The witch cleansing campaign that lasted for more than a month has finally ended. The LayerZero Foundation announced today on X that it has launched an airdrop qualification query page, but the result can still be described as "stingy".

As one of the most anticipated potential airdrop projects in the community, LayerZero's airdrop was expected to be "something big is really coming". However, as the witch cleansing activities progressed, a large number of studios and even retail accounts were reported as witch accounts, and all the hard work for half a year was ultimately wiped out.

Related reading: " LayerZero is about to issue a coin. What will come before the airdrop is the largest "witch cleansing activity" in history? "

According to a report previously released by LayerZero, there are 800,000 addresses that are potential Sybil accounts. As of now, Bryan Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero Labs, said on X that not all Sybils have been eliminated, and on the airdrop claiming day, the Sybils in the final list (published tomorrow) will be redistributed to the qualified LayerZero Core airdrop holders.

In the airdrop claim page released by the community, some users who are ranked in the top 5% of the qualifications can only receive more than 200 ZRO tokens, which is worth about 600u at 3u off-site. Bryan Pellegrino also said that the airdrop will be claimed on the mainnet, which means that the already meager airdrop income needs to deduct the gas cost.

Is LayerZero also involved in an insider trading scandal?

However, when most users were mocking and ridiculing the counter-deposit, there were still users who said they were eligible to receive tens of thousands of ZRO, and most of these people held Kanpai Pandas’ NFT.

Currently, the token economic distribution rules of ZRO only have the version initially announced by Bryan Pellegrino, that is, the total supply of $ZRO is 1 billion, 23.8% will be airdropped to the community and developers, of which 8.5% of the tokens will be circulated on the first day, 5% will be allocated to official bridge users, 3% will be allocated to RFP projects (ie ecological users), and 0.5% will be allocated to the community pool. Most of the remaining will be allocated in the next 36 months, with additional retroactive allocations every 12 months.

This means that of the 238 million $ZRO airdrops, 20.23 million were in circulation on the first day of listing. Bryan Pellegrino told the community that Stargate ecosystem users received a total of 10 million ZRO airdrops, Pudgy Penguins and Kanpai Pandas each received 1 million airdrops, and all projects in the RFP allocated airdrops to their respective communities according to their own wishes.

Among them, one address received a total of 5,335.55 ZRO airdrops for holding 50 Kanpai Pandas NFTs, and another address starting with 0x816 received 10,000 ZROs for holding 152 NFTs. On average, one NFT received about 100 ZROs, and the amount was adjusted according to the rarity of the NFT itself.

Since Kanpai Pandas is not a very well-known project, it has also aroused suspicion of "rat trading". However, according to nftgo data, there is no obvious correlation between the peak of Kanpai Pandas' trading volume and the LayerZero airdrop snapshot time, and its Official Twitter has been operating well. Therefore, Kanpai Pandas' "rat trading" is questionable.

Related reading: " Is Kanpai Pandas, who received the LayerZero airdrop, a "rat trading"? "

How should airdrop tokens be distributed?

Not only ZRO, but also the recent ZK airdrop, due to a series of mysterious operations such as the number of qualified addresses being far less than the predicted value, the opaque decision-making power, Nansen disassociating itself from the project, and the frequent appearance of suspicious addresses without direct official response, it has also been caught in the "rat trading" storm. Previously, AltLayer was also hotly discussed by the community for "rat trading" due to OG NFT.

Related reading: " ZKsync airdrop controversy: eccentric rules raise questions, insider trading controversy arises "

The root cause is that the community is dissatisfied with the airdrop allocation ratio. Retail investors have no idea how to make their accounts meet the official airdrop standards, and the official "final right of interpretation" only makes it seem that there is something fishy going on behind the scenes, which ultimately results in the airdrop being allocated to rats, who then sell their coins to retail investors, and the remaining supply of tokens is still being unlocked to continue dumping the market.

In contrast, the official Uniswap airdrop stated that as long as you have used Uniswap, regardless of whether you successfully exchanged or not, everyone can receive 400 UNI airdrops. At the same time, holding UNI also has a series of benefits such as SOCKS tokens.

Although this kind of airdrop with no threshold has been criticized, but in today's era of large-scale counter-purchase and takeover, it seems that UNI has become a truly successful airdrop case.

Kerman Kohli, a crypto researcher, put forward his insights after studying a series of controversial airdrop cases including Optimism, Starknet, EigenLayer, etc. He believes that whales should not get all the tokens just because they have invested a lot of capital, but at the same time the smallest users should get some basic number of tokens anyway.

But these two goals are in direct conflict. Right now, it seems that the best approach for industry standards is to implement a tiered system, with slightly less linear allocations (more liquidity, more tokens) for "big" users, linear allocations for "medium" users, and fixed allocations for "small" users. In the meantime, use some rough criteria to enforce this tiered system.

Related reading: " Understanding the airdrop mechanism: How to design a satisfactory airdrop? "

Will the ZRO airdrop be the end of the Mao Mao Party?

From ZRO’s perspective, many studios have been frustrated by the “largest-ever” witch cleansing campaign launched by ZRO. Although the project has a good reason, that is, it hopes to airdrop tokens to real users rather than sell them en masse as soon as they go online, it is really chilling that the studios are still abandoned after paying real money to help the project improve data and test performance.

As for the strong dissatisfaction caused by ZRO, c00k1e (@lonelyhorseme) said that the real reason is that these airdrop project parties are breaking the balance between VCs, project parties and "fleecing" users.

The "money-pulling" users or studios are the weakest party in this abnormal game caused by VCs irresponsibly pushing up valuations and spending money crazily. Project owners need user interaction data to get money from VCs, and VCs need project owners to issue tokens so that they can cash out and leave. The various project owners are clearly holding tokens as carrots in front of "money-pulling" users, using the air that will become tokens in the future to make users work for their data growth for free.

VCs’ own greed or investment misjudgment have led to these projects having extremely high valuations. The projects are unable to form a reliable and stable business model and have to rely on issuing tokens to get retail investors to pay for their indigestible excrement.

This abnormal model in which retail investors work hard but are ultimately abandoned may eventually be eliminated.