Judging from previous airdrops, the value of airdropped tokens of large projects is generally between a few hundred U to one or two thousand U. For example, if we refer to the last starknet, the number of tokens in this zksync airdrop is relatively large, with at least 450 tokens for one account. Normally, one account has about 1,000 zk tokens. If we calculate it based on the value of 500U, then the normal price of zk tokens should be around 0.2U. According to the official announcement, one account can get a maximum of 100,000 coins, which is an airdrop of 20,000 U. This is already very generous in the current airdrop field, so the coin price cannot be too high.
Here we speculate that the official team of zksync may have been being petty, because the single-coin price of token airdrops from other projects such as uniswap, ens, etc. is relatively high, generally above 1u, and rarely below 1u. The advantage of being below 1u is that when the coin price goes up later, everyone thinks the coin price will not be very high, so it is easier to take over.
If this kind of pettiness was useful in the past, it might be useful, but now most investors have done valuation analysis on the projects. It is not the case that the market value can be whatever you want. Therefore, when a large number of your coins are airdropped, the corresponding market will naturally give you a very low price, rather than a high price.
Is there any insider trading?
Of course there are. First of all, the airdrop is divided into four steps: qualification screening, asset statistics, multiplier and witch detection. In fact, many active users lose their qualifications during the qualification screening because they do not meet the requirements. The important point is that the qualification does not require the value of the tokens held, but puts it on the asset statistics. That is to say, for some people, they do not need to occupy a large amount of funds, which is a good thing for a large number of witch accounts, at least there will be a bottom line.
There is nothing much to say about the on-chain assets. Basically, they are relatively fair. The focus is on the multiplier. The first native NFT selected is actually not very popular. The native ERC20 tokens AAI HOLD KOI MEOW MUTE RF ZF ZORRO that also hold at least US$50. To be honest, I don’t know any of these. If the project party chooses some well-known tokens such as cheems, it’s actually okay, but unknown tokens are easy to manipulate.
The last witch detection is relatively simple, mainly looking at the transaction connection. Although there may be mistaken killings here, it is basically acceptable. Overall, what can be manipulated is the empty investment qualifications and multipliers, which are also the easiest to brush people and widen the gap.
Many people also lost money due to airdrop interactions.
At present, we feel that the on-chain gas fee is very low when using zksync. In fact, last year, the gas fee was quite high. For medium interaction, we generally take 50 transaction records as the standard, and its gas cost is roughly around 30u. If you do swap interaction, there will also be a certain amount of wear and tear, which is roughly around 10u-20u. If you cross the chain from the main network to zksync, then the cost will be at least around 3-5u, plus the cross-chain cost of the lite chain, that is to say, the cost of one account is at least 60u, and this does not take into account the principal loss caused by some project parties running away, the time cost of airdrops, and the cost caused by ETH price fluctuations.
If you do as described above, you can basically get about 1,000 coins, which is about 200u, and the profit is roughly 3 times. Taking into account that some accounts may be witches, the witch rate must be less than 60%, that is, at most three accounts out of 10 accounts cannot be witches, otherwise the profit will be very small or even a loss.
But in general, if one of a batch of 10 accounts is a witch, then the other 9 are very likely to be witches, and the witch rate is about 80%. Therefore, it is easy for ordinary users with insufficient strength to be killed by mistake.
From the big data, we can see that most ordinary players may make some money near the cost line (hundreds to thousands of U after deducting costs such as gas), and some players' costs are greater than the airdrop value (some projects have run away before, and they have been screened out by witches due to high gas interactions), resulting in small losses. Some small studios will get relatively good returns, and insider trading will also get a lot of tokens.
Where is the future of interactive airdrops?
Basically, the bonus period of airdrop token distribution is coming to an end. For project owners, on the one hand, they need to do a good job of anti-witch work and waste a lot of energy. On the other hand, they also need to try their best to "control" the tokens, that is, the insider trading set up for market value maintenance. At the same time, the probability of batch interactive users being counter-charged is also increasing.
For the project owners, the PUA in the bear market allows them to survive safely, but the value of funds in the bear market is also very precious. For example, the same 100u may be worth 200u or more. Therefore, when we say that the cost of an account is 60u, in fact, if the player exchanges the currency for eth and holds it until now, then add the silence cost, which is 120u or even more, so your actual profit may be less, which is obviously not worth the loss.
Therefore, overall, the point airdrop method has a certain degree of certainty, and being able to bring certainty to users is the biggest motivation for the airdrop to continue. Of course, we also need to be wary of the project side calculating the airdrop value based on the user's expenditure cost, so as to avoid the case of "getting rich overnight".
Finally, in addition to certainty, a reasonable airdrop also requires users to bring expectations and value to the project after the airdrop, so as to avoid the situation where no one is interested in the project after the airdrop. This is also worth the market's continued exploration.
