The points system/airdrop meta will likely continue until we see a new model
Infra/application projects have been dependent on doing airdrop campaigns to bootstrap TVL and on-chain activities
These airdrop campaigns attract users, as well as airdrop farmers and mercenary capital – people who set up new wallets, deposit TVL, and conduct transactions (often with bots to automate the process) on-chain in anticipation of getting airdrop rewards for their early participation in the ecosystems
The 50 largest airdrops in history have distributed a total of $26.6B in value, some recent eye-catching ones this year – Dymension $390M, Celestia $120M, LayerZero $375M, Jito $165M, StarkNet $2.1B, zkSync $1B – attracting significant usage and adoption for their infra/applications
Yet, these user activities tend to be short-lived as users and capital rotate to the next shiny infra for farming future airdrops
User activities often retrace post-airdrop – TVL shrinks, number of active wallets plummets, on-chain transactions decline
Take LayerZero as an example – since April after the airdrop snapshot was take, LayerZero’s bridging activities plunged from 240,000 to 12,000 – a 95% drop in transaction count
In view of this – new airdrop and anti-sybil attack strategies emerge to combat industrial-scale airdrop farming. The airdrop mechanism evolved from flat allocation per user (by Uniswap in 2020), to tiered airdrops (by Celestia & Jito in late 2023), and criterion-based airdrops (by Optimism & Arbitrum etc. in 2023). Until more recently, we have points system being popularized by Ethena, EigenLayer and many other restaking protocols
Despite the popularity of points system, it still faced controversies over the opaque points calculation rules and whales’ dominance in this points farming game
Consider the EigenLayer airdrop. The snapshot date of March 15 was only disclosed on April 30, yet some big players appeared to have insider knowledge, as they moved out all deposited tokens the following day after the snapshot was taken – on March 16, a day after the snapshot, the renowned trader GSR moved out $7 million in wBETH from EigenLayer. Similarly, a Binance-funded wallet withdrew $13 million in wBETH from EigenLayer on the same day
Or consider Blast, the L2 that made the points system famous, faced accusations from community members for allegedly distributing a substantial amount of golden points to specific dapps without any prior notice or transparency
With that said, the crypto community still have high anticipation for upcoming airdrops from infra projects like Monad, Farcaster, Berachain, Babylon, Movement Labs – who raised millions from VCs and expect to follow the same strategy to acquiring users
For now, airdrop campaigns will likely remain as the key user acquisition for crypto projects until some innovative strategies and thoughtful anti-sybil reward program emerge
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