Good news, ZRO airdrop is now available.
Bad news, you have to pay to receive it.
Previously, the market questioned the small amount of Layerzero's airdrop. Everyone said that they had worked hard for a long time but the amount seemed not enough; the feeling of "insulting airdrop" arose spontaneously.
And this insult seemed to come twice.
On the evening of June 20, Layerzero officially announced that the ZRO airdrop is now available, but it is not free:
Users must donate $0.10 in USDC, USDT, or native ETH for each ZRO to claim ZRO tokens.
LayerZero, euphemistically calling it a new claim mechanism called Proof-of-Donation, will donate up to $18.5 million to the Protocol Guild, a collective funding mechanism for ethereum developers.
Regardless of the transparency and purpose of donations, from the user's perspective, this rule can be expressed in plain language as follows:
If you want to receive airdrop, pay first.
This is the first time that airdrop has been introduced in the crypto market.
You’ve seen all sorts of shady scams like pool withdrawals, empty white papers, and “sorry we failed” scams, but openly collecting a portion of donations from your airdrop is unheard of.
So Airdrop to Earn became Pay to Earn.
Forced donation, strong contrast
What is even more emotional is that before ZRO is collected, the Layerzero official page displays a "historical review" section.
Before you receive ZERO, the page will give you an annual review column similar to that often used by domestic Internet companies, with warm reviews such as "You used omnichain for the first time on X day", "You interacted X times", etc., as if to remind you of the hard times when you worked hard to interact and waited for good expectations.
There is nothing wrong with this review itself, but when compared with the donations on the final collection page, it seems a bit sad.
This seems to be saying that all your previous efforts and interactions have added to the financial burden of the donation you finally receive.
Batch hair? Make a boutique account? Multiple chains together?
No problem, the clown is you.
Until the last moment, you still don’t know what the restrictions are on the receiving page; and according to industry inertia, you will at most feel that the rules for allocating the number of airdrops may be a bit unfair, after all, it is difficult to satisfy everyone.
But you really can’t think of the design of paying money to get airdrops until the very end. However, as the project owner, it may have already designed it, but it can’t be said at the beginning. Putting it at the last step will only make your sunk cost higher.
Here, the collection rules stipulated in the smart contract have become a thorn in the eyes of many Mao Zedong party members. Sorry, there is no way to change it. The contract has been written. If you want to collect it, you have to donate.
It’s not that donating money is bad, nor that everyone has no kindness; it’s just that this design, which looks a bit forced and malicious, can easily create a contrast and gap in people’s minds, and then cause them to understand “donating” as “robbing”.
Airdrop tax, robbing the rich and the poor
If we abstract this donation button further, we can actually understand it as a kind of "airdrop tax".
The project party rewards you for your interactive behavior, but the amount of the reward is actually decided by the project party. At the same time, there is no law that stipulates that the project party cannot extract part of the tax from the reward amount for other purposes.
I am the fish and others are the butchers. It is already very good to give you airdrops. What's wrong with collecting taxes?
From the perspective of the project owner, this is reasonable, even a bit greedy; but from the perspective of the majority of users, I'm afraid this project takes itself too seriously.
As for the big holders and bulk traders, if every ZRO has to pay a donation, then the big holders will obviously have to pay much more. But the small holders are not spared either. Under the design of every 0.1, all beings are equal, robbing the rich and the poor.
Some netizens even said on Twitter that the donation tax they were charged was not strictly designed according to 0.1/person, and that they actually had to pay much more, which was a total robbery.
Coupled with the surge in gas fees during the airdrop period, small households who receive airdrops will feel like they have made a profit but not fully earned it, or even felt like they were tricked.
Will you still be determined to earn money from multiple accounts? Studio-level airdrop hunters need to carefully calculate their input-output ratio and keep their costs as low as possible; after all, no one can predict what the tax rate of this donation is.
The huge profits in the golden age eventually led to involution.
User rolls, more and more people come, you don't interact, some people interact. Project rolls, in the end you get less and less, and even have a tax design.
There is a saying that goes, the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.
Layerzero is the first to pay money to get ZRO, but it will definitely not be the last in the future.
Later project owners may use more moderate tax rates, more circuitous excuses, and more grandiose narratives to take away a portion of the airdrops you have already received. As a market participant and acceptor of the rules, you may have no other choice.
Want to collectively not resist this behavior? This is even more difficult in a decentralized and diverse crypto forest.
Lower your expectations and live within your means. There is no free lunch in this world, and there may be no free airdrops in the future.
$ZRO $LISTA $ZK
