Original author: Frank
Source: PANews
With ZRO's landing on the exchange on the evening of June 20, LayerZero's airdrop drama has finally come to an end.
According to the latest Dune data dashboard, the number of ZRO tokens that can be claimed in this round is 85 million, and as of the morning of June 21, 278,000 people have claimed, 40 million tokens have been claimed, the lowest receiving address is 8 tokens, the largest single address has received 10,662, and the median airdrop collection is 53 ZRO.
Based on the price of $3.46 on June 21, the size of the ZRO token airdrop is about $290 million. Users can claim an average of $229 in tokens, with a maximum single address receiving $36,000. Compared with the previously released Starknet and Jupiter, the largest single address is indeed a lot lower (the largest single address of Starknet is $360,000, and the largest single address of Jupiter is $130,000), but it does improve to a certain extent from the average, and nearly half of the addresses of JUP get $127. The war against witches does seem to be generating more for the average real user.
But on the other hand, LayerZero's on-chain data has also plummeted by more than 90% after announcing the fight against witches. Coupled with the outrage caused by the temporary donation plan launched when collecting tokens, LayerZero's airdrop has attracted a lot of attention, but it may have also lost the goodwill of some users.
The strictest witch hunt in history, nearly 2 million witch addresses were blocked
LayerZero is a universal data information communication protocol that transmits information on-chain in a secure and simple way to enable cross-chain communication between applications. The project has previously closed three rounds of funding totaling $261 million.
Since closing a $135 million Series A1 funding round at a $1 billion valuation in 2022, LayerZero has been labeled as a potential "big hair", with nearly 6 million wallet addresses officially interacting with the protocol and developers deploying more than 54,000 OApp contracts. In the case of full airdrop expectations, LayerZero unexpectedly adopted the strictest witch restrictions in history and launched a round of war against witches.
On May 4, LayerZero announced the completion of the first phase of snapshots and plans to conduct a TGE on June 20 to issue the token ZRO. It also launched a self-reporting program for witch activity, and if a witch turns herself in to report, she will receive 15% of the expected distribution of tokens. But that's just the appetizer for LayerZero's Witch Wars, which was followed by a witch hunt where users can earn 10% of the Witch's expected tokens by reporting a Witch address. According to the latest witch report, a total of 1.04 million addresses have been reported and judged to be witches, in addition, more than 800,000 addresses of witches who have surrendered.
According to LayerZero, this restriction on witches will save about 1% of the total supply of tokens (about 10 million), which will be redistributed to eligible addresses. At the moment, the final list of witches and the expected income of witches have not been officially announced.
The hair studio suffered heavy losses
In this campaign against witches, the Hair Picking Studio was hit hard. Not only did 2 years of interaction come to nothing, but also took a painstakingly operated wallet address.
例如：0xe93685f3bba03016f02bd1828badd6195988d950
This address has been involved in interactions for a total of 730 days, and has been interacting since March 28, 2022 at the earliest, with a total of 229,400 interactions. It is the address with the longest interaction time on the LayerZero chain, and it has been marked as a witch and has not received any grains. The second-place address 0xcaf331a897594b6f8604d40439fe93f758348dea had 120,000 interactions and received a total of 5,010 ZRO, which would have 0xe9 about 10,000 ZRO. Based on the ZRO price of about $3.46 on June 21, the address lost $34,600 in revenue as a result.
Another airdrop hunter at the beginning of the 0x196a can only get 354.92 ZRO in the LayerZero airdrop. He has previously won 104,806 ZK (worth $29,000), 10,250 ARB (worth $14,000), and 17,007 OP (worth $24,000) in the airdrop.
Of course, perhaps the harder blow to the witches is the publication of the list of witch addresses, which according to the latest list shows that about 1.04 million addresses have been marked as witch addresses. There are skeptics that these lists will be used by other projects for anti-witch projects, and those who have to re-establish new interactive addresses or simply withdraw from the circle.
In addition, whistleblowing activity can also lead to accidental injury. On LayerZero's Witch Reporting Portal and social media comment sections, a large number of users said that their addresses were mistaken for Witch addresses, and that their complaints were being re-examined. This is the main reason why LayerZero staff need to work overtime around the clock compared to other projects that carry out airdrops.
Forced donations have once again sparked condemnation
At 19:00 on June 20th, everyone thought that LayerZero's airdrop had finally come to an end, and users found that LayerZero still had a backhand. The LayerZero Foundation has published an article announcing a new claim mechanism called "Proof of Donation", where users are required to donate $0.1 per ZRO when claiming tokens. The LayerZero Foundation has announced that the donation of up to $18.5 million will go directly to ProtocolGuild, a public good of Ethereum that funds the core development of the Ethereum ecosystem.
This move once again sparked a backlash from the community, with Bryan Pellegrino tweeting that users do not need to be forced to donate. If you don't want to donate, you can choose not to claim ZRO tokens. This statement added fuel to the fire.
Many users said they felt like they were being played, and Ethereum's gas fee rose to $33 at one point due to the concentrated rush to claim tokens, and many users did not deposit funds into the receiving address. In order to claim tokens, you need to deposit a fund into the address for donation, and then pay another fee when you claim it, and on the chain, every action means a payout.
In the face of the controversy, LayerZero said it did so because there is "evidence that free tokens will not lead to lasting use of the protocol in the long term," stressing that LayerZero has never said that ZRO token claims are airdrop activities. One @JackKeety user replied, "You think ZRO is free, but aren't the users paying for the high cross-chain fees during those interactions?" You get attention and profits, and then you treat users like e-beggars waiting for handouts, and if we don't plan to claim tokens, can you also return the cross-chain fees paid to users?"
Some users questioned why they didn't directly reward developers with the saved tokens since they had taken great pains to eliminate witches.
In the face of users' doubts, Bryan Pellegrino, who has always been keen to reply, chose to remain silent this time.
On-chain data plummeted by more than 90%.
The cost behind the war against witches is also painful, and the performance of on-chain data is the most direct response.
On May 1, the number of messages on the LayerZero chain in a single day was 351,000. On May 4, LayerZero announced the launch of the Witch Surrender Program, and on May 5, the number dropped to 75,000, a decrease of about 78%. And this data continued to fall until the airdrop was released, and as of June 20, the number has dropped to 31,000. This is down 91% from May 1 and only 5% from the June 30, 2023 high of 766,000 entries. Although other projects will also face the dilemma of data decline after the airdrop, taking ZKsync, which has just been airdropped, as an example, the highest daily active address is about 528,000 since the beginning of this year, and the lowest drop has dropped to 194,000 before the airdrop is released, with an overall decline of 63.2%. But it's still much smaller than LayerZero's. In addition, the activity of various protocols on LayerZero has also generally decreased by more than 6% in one month.
From this point of view, LayerZero's data boom does have an indelible credit to the witches, and from the long-term development of the industry, restricting witches can indeed bring more fairness to real users. However, LayerZero's operation seems to be more like completing a number of witch tricks, initiating a witch bounty and announcing the list of witches after the witches have completed 2 years of interaction. In the course of this witch hunt, LayerZero has earned enough eyeballs, but it doesn't seem to have really brought much to the activity on the chain.
On June 21, Bryan Pellegrino, co-founder and CEO of LayerZero, tweeted, "What an unreal day, I've never been so exhausted in my life. Enter an unknown sleep time after turning off the notification. All the best". For the past three days, Bryan Pellegrino seems to have been active on social media, and has frequently posted pictures of overtime, including one that shows LayerZero employees taking intravenous drips to keep their energy up. All LayerZero staff have put a lot of effort into this airdrop, but how to revive the activity on the chain in the future may be the bigger challenge for LayerZero.