Kinetiq Ends kPoints With Paid Claim as KNTQ Drops 23%

Kinetiq ended its kPoints program on Oct. 1 by giving participants the right to buy 50 million $KNTQ tokens rather than receive them for free. $KNTQ fell 23% from its price just before the announcement.

“Your kPoints now allow you to claim $KNTQ,” the Hyperliquid liquid-staking protocol announced. In the next post, it specified a fixed purchase price of $0.26 per token and a 10-day claim window. The program distributed 36.8 million kPoints in total.

At 12:09 a.m. ET on Oct. 2, $KNTQ traded at $0.325, down 23% from $0.422 at 8 a.m. ET on Oct. 1, just before the 8:01 a.m. announcement, according to The Defiant's calculation using CoinGecko data. It had traded near $0.281 at 10:05 a.m. ET before recovering some ground.

Hyperliquid's $HYPE token fell 1.8% over roughly the same period.

Kinetiq lets users stake $HYPE for kHYPE, retaining a token they can use in DeFi while accruing staking rewards. The protocol had about $1.16 billion in total value locked in DefiLlama's latest snapshot. Its $KNTQ governance token launched in November 2025.

Points Become a Purchase Right

The allocation could generate $13 million in gross proceeds if all 50 million tokens are bought at $0.26 each.

Kinetiq's kPoints documentation, last updated June 1, described weekly distributions of 800,000 points and said details of the program were “kept entirely private.”

DeFi educator and podcast host DeFi Dad supported the purchase-option approach but criticized the communication. “I wish more teams offered up these call options instead,” he wrote, adding that the team should have stated upfront that users would receive an option to buy discounted $KNTQ.

Any $KNTQ left unclaimed after the 10-day window will return to the Kinetiq Foundation for ecosystem and growth initiatives, according to Kinetiq.