Yesterday, the Eigenlayer restaking protocol announced the arrival of its governance token EIGEN, which will be distributed starting from May 10th to all those who have deposited on the platform, with the snapshot set on March 15th.
While all airdrop hunters were eagerly awaiting a statement from the ZkSync team, also about to release a token, here comes Eigenlayer making its entrance and leaving everyone speechless.
However, the surprises ended up disappointing a large part of the Ethereum community, which was expecting a grand airdrop and instead found themselves facing an allocation that exclusively benefits the project team.
Let’s see all the details below.
Summary
Eigenlayer announces the official date for the EIGEN token airdrop: appointment set for May 10th
Yesterday the famous restaking protocol Eigenlayer revealed its cards by announcing the release program for the governance token EIGEN, which can be redeemed by platform users from May 10 onwards.
In particular, those who have deposited assets directly on Eigenlayer and holders of liquid restaking tokens (LRT) have been rewarded, with snapshot on March 15, 2024.
The crypto EIGEN has been presented as “The Universal Intersubjective Work Token“, and will essentially be used to manage the consensus of the restaking infrastructure and the AVS (Actively Validated Services) ecosystem through intersubjective staking.
Trying to simplify, we can see EIGEN as a resource (non-slashable) that can be staked in various AVS to obtain greater guarantees against unwanted actions of the service, covering a complementary role to the native restaking of ETH.
The Eigenlayer airdrop has been divided into two phases, where the first one is dedicated exclusively to native restakers and restakers via LRT, and the second one is focused on users of affiliated DeFi platforms such as Pendle.
In total, the EIGEN tokens allocated for the airdrop amount to 15% of the total supply: 5% in the first phase and 10% in the second phase.
You can check your eligibility for the first phase by clicking on this link and entering your cryptographic address. It is not necessary to connect your wallet.
As anticipated, the claim will be active starting from 7:00 PM on May 10th, and will be live for 120 days.
The tokenomics of EIGEN has been outlined by the Eigenlayer team as follows.
Total Supply: 1,673,646,668.28466 EIGEN. dynamically regulated with halvings and potential new emissions:
- Community: 45%ahahaah
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- Investors: 29.5%
- Early contributors: 25.5%
It is worth noting how investors and early contributors undergo a 1-year cliff, meaning they do not receive their respective allocation before one year.
After this period, there will be a monthly unlock of 4% for the following 2 years.
The Ethereum community is disappointed: excessive allocation for the team, non-transferable EIGEN
The hype for the Eigenlayer airdrop suddenly vanished as soon as platform users noticed the wild distribution of the EIGEN token that tends to reward project teams, investors, and whales rather than early adopters in the restaking sector.
Many have indeed complained about having staked several ETH for months and receiving a disappointing allocation, while investors were allocated almost double the airdrop quota.
In the midst of everything, you can also smell the stench of insider trading: it is worth noting how a whale deposited 4000 ETH (13 million dollars) on Eigenlayer on January 2, only to magically withdraw everything on March 16 (just one day after the snapshot), accumulating a whopping 3,500,000 Restaked Points.
Either the whale was particularly lucky or received confidential information from insiders.
What, however, has shocked the Ethereum community is not so much the allocation or the preferential lane given to the whales (it was known that many would participate in the airdrop) but rather the fact that EIGEN will not be transferable in this first phase.
This means that the token cannot be transferred to CEX nor can it be sold on DEX, until the Eigenlayer team decrees the achievement of network decentralization.
Crypto farmers will therefore find themselves with tokens in hand that cannot be sold, but only staked until an official announcement.
Obviously, you can also go through alternative routes by using derivative platforms like Aevo and Bitget, but we are talking about more complex solutions.
If you want to try your hand at premarket trading, you can consult this Bitget document: the token has already been listed on the exchange ahead of the official launch.
The reference price at the time of writing the article is about 11 dollars.
The community is asking for a review of the allocation of the EIGEN token and the removal of the non-transferability block, as happened similarly with the Renzo restaking protocol.
Meanwhile, the disappointment has resulted in a drop in Eigenlayer’s TVL, which in a few hours has recorded over 5000 withdrawals.
We will see in the coming hours/days if the project team will take measures to contain the widespread discontent.
Upcoming airdrops to keep an eye on
Other projects planning to release an airdrop in the near future have taken the opportunity to throw FUD on the fire following the disappointment from the Ethereum community for the launch of Eigenlayer’s EIGEN token.
First of all the layer-2 zksync, which until yesterday monopolized the attention of airdrop hunters, reiterated the superiority of its infrastructure by suggesting that its distribution will be managed better than what Eigenlayer did.
However, we remind you that the two projects are not in competition with each other; in fact “Frogmonkee“, one of the main developers of Zksynnc, revealed to have deposited several ETH on Eigenlayer before it became part of the MatterLabs family.
In addition to zkSync, many other airdrops are about to officially enter the crypto markets.
The most well-known and attractive in terms of incentives are the following:
- Scroll: Ethereum zkrollup layer-2. TVL: $708 million
- Linea: zkrollup layer-2 of Ethereum TVL: 321 million dollars
- LayerZero: cross-chain interoperability platform. 98 million transactions
- Bouncebit: restaking protocol on Bitcoin. TVL: 487 million dollars
- Bitget wallet token BWB: 19 million users
- Swell: Ethereum restaking protocol. TVL: $1.35 billion
- Monad: world’s fastest blockchain. currently in testnet
