3 intellectual property has matured. Pudgy Penguins illustrates the trajectory: a project that began as an NFT collection has expanded into consumer products, gaming and a brand recognized well beyond the crypto sector. IP of this scale no longer depends on an exchange for visibility; it arrives with an established audience.

What that audience frequently lacks is an accessible and trusted entry point into digital assets. This is where an exchange can add value — not by licensing an IP for a single campaign, but by integrating it into how users discover, learn and trade.

In 2026, LBank entered strategic brand partnerships with four Web3-native IPs: PONKE (March), Nobody Sausage (April), YETI (June) and Pudgy Penguins (August). Each partnership was designed to test a distinct layer of the IP Liquidity model.

The Three Layers in Practice

Attention: Pudgy Penguins

The partnership with Pudgy Penguins brings one of Web3's most widely recognized characters to LBank's user base. Launched in August 2026 with a 500,000 USDT campaign, it later became a central element of LBank's 11th-anniversary campaign, "Come As You Are." Its strategic role is reach: offering an approachable, familiar entry point to audiences who are unlikely to respond to conventional trading messages.

Participation: PONKE and YETI

The PONKE partnership, rooted in meme culture, introduced creative challenges in which users produced memes and emojis alongside trading activity. YETI, a partner since LBank's 10th anniversary in 2025, contributed humor-driven short-form video content and, in 2026, was integrated with LBank's prediction markets around the World Cup. Both partnerships were designed to move users from observation to participation.

Identity: Nobody Sausage

Nobody Sausage, an animation IP with tens of millions of followers across social media, extended beyond a campaign format. The character has been integrated into LBank's in-platform notifications, trading interface and onboarding flow. Its guiding message, "Anybody can be Nobody," resonates with users seeking to participate without labels. When a culture is embedded in the product, users move from visiting the platform to identifying with it.

Measuring IP Liquidity

A cultural strategy is only meaningful if it produces measurable outcomes. LBank evaluates its IP partnerships across three dimensions: user growth, audience engagement and trading activity. Recent results illustrate how the model performs in practice.

Pudgy Penguins and YETI: Accelerating User Growth

Ahead of the 2026 World Cup, LBank had approximately 25 million registered users. Over the following months — a period in which LBank announced its strategic partnerships with YETI (June 10) and Pudgy Penguins (August 6) — registered users grew to more than 30 million.

Audience engagement rose in parallel. Average views and interactions per post on LBank's official social channels increased by approximately 30% year over year and approximately 17% quarter over quarter. YETI's creative video content alone surpassed one million views.

The Pudgy Penguins partnership also drew attention from independent market analysis. In an August 10 assessment of PENGU's trading activity, CoinMarketCap's AI research identified LBank's partnership and 500,000 USDT reward campaign as a key, time-linked catalyst. An independent data platform attributing market activity to an exchange partnership is a clear external signal of Attention Liquidity at work.

Q3 2026: Trading Activity

The impact is also reflected in LBank's trading data. In Q3 2026, the quarter in which the Pudgy Penguins partnership launched, LBank reported, citing CoinGecko data (source):

• Average daily trading volume up 10.22% quarter over quarter

• Derivatives volume up 16.23% quarter over quarter

• Spot volume growth for three consecutive months

What the Results Indicate

The pattern is consistent across partnerships: IP generates attention, campaigns convert attention into participation, and product integration sustains it. Growth in users and trading volume follows as the lagging outcome, rather than the starting point.

Redefining the Exchange Model

An exchange built on IP Liquidity must still deliver the fundamentals expected of any leading platform: deep markets, timely listings and robust security. Culture does not replace these foundations. It changes who chooses the platform, and why they remain.

The next generation of digital asset users is unlikely to select an exchange on marginal differences in order-book depth. They will favor platforms that reflect their culture and values. This conviction underpins LBank's partnerships with Pudgy Penguins, YETI, Nobody Sausage and PONKE — and it is why, in LBank's view, liquidity is no longer defined by capital alone.