Forced donations, witch hunting, LayerZero airdrop drama ends, on-chain data drops 90%

Written by: Frank, PANews

As ZRO landed on the evening of June 20exchange, LayerZero’s airdrop drama has finally come to an end.

According to the latest Dune data dashboard, ZRO TokenAvailable in this roundToken为 8500 万枚，截至 6 月 21 日上午已有 27.8 万人进行领取，已领取Token为 4000 万枚，最低领取的地址为 8 枚代币，最大的单个地址领取了 10662 枚，空投领取中位数为 53 枚 ZRO。

Based on the price of $3.46 on June 21, the scale of this round of ZRO token airdrops is about $290 million. Users can receive an average of $229 in tokens, and the largest single address can receive $36,000. Compared with the previously released Starknet and Jupiter, the largest single address is indeed much lower (Starknet's largest single address is $360,000, and Jupiter's largest single address is $130,000), but the average value has indeed increased to a certain extent, and nearly half of JUP's addresses have received $127.WitchThe war does seem to bring more benefits to ordinary real users.

但另一方面，LayerZero 的链上数据在宣布对抗Witch后也直降了九成以上。再加上领取代币时临时推出的捐助计划引发众怒，LayerZero 的这轮空投赚足了眼球，但可能也失去了一些用户的好感。

The most severe witch hunt in history, nearly 2 million witch addresses were blocked

LayerZero is a universal data information communication basic protocol.SafetyAnd a simple way to transmit information on the chain to achieve cross-chain communication between applications. The project has previously completed three rounds of financing, totaling US$261 million.

Since completing a $135 million Series A1 round of financing at a valuation of $1 billion in 2022, LayerZero has been labeled as a potential "big hair". According to the official statement, nearly 6 millionwalletAddresses have interacted with the protocol, and developers have deployed over 54,000 OApps contract. However, when the airdrop expectations were fully met, LayerZero unexpectedly adopted the most stringent witch restrictions in history and launched a round of war against witches.

On May 4, LayerZero announced the completion of the first phase of the snapshot and planned to conduct TGE on June 20 to issue the token ZRO. It also launched a self-reporting plan for witch activities. If a witch surrenders and reports, she will be able to obtain the expected distribution of 15% tokens. But this is just an appetizer for LayerZero's war against witches. Later, a witch hunting activity was launched. Users can get 10% of the witch's expected tokens by reporting the witch address. According to the latest witch report, a total of 1.04 million addresses have been reported and determined to be witches. In addition, the addresses of self-surrendered witches exceed 800,000.

According to LayerZero officials, this restriction on witches can save about 1% tokens (about 10 million) in total supply, which will be redistributed to qualified addresses. At present, the official has not yet announced the final list of witches and their expected income.

Lumao Studio suffered heavy losses

In this campaign against witches, Lumao Studio was hit hard. Not only did they gain nothing from the two years of interaction, but they also lost the hard-earnedwalletaddress.

For example: 0xe93685f3bba03016f02bd1828badd6195988d950

This address has participated in the interaction for a total of 730 days, starting as early as March 28, 2022, with a total of 229,400 interactions. It is the address with the longest interaction time on the LayerZero chain, and has now been marked as a witch, with no gains. The second-ranked address 0xcaf331a897594b6f8604d40439fe93f758348dea has 120,000 interactions and received a total of 5,010 ZROs. According to this ratio, the address 0xe9 could have received about 10,000 ZROs. According to the ZRO price of about $3.46 on June 21, the address lost $34,600 in revenue.

Another airdrop hunter with the ID 0x196a could only get 354.92 ZRO in the LayerZero airdrop. He had previously received 104,806 ZK (worth $29,000), 10,250 ARB (worth $14,000), and 17,007 OP (worth $24,000) in the airdrop.

Of course, the more painful blow to witches may be the published list of witch addresses. According to the latest list, about 1.04 million addresses are marked as witch addresses. Some people doubt that these lists will be used by other projects for anti-witch plans, and those furry studios will have to re-establish new interactive addresses or directly withdraw from the circle.

In addition, reporting activities may also cause accidental injuries. On LayerZero’s witch reporting portal and social media comment area, a large number of users said that their addresses were mistaken for witch addresses and appealed for re-examination. This is also the main reason why LayerZero staff need to work overtime around the clock compared to other projects for airdrops.

Forced donations spark renewed outcry

Tokens were available for redemption at 19:00 on June 20. Everyone thought that the LayerZero airdrop had finally come to an end, but users discovered that LayerZero still had a back-up plan. The LayerZero Foundation published an article announcing the launch of a new "proof of donation" claiming mechanism, where users are required to donate $0.1 for each ZRO when claiming tokens. The LayerZero Foundation announced that the donation of up to $18.5 million will be donated directly to the Protocol Guild, which is a public product of Ethereum that provides funding for the core development of the Ethereum ecosystem.

This practice once again triggeredCommunityIn response to the strong dissatisfaction with the coin, Bryan Pellegrino said on Twitter that users do not need to be forced to donate. If you do not want to donate, you can choose not to receive ZRO tokens. This statement added fuel to the fire.

Many users said they felt they were being played. Due to the concentrated craze for claiming tokens, Ethereum's gas fee once rose to $33, and many users did not deposit funds in the address where they claimed the tokens. In order to claim the tokens, you need to first deposit a sum of money into the address for donation, and then pay a fee when you claim them. On the chain, every action means an expense.

In the face of controversy, LayerZero said that it did so because "there is evidence that free tokens will not lead to lasting use of the protocol in the long run", and emphasized that LayerZero never said that ZRO token collection was an airdrop activity. A user @JackKeety responded, "You think ZRO is free, but aren't the high cross-chain fees paid by users during those interactions? You get attention and profits, and then treat users as electronic beggars waiting for charity. If we don't plan to collect tokens, can we also return the cross-chain fees paid to users?"

Some users also questioned that since they had taken so much trouble to exclude witches, why not just use the saved tokens to directly reward developers.

Faced with users' questions, Bryan Pellegrino, who is always keen to respond, chose to remain silent this time.

On-chain data dropped by more than 90%

The cost behind the war against witches is also heavy, and the performance of on-chain data is the most direct response.

On May 1, the number of messages on the LayerZero chain in a single day was 351,000. On May 4, LayerZero announced the launch of the witch surrender plan. On May 5, the data dropped to 75,000, a decrease of about 78%. And this data continued to fall before the airdrop was released. As of June 20, the data had dropped to 31,000. It was a decrease of 91% from May 1, and only 5% compared to the high of 766,000 on June 30, 2023. Although other projects will also face the dilemma of falling data after the airdrop, taking the newly airdropped ZKsync as an example, the highest daily active address this year was about 528,000, and when the airdrop was released, the daily active address was 2.557 million.Xiaobai NavigationThe lowest level before the event dropped to 194,000, with the largest overall drop of 63.2%. But it is still much smaller than the drop of LayerZero. In addition, the activity of various protocols on LayerZero has generally dropped by more than 60% in one month.

From this point of view, the data prosperity of LayerZero is indeed due to the indelible contribution of witches. From the perspective of the long-term development of the industry, restricting witches can indeed bring more fairness to real users. However, LayerZero's operation seems to be more like playing tricks on witches many times. After the witches completed 2 years of interaction, it launched a witch bounty and announced the list of witches. In this wave of witch hunting, LayerZero has attracted enough attention, but it seems that it has not really brought much benefit to the activity on the chain.

On June 21, Bryan Pellegrino, co-founder and CEO of LayerZero, tweeted: "What an unreal day. I have never been so tired in my life. I turned off the notification and went to sleep for an unknown time. All the best." In the past three days, Bryan Pellegrino seems to have been active on social media, and he frequently posted pictures of overtime. One of the pictures showed that LayerZero employees were receiving intravenous drips to maintain their energy. All LayerZero employees have put a lot of energy into this airdrop, but how to re-boost the activity on the chain in the future may be a bigger challenge for LayerZero.

The article comes from the Internet:Forced donations, witch hunting, LayerZero airdrop drama ends, on-chain data drops 90%

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