Recently, the studios that have been snatching airdrops are all complaining and demanding justice!
The scale of this wave of projects is shrinking as if it were planned, and recently zkSync has been caught red-handed!
Avail deceives its Aunt Flo
On April 19th of this year, Avail announced the airdrop rules, marking the beginning of this wave of project deception.
Avail is actually a very prominent project, as a leading project in the DA layer of the modular blockchain trend.
If you don’t understand, just look at their funding records: both the Seed and Series A rounds were led by Dragonfly, raising a total of $70 million in two rounds!
Having just raised so much money, everyone was naturally full of expectations!
However, the subsequent airdrop registration website disappointed many people – many participants of the test network and heavy L2 users, who were sure they would get something, received a “Not Eligible” result in the eligibility check. There was a lot of online cursing, criticism of the rules and standards, and even questioning of fairness, with many users accusing the project of insider trading.
Dymension, as a modular settlement layer, objectively serves as a customer of Avail DA. These connections caused many users to buy DYM and stake it in anticipation of Avail’s airdrop.
But in the end, the airdrop did not reach the DYM stakers.
Even the participating nodes were scammed – claiming to randomly select 5% of nodes to receive the airdrop, I asked a whale who had set up thousands of nodes, and they also did not receive the airdrop.
If it was indeed a random selection, with 1000 nodes, there should have been 50 winners, so not having any basically confirms the accusation of insider trading.
Community users have been demanding justice, and under pressure, Avail eventually held a second phase of the airdrop, appeasing some of the community users.
Taiko refuses to respond to the airdrop rules
Another prominent project, Taiko, simply did not disclose the airdrop rules – it’s either you have it or you don’t.
They deceive with confidence.
The co-founder of the project, Wang Dong, first posted on X, stating, “To avoid unnecessary disputes, we will not disclose the details of the TKO Genesis airdrop rules. Our goal is fairness, but we cannot satisfy everyone. Congratulations to those who received TKO, and we apologize to those who did not.”
Shortly after, as more and more doubts and insults were voiced on the X platform, Wang Dong seemed to be provoked and made another statement on Discord:
IO is a PUA master
Since HackVC invested $30 million in io.net in March this year, its private valuation has reached $1 billion.
As an AI computing power platform, it was stated that 32 million tokens would be airdropped to computing miners.
From March to May, a large number of users flocked to IO computing mining for airdrops, causing even the price of mac to rise, to what extent:
However, IO does not display points, leaving miners anxious, so they have to keep hanging in there. Regardless of renting computing power or buying mining equipment, both have costs.
One miner said, “It’s like IO is PUAing you to hang on for a long time, but doesn’t tell you the actual points, so everyone is putting in a lot of effort, and the rebound will be just as big.”
IO only allocated 32 million tokens to miners, but the computing power of miners is unlimited, maintenance is complex, and there is a substantial financial investment, leading to many studios and teams being ripped off in the end, with almost half of the machine costs not being recovered based on the current token price.
zkSync gives up even its underwear
If the previous projects still had some face, at most being a bit stingy, zkSync is a blatant insider trading project, just starting with deception.
zkSync completed its fundraising in the last bull market, with a staggering $258 million raised at the time! There hasn’t been a project of this scale in this round of fundraising.
The leading institutions are all reputable, including Dragonfly and a16z.
Unexpectedly, with such a high profile, they actually turned against their principles.
For example, the NFT market Element tweeted that, as the largest NFT market on ZKsync, they did not receive any airdrops and questioned whether this was a joke.
Those who received the airdrops were some strange addresses, with 12,000 addresses having no interaction records at all, and those who received substantial ecosystem airdrops were all connected to them.
Airdrops are essentially marketing expenses
As early as ten years ago, internet companies were giving out red packets to attract new users, and there were many studios making a living off of it.
Now, even Pinduoduo, which started out by giving out red packets, is becoming stingy.
This is actually a normal process of project development. The project side always has a limited budget, so where they spend it matters.
In the early days of crypto projects, the entry barriers were high, and it was more direct to give money to users than to advertisers.
But after studios faked users in bulk, do they still expect the project side to settle with them?
Now, with technological advancements, the entry barriers for many projects have lowered significantly. In the end, airdrops of crypto projects will be like red packets of internet products today – only a very small percentage of users will receive anything, and the days of making a living off of airdrops are gone.
For those of you running studios, it’s time to change careers, and I advise all you air-drop enthusiasts to try to stay away from it as much as possible.