Behind the Chart: An Update on $PEAQ Liquidity, Supply, and Market Structure

Most of the work that keeps a token healthy never shows up on a price chart. It happens in the background – in liquidity pools, on OTC partners, across monitoring dashboards, and in the steady, unglamorous job of keeping markets orderly across dozens of venues at once.

In early March, we announced we were taking measures to optimize and align liquidity across exchanges. Since then, average monthly $PEAQ trading volume has more than tripled – from $74 million in Q1 2026 to $234 million in Q2 – with May 2026 the token's strongest trading month in over a year. This and the other updates will be in the focus of this post as we break down what we’ve done since, what it has changed, and what we’re still doing. It’s not for hype, but rather in an effort to give you a look under the hood at how we’re strengthening the $PEAQ economy for the robots, the machines, and the people who hold the token.

Where $PEAQ stands today

Since the TGE, $PEAQ has accumulated more than ~$10B in total trading volume and is distributed across a broad footprint. $PEAQ is available across major centralized and decentralized venues:

• Core CEXs – Spot: Bithumb, Upbit, Gate, KuCoin, Bitget, Kraken, Bitvavo, BitMart
• Core CEXs – Perps: Bybit, MEXC, XT.com
• Key DEXs: MachineX (the world’s first Machine Economy DEX on peaq), PancakeSwap, Uniswap

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The full markets list is available on CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap.

Our focus isn't on being everywhere; it's on depth and quality where it counts. Part of this work meant making active choices about where $PEAQ trades. We shifted perps concentration toward the venues with the deepest, most active books – consolidating onto Bybit as our primary perps venue rather than fragmenting liquidity across thinner ones. Concentrated depth beats scattered presence every time: tighter spreads, healthier books, a better experience for anyone trading $PEAQ.

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Figure 1: CEX Spot Trading Volume

Figure 2: Perps Trading Volume

Onchain activity is showing clear signs of re-acceleration. As part of our omnichain strategy, we bridged the token’s footprint to BNB in Q3 2025, which further increased distribution of $PEAQ. Q1 2026 was relatively quiet given the post October 2025 liquidation event, but May 2026 saw the trading volume rebound to ~$20M, nearly matching the Dec 2025 peak. PancakeSwap continues to anchor the majority of onchain volume, while we have also expanded the distribution to Base as volume on Uniswap has begun to pick up, suggesting higher interest in peaq as an ecosystem. 

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Figure 3: DEX Trading Volume

Concentrating liquidity where it counts

Liquidity spread too thin across too many venues helps no one. It widens spreads, makes prices jumpy, and turns ordinary trades into slippage. The first measure we took was to concentrate liquidity where it does the most good, rather than fragment it. That meant stepping back from venues where liquidity was too thin to serve the community well and refocusing on the venues where depth and activity are strongest – including both perp and spot trading.

The liquidity work isn’t just about where traders trade, but about how the ecosystem is structurally engineered to build and sustain liquidity over time.

On the protocol level, the VEO (Vested Emission Offering) program turns what is usually a zero-sum game – early investor exits – into something that strengthens the entire ecosystem. Instead of investor unlocks hitting the market and driving prices down, a portion of VEO proceeds is programmatically channeled into MachineX liquidity pools. Early investors get structured liquidity options, the community gets discounted access to vested tokens and the DEX gets deeper pools. Everyone wins.

Proceeds from liquidity provision across DEXs are reinvested back into strengthening $PEAQ liquidity across key venues, creating a self-reinforcing loop where on- chain activity directly funds deeper, more resilient markets. This same principle guided our decision to migrate the PEAQ/USDC pool on PancakeSwap to a higher fee tier – a move that brings stronger rewards to LPs while meaningfully deepening our own LP position and putting more weight behind $PEAQ liquidity where it counts.

Beyond our market makers, we are actively working with DeFi partners to run active liquidity strategies – deepening pools, improving on-chain capital efficiency (e.g. MachineRWA and Machine Financing) and expanding the infrastructure that keeps $PEAQ liquid and accessible across the ecosystem. As MachineX matures and more tokens from the peaq ecosystem list on-chain, it becomes an increasingly important venue – not just for $PEAQ, but for the broader Machine Economy. With this and other initiatives, we aim to provide as much transparency as possible, as we showed through our earlier voluntary submission to Blockworks’s Token Transparency Framework, where peaq scored 40/40.

Concentration isn't only about venues – it's about communities. Korea has emerged as one of the most engaged markets for $PEAQ, and it's no coincidence: the country sits at the leading edge of robotics and the broader Machine Economy, and that translates into a real depth of understanding and genuine excitement for what peaq is building. We've leaned into that, running several trading and community campaigns there and dedicating more time and resources to a market where the thesis already resonates. 

Improvements in the real-time monitoring system

We have partnered up with Coinwatch to give us clearer visibility on the performance of our market makers, as well as areas which we need to pay more attention to when it comes to liquidity health and volatility.

Furthermore, to stay ahead of large token movements, we’ve implemented active wallet monitoring infrastructure with real-time alerts – giving us early visibility into investor activity before it reaches the open market. This is an active layer of oversight that enables us to respond quickly, coordinate with OTC partners where needed and ensure that large flows are managed in a way that protects price discovery for the broader community.

Figure 4: Market Maker Monitoring

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Figure 5: Active Wallet Transfer Alert

Figure 6: Wallet Monitoring Dashboard

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The point of catching these movements early is to act on them. When the system flags a significant flow, it triggers an OTC process in which peaq Foundation has the first right of refusal on those tokens before they reach the open market, and from there we work with the holder to keep them off the order books. The aim is simple: big movements get absorbed quietly rather than hitting the open market.

Managing the supply side responsibly

A healthy market isn’t only about demand – it’s about how supply enters circulation. The hardest part of any token’s life is investor unlocks, where early backers sell into the market and holders feel the pressure. Firstly, just to reiterate: the vested $PEAQ tokens do NOT release in bulk batches for a month or a larger period. It releases gradually, block by block – a small amount with every new block. Be wary of that when using third-party unlock monitoring tools, as with peaq, there is no single date where a large unlock happens.

Now, as far as what happens after the investor unlocks, we’ve built a real backbone to manage that responsibly. We’ve stepped up our OTC infrastructure, including active token movement monitoring and liquidity backstops. We are actively working with OTC partners so that large flows can be handled off the open market, where they won’t disrupt the price for everyone else. So far, OTC demand has been strong. To date, we've facilitated up to 80M $PEAQ in deals off the open market, with buyers including Greenfield, Spartan, and others. None of it touched open-market price discovery, and all of it now sits with determined long-term holders. None of it touched open-market price discovery, and all of it now sits with determined long-term holders. On top of that, Vested Emission Offerings (VEOs) give vested investors a way to exit responsibly while strengthening the ecosystem. Through Lucid Finance’s VEO platform, early investors can offer a portion of their tokens at a discount. So far, Lucid has powered 12 $PEAQ VEOs. VCs, including Spartan Group, and the community were able to participate on equal terms. Across the VEOs, discounts averaged about 5%, mostly staying close to the market price, and always – the same for all participants.

The point of all of this: turn moments that usually hurt holders into moments that deepen the market for them.

What’s next

Two key updates are coming.

First, a round of tokenomics optimizations. These are refinements within the current framework – not a structural overhaul of supply or token distribution – aimed at taking unnecessary sell pressure out of the system. Think tuning, not redesign.

Second, Token Economics 2.0 – the bigger shift. Traction has never been the issue: peaq ran more than 180 million transactions last year, with real enterprises and machines building on it. What's been missing is a direct line between that real-world activity and the $PEAQ token. Economics 2.0 connects the two: as machines transact across the network, the activity runs through $PEAQ rather than around it.

Under the hood, it's a unified revenue stream feeding the trust layer that verifies machines and the engine that brings new ones on-chain, with $PEAQ bonded rather than sold to run the protocol, disinflationary issuance, and burn mechanisms that steadily tighten supply. Where the near-term tweaks ease sell pressure, Economics 2.0 is built to grow demand – tying $PEAQ to real machine activity across every chain peaq touches.

In the meantime, the work above carries on: concentrating liquidity, strengthening the venues that matter, and managing supply responsibly. These efforts are ongoing, and we'll keep improving on every front.

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