For some DeFi projects, when airdrop rewards dry up, it kickstarts a terminal liquidity decline from which they don’t recover. DeFi lending protocol Gearbox has defied that pattern. Last year, its total value locked fell 80% from its $410 million peak. Users caused the slump by abandoning Gearbox when opportunities to farm airdrops of restaking services like Renzo shrank. TVL is a metric that measures the amount of deposits to a DeFi protocol. Yet, Gearbox’s TVL has since bounced back to $340 million, D ...