Author: Jesse Coghlan, CoinTelegraph; Translated by: Deng Tong, Golden Finance
LayerZero’s token launch on June 20 led to a surge in Arbitrum’s fees, pushing the blockchain’s daily revenue to a record $3.43 million, an increase of about 16,680% from the day before.
LayerZero launched its ZRO token on Thursday but has drawn criticism for its mandatory “donation” mechanism — which requires participants to spend a small amount of money per token to receive an airdrop allocation.
These mechanisms drove up average gas fees on the blockchain from less than 1 cent to 89 cents.
This caused its profits to surge to $3.29 million for the day, another all-time high for the network, according to data from Dune Analytics and DefiLlama.
Arbitrum's revenue and profits soared. Source: Dune Analytics
LayerZero stipulates that ZRO token claimants must donate a small amount of funds for each token.
“To claim ZRO, users must donate $0.10 USDC, USDT, or native ETH for each ZRO,” LayerZero wrote in a post on June 20. It added that the donation will go to the Protocol Association, which helps fund Ethereum developers.
LayerZero argued that its token launch “was not an airdrop” because airdrops were incompatible with the “goals of fair distribution, community building, and protocol health” and many recipients had “little to no interest” in the long-term project.
This was Arbitrum’s highest revenue day since December 14, when the site was forced offline due to a surge in inscriptions on the network.
Inscriptions are a data format that can carry packets larger than simple transaction data (such as images), which makes them expensive due to their size.
This cost was also passed on to Arbitrum, which made just $414,000 in profit on Dec. 14, as it incurred higher fees for issuing and verifying expensive inscription data on ethereum.
Meanwhile, ZRO has struggled. According to CoinGecko, the price of ZRO fell 23% to $3.42, with a high of $4.79.
