Written by: Nian Qing, ChainCatcher
Last night, Blast officially opened airdrop applications. In the recent "airdrop is dead" anger caused by ZKsync and LayerZero, Blast and its founder Tieshun Pacman were also criticized by the community without surprise. There are three main points of complaints:
The token collection process is irritating
The price of the token after listing is lower than expected, and the benefits of users participating in staking are low
The top 1% of active addresses need to wait for a 6-month linear unlocking period
Specifically, before claiming the airdrop, users are required to watch a video lasting dozens of minutes, where the founder Pacman will introduce Blast’s token economics and development plan in detail. In addition, after watching the video, users must download the mobile app and get 4 prompts before they can finally claim the tokens.
Secondly, before Blast went public, multiple analysts had valued the token, and even the more pessimistic valuations were all above $0.03. After the token was launched, Blast's FDV was only around $2 billion. In contrast, Arbitrum, Optimism and other L2s had FDVs of nearly $10 billion when they were released (which also shows to some extent that retail investors no longer pay for VC coins with high FDV).
However, compared with the token price, some users who participated in large-scale staking reported that their airdrop benefits were very low. For example, Christian, co-founder of NextGen Venture, said that he deposited more than 50 million US dollars in Blast, but only received an airdrop worth 100,000 US dollars. Christian also angrily called Blast a scam project and called Pacman a "serial scam." @beijingduck2023, the "big brother" of Blast points, pledged about 10 million US dollars, and with a total score of 281.2 billion and 1.22 million gold points, he only received 64,000 BLAST, worth more than one thousand US dollars. In addition, large accounts (the top 0.1% of addresses, about 1,000 addresses) still need to wait for a 6-month linear unlocking period.
But objectively speaking, Blast has received much less negative reviews in the community than the recent ZRO and ZK. X user @CryptoWoodBro mentioned that 7% of the Blast airdrops were given as staking points and 7% were given as gold points. Staking points can be automatically earned by just lying down and not moving, which is suitable for whales with large funds; gold points require studying the rules of each project and participating deeply, which is suitable for retail investors with small funds who are willing to work hard. In addition, some rules allow points to double/expand. Therefore, the Blast airdrop actually takes care of the interests of retail investors and provides retail investors with small funds with the opportunity to "get rich through hard work".
The era of "short, flat and fast" is over
Although Blast has put a little fire on the discussion of "airdrops are dead" by not checking witches and taking into account a certain degree of fairness (especially taking care of some retail investors) in this airdrop, the point-based airdrop it represents is still not the way forward for Web3 projects.
Before the airdrop, Blast had a bad reputation due to its point-based gameplay. In March, the new point-based gameplay released on the Blast mainnet was accused of PUA. The new rules require users to migrate their ETH points to the mainnet to enjoy a 10x inflation, but users need to pay more than $50 in gas fees for migration, which is too costly for small retail investors. After the migration, users found that the inflation factor was a random number of 0-10 times. Although Blast officials later fixed the bug, it also left criticism that the points calculation rules were not transparent. Previously, the official also secretly issued a large number of gold points to some Dapps.
When the point system was being discussed in the community, someone said that whether this round of point-based PUA would end or not would largely depend on the performance of Blast. If the price of Blast was much lower than expected, the point-based airdrop PUA would naturally become "extinct". Many OGs and KOLs also declared that they would "no longer participate in point-based interactive activities in the future."
But even if Blast fails, does it mean the demise of point-based airdrops?
Although the community has long complained about the points system, brushing points is still a common marketing and incentive method for current Web3 projects.
Some well-known un-coined projects include:
Scroll released the Scroll Marks user points statistics rules on May 15, mainly counting the user's bridging data and gas burning data scores since the launch of the Scroll mainnet on October 10, 2023. Later projects will issue airdrops based on Scroll Marks;
Linea launched the first phase of the Linea Surge points program (Volt 1) on May 17. Linea Surge will run for 6 months (6 Volts). There are three main ways to obtain points: ecosystem points, referral points, and early adoption and historical contribution points.
Backpack launched the account transaction volume points system in February. The points ranking will serve as an important reference data for future airdrop qualifications or Launchpool projects.
In addition, many projects such as KIP Protocol, KiloEx, Swell, and Puffer Finance have launched point activities. Will projects without point incentives be better? No. The situation faced by retail investors will become increasingly difficult. Without a point system, it will be difficult for users to get rid of being nodes, doing tasks on third-party platforms, doing Odyssey, staking to provide LP, buying NFTs that have no actual value, etc.
Although the airdrops of the project parties have been involuntarily rolled out, it does not mean the end of the airdrop era. The Mao Mao Party has not stopped because of one or two setbacks. There are still a large number of addresses interacting with these unreleased projects. It is just that the era of "short, flat and fast" has come to an end temporarily, that is, the era of zero-cost and low-cost airdrops has completely ended. This marks that the "industrialization of airdrops" has officially entered a mature period, and users have become "Web3 product testers" with certain capital and certain professional knowledge, and the depth of participation is the key.
Airdrops are not dead, so why are project owners and money-grabbing parties no longer buying into each other's ideas?
The project owner can never satisfy everyone, but why does the negative sentiment brought about by this year's airdrop seem particularly prominent?
The most important reason for this situation is the overall downturn. Although the BTC ETF has brought about an increase in the price of BTC and some altcoins in this round, there is actually not much new capital flowing into the crypto market. There is only rotation between new concept sectors. After being repeatedly beaten by the "value coins" with high valuations and low circulation, retail investors finally completely disenchanted them and chose not to pay for fomo. The stock fund game between VCs, project parties, exchanges, and retail investors, most projects fell sharply after the airdrop because not many people explained the market. In addition, after the "value coin" loses its wealth-creating effect, it is also difficult to attract new users to enter the market.
Secondly, airdrops are no longer a good business for both project owners and users. The industrialization of airdrops has created an irreparable cognitive gap between project owners and users.
The best airdrop in history is Uniswap, and no one will refute this. But no one can replicate the airdrop feast that belongs to the founder. The so-called good is composed of three factors that are now impossible to achieve: users do not have too high expectations for the project party's airdrop, the interaction threshold is extremely low, and the airdrop value is high.
The "wealth-creating effect" brought by airdrops has fostered the industrialization of airdrops, gradually widening the cognitive gap between project owners and users.
For project owners, airdrops are a sign of product-market fit. Most project owners believe that their products can meet existing market demand (but how many Web3 projects have real use cases and core values?), and airdrops are rewards for actual users. This way of thinking directly leads to the arrogance of project owners. As LayerZero founder Bryan said in response to "mandatory donations", "If you don't want to donate, don't apply for tokens. This is not something you own, but something provided by others." For project owners, token airdrops have become "alms" to users.
For users, the result of the industrialization of airdrops is that they will default to expect every project to conduct airdrops, and they will participate in it as "workers" and "farmers", contributing technology, time and costs, helping to build the ecosystem and push up the project's data and valuation, helping it obtain more financing, and they should receive corresponding rewards.
From the results, for the project side, if the airdrop threshold is set low, it means that it will attract "low-value" users, and there is a risk of selling after the token is released. Short-term and low-value users will quickly withdraw funds and transfer liquidity to the next "farm" after receiving the airdrop; for users (especially retail investors), even if the amount of funds is small, they actually pay a cost in the interaction process, and usually because the project side's airdrop rules are not transparent, they often face the risk of being reversed.
The "perfect airdrop" advocated by Hayden Adams, the founder of Uniswap, which can shape a culture that rewards early adopters, more equitable and widespread value distribution, simpler self-service adoption, and make the public willing to try new things, and achieve early liquidity and early price discovery, may only be realized once. After all, Web3 has never been a utopia.
Airdrops need to be redefined
Jupiter co-founder Meow raised a point in the recent discussion around LayerZero airdrops. He believes that "airdrops are gifts. Not rewards, not a loyalty program, and not a means of growth. It's that simple. If you ask what you can get from it, it is no longer a gift, and thus loses its meaning and its original sincerity." He further explained that in order to help protocol developers think about how to conduct airdrops.
He mentioned that we need to give a clear definition of airdrops. Airdrops are airdrops, incentives are incentives, rewards are rewards, and growth is growth. All these confusions in terms have led to the problems that exist in airdrops now.
In fact, I agree with his latter point of view. A clear definition is actually more conducive to solving the above problems and bridging the cognitive differences between project owners and users. Perhaps, the project owner should separate the money spent on user growth from the airdrop budget as a gift.
Crypto KOL Cobie discussed the "death of airdrops". He believes that the current status of airdrops is difficult to meet the needs of users, and its reputation can easily be backfired by small mistakes. Project owners may try better listing methods such as not issuing airdrops.
Binance co-founder He Yi also recently wrote that the fratricide between Lumao Studio and L2 project has turned into a farce, and the Lumao era may be coming to an end. As an ordinary investor, the ICO of 2017, the IEO of 2021, the nesting dolls, and even the Lumao strategy of 2023 may not be suitable for today's market.
In the era of "airdrop" industrialization, perhaps we should really redefine airdrops and redesign the rules based on this.
Although there is no absolutely perfect airdrop or incentive method, the most important thing that project parties need to pay attention to is that what users need most is fairness, fairness, and fairness!
