Airdrop Updates: Part 2

Written by @DegenYogi

Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen several significant developments in the airdrop community. The first was zkSync’s infamous airdrop, which disappointed most of the community. The team chose a new method to filter out Sybils and industrial farms, which involved calculating how long the address was active on the chain and how much USD value was on-chain during that time and assigning each wallet a TWAB, time-weighted average balance. I won’t get into the mathematics of it. In short, this disqualified many users who had been active on zkSync for years but didn’t always have liquidity on zkSync, even if they met all the other specified criteria. 

The controversy continued when wallets that had only been active on zkSync for a couple weeks or months, or in some cases not, received max allocations of 100k $ZK. Users who had been active for years, with thousands of transactions and thousands in fees spent, only received 1-5k $ZK or nothing. ZkSync founders just added fuel to the fire by claiming that upset community members were merely bots that were being used in a FUD campaign against zkSync and refused to change anything about the distribution. Needless to say, sentiment was low. Depending on the exchange, $ZK launched around $0.5-0.7 and currently sits at $0.17. Within 24 hours of launch, almost 45% of addresses who claimed had already sold all of their tokens. Founders have since apologized, but sentiment remains low.

Next to disappoint the community was LayerZero. LayerZero team spent a lot of time weeding out Sybil clusters, even going so far as to crowd-source the process with their bounty program. However, the average user only received 50-500 tokens, while wallets with less activity received up to 10,000. On claim day, LayerZero announced a mandatory “donation” of $0.1/token to Ethereum developers. This obviously upset the community, as many members pointed out that we already pay a fee with every transaction that goes to the developers. $ZRO launched around $4 and then dumped to $2.4. It currently sits around $3-3.5

The Blast airdrop wasn’t much better. The tokenomics were alright, with 7% of the supply going to points and 7% going to gold holders, and allocations were pretty fair concerning gold/points earned. However, expectations weren’t really met when the token launched. Estimates were much higher, even premarket priced Blast at around $3-4 billion FDV. $BLAST launched just under $3b and has slowly broken down to 1.5b, or $0.015/token.

Some of these bigger airdrops are somewhat disappointing for most who put effort into farming them, so we’re seeing quite a few farmers give up and quit. I agree that most of the larger projects that are low-effort farms probably won't have the best ROI; however, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other opportunities in the market. With fewer participants searching for the next big airdrop to farm, we can earn a larger piece of the pie.

First, we can continue our Scroll and Linea farms because we are already this far, right? The best way to earn as many Scroll marks and/or Linea LXP-L as possible is by using a lending/borrowing loop on either LayerBank or Zerolend. LayerBank even automates the process for you with up to 3.3x leverage.

I still believe Linea has the potential to be a good airdrop for those who have been collecting LXP and LXP-L as there are still only 1.2m LXP holders, with the amount of LXP that each wallet can earn is limited to however many were rewarded for quests, and only 690k wallets collecting LXP-L. With one of the highest raises we’ve seen this cycle at over 700m, Linea has a massive war chest and could still result in a quality airdrop. 

Linea just announced (hopefully the last) the LXP campaign, which will be hosted by Layer3.xyz once again. It will begin July 1st and last for five weeks. If you’ve been farming Linea for a while now, I would recommend participating. Just head over to Layer3.xyz and connect your wallet. Scroll down and click on “Linea Culture SZN.” Complete daily mints to earn LXP.

We’ve also seen quite a few smaller airdrops and announcements happen as well. Some of those include:

• ZetaMarkets $ZEX, claim at token.zeta.markets

• ExchangeArt $ART, claim on 7/7 at exchange.art/art-claim

• SanctomSol $CLOUD is launching soon on Jupiter’s LFG launchpad

• Ether.fi Season 2 checker on July 5^th, claim on July 8^th

• Eigen Layer Phase 2 of season 1 claim at claims.eigenfoundation.org

Overall, I still believe there is good money to be made from airdrops; however, the game has changed. To be highly profitable like they have been in the past, we either need to farm with size or find an edge. With the competition stiffer than ever, it's probably best to look for other opportunities in the market as well. If we can hit two birds with one stone, that’s even better. Over the next couple of months, I plan to continue farming and explore several other market opportunities. Everything from fine-tuning and operating some bots to farming some high-yield stablecoin farms or delta-neutral positions with some of my profits.

When the market changes, we must adapt and change with it, so that’s what we will do! Keep clicking, my friends! I will regularly post updates on everything on Telegram. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.