Author: Frank, PANews

With the launch of ZRO on the exchange on the evening of June 20th, the airdrop drama of LayerZero finally comes to an end.

According to the latest data from the Dune dashboard, the ZRO token can receive up to 85 million tokens in this round. As of the morning of June 21st, 278,000 people have claimed tokens, and 40 million tokens have been claimed. The minimum amount of tokens that can be claimed is 8, and the largest single address has claimed 10,662. The median airdrop claim is 53 ZRO tokens.

Based on the price of $3.46 on June 21, the scale of ZRO token airdrop is approximately $290 million. The average user can receive $229 worth of tokens, and the maximum amount for a single address is $36,000. Compared to the previously released Starknet and Jupiter, the maximum amount for a single address has indeed dropped significantly (Starknet's maximum amount is $360,000, and Jupiter's maximum amount is $130,000), but there has been a certain degree of improvement in terms of the average value, with nearly half of the addresses receiving $127 worth of JUP. It seems that the Witch War has indeed brought more profits to ordinary real users.

On the other hand, LayerZero's on-chain data also dropped by more than 90% after announcing the fight against the witch. In addition, the temporary donation plan launched when receiving tokens has caused public anger. This round of airdrops by LayerZero has attracted a lot of attention but may also have lost some users' goodwill.

The most severe witch hunting operation in history, nearly 2 million witch addresses have been banned

LayerZero is a basic protocol for general data information communication, which securely and simply transmits information on-chain to achieve cross-chain communication between applications. The project has previously completed 3 rounds of financing, totaling 2.61 billion US dollars.

After completing a $135 million Series A financing round with a valuation of $1 billion in 2022, LayerZero has been labeled as a potential 'big wool'. According to official sources, nearly 6 million wallet addresses have interacted with the protocol, and developers have deployed over 54,000 OApp contracts. However, despite the expectation of a full airdrop, LayerZero unexpectedly implemented the most stringent witch restriction in history and launched a war against witches.

On May 4th, LayerZero announced the completion of the first phase of the Snapshot and plans to conduct TGE on June 20th, issuing tokens ZRO. It also launched the Witch Reporting Program, and if the witch voluntarily reports, they will receive 15% of the expected token distribution. However, this is just an appetizer for LayerZero's Witch War. Later, it launched the Witch Hunting Program, and users can report witch addresses to obtain 10% of the expected token. According to the latest witch report, a total of 1.04 million addresses have been reported as witches, and in addition, more than 800,000 addresses have voluntarily reported as witches.

According to LayerZero officials, the restrictions on witches this time can save about 1% of the total supply of tokens (about 10 million tokens), which will be reallocated to eligible addresses. Currently, the official has not yet released the final list of witches and the expected income of the witches.

Luma Studio suffered heavy losses

In this witch hunt, Luma Studio has been hit hard. Not only did they gain nothing from two years of interaction, but they also lost their carefully managed wallet address.

For example: 0xe93685f3bba03016f02bd1828badd6195988d950

This address has been involved in interactions for 730 days, starting as early as March 28, 2022, with a total of 229,400 interactions. It is the address with the longest interaction time on the LayerZero chain, and is currently marked as a witch with no income. The second-ranked address, 0xcaf331a897594b6f8604d40439fe93f758348dea, has 120,000 interactions and has received a total of 5010 ZRO. According to this ratio, the address 0xe9 originally could have received about 10,000 ZRO. Based on the price of ZRO on June 21, which was approximately $3.46, the address has thus lost an income of around $34,600.

Another airdrop hunter starting with 0x196a can only get 354.92 ZRO in the LayerZero airdrop. He has previously obtained 104,806 ZK (worth $29,000), 10,250 ARB (worth $14,000), and 17,007 OP (worth $24,000) in the airdrop.

Of course, a more severe blow to the witches may be the publication of the witch address list. According to the latest list, about 1.04 million addresses have been marked as witch addresses. There are doubts that these lists will be used by other projects for anti-witch plans, and those studios will have to re-establish new interactive addresses or directly withdraw from the circle.

In addition, the reporting activity may also cause accidental injuries. On LayerZero's witch reporting portal and social media comment section, many users expressed that their addresses were mistakenly identified as witch addresses and appealed for re-examination. This is also the main reason why LayerZero staff need to work overtime day and night compared to other projects for airdrops.

Forcing Donations Sparks Outrage Again

Token distribution will start at 19:00 on June 20th. Everyone thought that the LayerZero airdrop had finally come to an end, only to discover that LayerZero still has a trick up its sleeve. The LayerZero Foundation has released an article announcing the launch of a new claiming mechanism called "Donation Proof", where users are required to donate $0.1 for each ZRO when claiming tokens. The foundation claims that this donation, totaling up to $18.5 million, will be directly donated to ProtocolGuild, a public good for Ethereum, providing funding for the core development of the Ethereum ecosystem.

This approach has once again sparked strong dissatisfaction in the community, but Bryan Pellegrino tweeted that users do not need to donate compulsorily. If they do not want to donate, they can choose not to receive ZRO tokens. This statement has further fueled the controversy.

Many users feel that they have been fooled. Due to the frenzy of receiving tokens, the gas fee for Ethereum has soared to $33 at one point, but many users did not deposit funds in the receiving address. In order to receive tokens, you need to first send a donation to the address, and then pay another fee when receiving. On-chain, every action means an expenditure.

In the face of controversy, LayerZero stated that the reason for doing so is because "there is evidence to suggest that free tokens will not lead to the long-term sustainable use of the protocol," and emphasized that LayerZero never claimed that the ZRO token distribution was an airdrop. However, a user @JackKeety retorted, "You think ZRO is free, but aren't the high cross-chain fees paid by users during the interaction process? You have gained attention and profits, and then treated users as electronic beggars waiting for alms. If we don't intend to claim the tokens, can we also refund the cross-chain fees paid by users?"

There are also users questioning why, since the witch was painstakingly eliminated before, the saved tokens were not directly used to reward the developers.

In the face of user doubts, Bryan Pellegrino, who has always been enthusiastic about replying, chose silence this time.

On-chain data reduced by more than 90%

The cost behind the war against witches is also painful, and the performance of on-chain data is the most direct response.

On May 1st, the daily number of messages on the LayerZero chain was 351,000. On May 4th, LayerZero announced the launch of the Witch's Surrender Plan, and on May 5th, the number dropped to 75,000, a decrease of about 78%. And this data continued to decline before the airdrop was released. As of June 20th, the data has dropped to 31,000, a 91% decrease from May 1st, and only 5% of the peak of 766,000 messages on June 30, 2023. Although other projects will also face a decline in data after the airdrop, taking ZKsync, which was just airdropped, as an example, the highest daily active addresses this year were about 528,000, and the lowest before the airdrop was 194,000, with a total decrease of 63.2%. But still much smaller than LayerZero's decline. In addition, the activity of various protocols on LayerZero has generally decreased by more than 60% in the past month.

From this point of view, LayerZero's data prosperity does have an indelible contribution to the witches. From the long-term development of the industry, restricting witches can indeed bring more fairness to real users. But LayerZero's operation seems more like completing multiple pranks on witches, launching a witch bounty after the witches have completed two years of interaction and announcing the witch list. In this wave of witch hunting, LayerZero has gained enough attention, but it seems that it has not really brought much harvest to the on-chain activities.

On June 21st, Bryan Pellegrino, co-founder and CEO of LayerZero, tweeted, 'What an unreal day, I have never been so exhausted in my life. Entering unknown sleep time after the shutdown notice. Best wishes.' In the past three days, Bryan Pellegrino seems to have been active on social media, frequently posting pictures of overtime. One of the pictures shows LayerZero employees receiving intravenous drips to stay energized. The entire team at LayerZero has put in tremendous effort for this eventful airdrop, but how to reinvigorate on-chain activity in the future may be an even greater challenge for LayerZero.