The full- chain interoperability protocol LayerZero officially opened airdrop applications at 19:00 Taiwan time yesterday evening (20th). But many users were surprised when they claimed it, because LayerZero introduced a claim mechanism called "Proof-of-Donation" this time.
If users want to claim their own ZRO airdrop, they first need to pay USDC, USDT or ETH worth USD 0.1 for each ZRO. (That is to say, if you can receive 100 ZRO, you need to pay $10 first)
The community denounced: Scammer
Although LayerZero explained that all donations collected from this airdrop will be contributed to the Protocol Guild, an on-chain funding project for Ethereum developers, on the grounds that the Protocol Guild and the core developers of Ethereum are crucial to the development of LayerZero.
However, the community was originally disappointed because the number of airdrops was not as expected. Now, without warning, it proposed that donations must be made to apply for airdrops, which once again aroused dissatisfaction in the community. User @Airdrop_Guard directly criticized The CEO of LayerZero is called a "fraudster", and user @d_lennertz also said, "This is not a donation, this is theft, this is garbage"...
The founder of LayerZero added fuel to the fire: You can not accept it
Regarding the community’s doubts that this move is tantamount to forced taxation, LayerZero co-founder and CEO Bryan Pellegrino also responded on X last night:
There are no mandatory donations, if you don't want to donate...just don't claim it. It's not something you own, it's something provided to you.
But his tough speech simply added fuel to the fire, and a large number of netizens responded angrily: "This is a ridiculous way to humiliate everyone who is looking forward to getting airdrops from LayerZero. I will never touch anything related to L0 again, disgusting ", "Then you should refund the handling fee for our interaction", "Idiot behavior"...
Post a long article explaining the original intention
There is a high probability that it has received too many negative comments from netizens, or that LayerZero’s public relations team has finally done its job. Bryan Pellegrino published another long article on X at 11:25 last night, explaining why this time a donation certificate will be used to receive the airdrop.
I think the airdrop craze has completely destroyed the market. When I received the Uniswap airdrop, I had no expectations, I was using it because it was useful and awesome, and one day... all of a sudden it was a surprise that made me even more sold on the protocol.
I didn't go back to using Uniswap heavily because of this, hoping they would give me more free tokens, I didn't expect that before and I haven't since.
Before airdrops became a major craze until 2022, we were very connected to the community and even our investors agreed to some pretty crazy terms because we knew we needed to reward people who were like day one backers, who were super active Users, early developers, people interested in technology, our early Discord group is awesome, love you all.
After that, things changed significantly. We had absolutely no plans to do an airdrop, not at all, never mentioned it, never talked about it. Then one day in 2023, suddenly, after several other big airdrops, people started speculating heavily.
We had been online for a year and had only sent a million messages, and then all of a sudden we were sending close to a million messages a day, which was crazy. When Stargate launched, there was an auction on day one and 100% went into the protocol’s liquidity, and that was never in question.
After that, the pressure became very, very high, the expectations became huge, every airdrop discussant said that we would be the biggest ever, everyone's expectations became more and more crazy, and more people started to pour in and "farm" . I
We were still going to remain silent, basically we had no control over the market, but at the end of 2023, obviously the peak of the madness was reached and every day was "WEN WEN WEN", so we announced that we would be making allocations in the first half of 2024.
After the official announcement, the question is - what is the best way to distribute it (from a protocol perspective). Obviously, most people just do something because they expect to get more, and these people are unlikely to become long-term stable users... We made it clear that we wanted to focus on developers (developers are our cornerstone and the protocol's In the future), we hope to maximize consensus.
Giving people something where their only thought is "when will they be able to sell it" feels like a poor way to achieve protocol consistency. It is immediately sold off, held by others who can afford it, and the supply goes from being held by any active user with aligned interests to being held primarily by some currency stakeholder.
The original intention of the donation testimonials was to get people to stop and think for two seconds and donate a little bit at a time to a great group that really needs support, and we all benefit a lot from it. Stop and think, pledge a donation to a great cause, and then hopefully have more alignment and shared value with our immutable, permissionless, censorship-resistant infrastructure.
I know a lot of people were affected by FUD at that moment, but please look at the release video, this is the true story and we never told anyone. (receipt here: etherscan )
From day one, years ago, we set out to build a new and better network, a publicly owned, uncontrolled network based on the value of blockchain. What I care about is what will happen in a 5-10 year time span, not the current expectations that others have set for us.
We care about what we're building, we broaden the scope, give a lot of people the opportunity to agree, and we focus on letting developers decide.
I love this field, I've been here for over ten years and will be here for another ten. We care deeply about what we're building, and while I hope everyone loves LayerZero now, I'm sure they will eventually. This is everything we believe in, and we're building it for the long term and supporting the best developers in any way possible.
Thanks for your question, nice to vent.
Although Pellegrino tried his best to appease users, claiming that the current airdrop culture has damaged major protocols, it is obvious that they can actually have better ways of handling it, such as using free donations, asking the community for opinions in advance, or designing If you are willing to donate, you will be given NFT, which will definitely make it easier to win the favor of users... Posting a long post to express your original intention after everything is too late will inevitably make people feel that they are just making excuses.
ZRO drops to $3.3
On the other hand, at 20:00 on June 20, Taiwan time, LayerZero’s native token ZRO has been successively listed on exchanges such as OKX, Bitget, and Binance. After the opening of the market, ZRO reached a maximum of $4.89.
However, perhaps affected by the official's successive public relations crises, ZRO subsequently fell all the way. The current price of ZRO is $3.32, which is a drop of more than 32% from yesterday's high.
