LayerZero Labs CEO Brian Pellegrino claims that aggressive Sybil filtering and a laser focus on prioritizing developers and “sustainable” users helped LayerZero’s native token price remain stable post-airdrop.
Pellegrino told Cointelegraph during Korea Blockchain Week that LayerZero did a number of “very unique” things with the airdrop, including a “massive Sybil hunt” to block bots and heavy farming to reward the network’s most dedicated users with native ZRO (ZRO) tokens.
“Our goal was to reward real users – our most dedicated and long-lasting users.”
The price of LayerZero’s native token, ZRO, stands in stark contrast to the tokens of Starknet (STRK) and ZKsync (ZK), competing Ethereum layer 2 networks that were released to the market via airdrops in 2024.
Pellegrino said the top priority for any team conducting an airdrop is to “bridge the gap between expectations and reality,” adding that LayerZero has worked hard to strike a balance.
“We had this huge Sybil hunt. When we first announced Sybil, there was a very visceral negative reaction because people didn’t expect this to happen,” he said.
“But once people saw that we were really putting a lot of effort into it, and that our goal was to get higher allocations for real users, people started to feel very positive about Sybil hunts.”
ZRO outperformed major competing airdrops despite the price drop.
LayerZero airdropped its own token, ZRO (ZRO), to users on June 20. According to CoinGecko data, the initial market price was $4.40.
Despite the backlash over the implementation of a rule requiring users to make a donation to claim the airdrop (Pellegrino admits the team “didn’t notify people in advance”), ZRO’s price has only fallen 23% since launch.
Bryan Pellegrino at Korea Blockchain Week 2024 in Seoul. Source: Cointelegraph
The STRK token, which debuted on the market at an opening price of $5, was airdropped to 1.3 million wallet addresses on February 20.
However, Starknet’s token launch was marred by claims that the project heavily favored insiders over legitimate users of the network and failed to introduce protections for the vast number of “airdrop swindlers.”
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The airdrop squatters are accused of manipulating metrics on developer platform GitHub to obtain an abnormally large amount of STRK tokens.
Banteg, a Yearn.finance developer who remains anonymous, revealed that approximately 701,544 of the 1.3 million wallet addresses targeted for the STRK airdrop were linked to renamed GitHub accounts controlled by illegal residents.
The price of Starknet’s STRK token has fallen by more than 91% since launch, and the number of active addresses on the network has dropped dramatically. According to data from Starknet crawler Starkscan, there were around 380,000 active accounts on February 20, but that has plummeted to just 8,300 at the time of this article’s publication.
Starknet’s active accounts plummeted 97% after the airdrop. Source: Starkscan
ZKsync airdropped ZK tokens to users on June 17. The launch price was $0.31, but according to CoinGecko data, it has since plummeted by more than 67%, to $0.10 at the time of issuance.
Like Starknet, ZKsync’s airdrop was criticized by critics for having “little Sybil filtering,” which allowed predatory airdrop hunters, rather than legitimate users of the network, to do the airdrop at will.
“The ZKsync airdrop is here. Probably the most farmable and farmed airdrop of all time,” Mudhi Gupta, director of information security at rival Layer 2 network Polygon, wrote in a June 11 post on X.
“In my view, there is very little Sybil filtering,” Gupta added. “Anyone who knows the rules could easily make a lot of money.”
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