[Update] LayerZero Announces ZRO Airdrop, Requires User "Donations" to Receive Tokens

After several rounds of purging Sybil wallet addresses and an extended waiting period, LayerZero has officially announced the ZRO token airdrop event on the morning of June 20.

[Update] LayerZero Announces ZRO Airdrop, Requires User "Donations" to Receive Tokens

Updated as of the evening of June 20:

Promptly at 06:00 PM on June 20, the project announced the token claim link for user wallets that meet the conditions.

ZRO Claim Is Live.

Supported Chains: Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, BNB Chain, and Avalanche.

Of note, the project requires users to "voluntarily" donate 0.1 USD worth of USDC, USDT, or ETH per ZRO token received to the Protocol Guild fund, aimed at supporting Ethereum developers.

The project labels this as a new token claim mechanism called Proof-of-Donation.

According to estimates, if all "free" ZRO tokens are claimed, this initiative could raise $8.5 million. LayerZero Foundation has also allocated $10 million to correspondingly contribute. Thus, this round aims to collect $18.5 million in donation funds.

Furthermore, in the initial hours, overwhelming demand for claims has overloaded blockchains, causing delays of over an hour for users to receive ZRO tokens. Consequently, transaction fees have surged across networks, notably Arbitrum collecting an additional $3 million in fees.

Original Post:

As hinted in a previous post with an image dated June 20, 2024, LayerZero Foundation—an organization supporting the cross-chain solution LayerZero—has officially announced an airdrop program for the community.

The ZRO token distribution began at 06:00 PM today, June 20, 2024 (Vietnam time).

According to the project team, the ZRO token airdrop targets a total of 1.28 million eligible wallets—equivalent to 8.5% of the total supply of 1 billion ZRO tokens. The circulating supply of ZRO at the time of token issuance will be 250 million ZRO, accounting for 25% of the total supply, with allocations as follows:

• 8.5% allocated to the airdrop: 5% for users, 3% for RFP (Request for Proposal), and 0.5% for community members.
• 11.5% for future ecosystem incentive proposals (RFP, Snapshot, Discord role).
• 5% for operational budgets for LayerZero Foundation and liquidity.

The majority of the remaining tokens will be distributed over the next 36 months in subsequent retroactive supplements every 12 months.

Specific token unlock schedules for LayerZero. Source: LayerZero

CEO Bryan Pellegrino of LayerZero also revealed plans for three more ZRO airdrops within the next 36 months.

The primary utility of the ZRO token includes governance, enabling token holders to vote on critical protocol decisions, starting with proposals to enable/disable fee splitting for token holders, akin to Uniswap's DEX. However, instead of distributing funds to investors, LayerZero's system will collect transaction fees and burn them, similar to how EIP-1559 operates on Ethereum.

This information comes just one day after LayerZero posted a link to help users check if they were "airdrop winners," based on criteria such as chain interactions, transaction volume, and most used dapps. A total of 1.28 million valid wallets were eligible to receive the airdrop.

LayerZero is a leading cross-chain asset transfer solution in the crypto market, successfully raising $120 million with a valuation of up to $3 billion. LayerZero has integrated its cross-chain network with eight other chains such as Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon, Arbitrum, BNB Chain, Optimism, Base, and Solana. Future plans include expanding integration into many other blockchains.

Earlier in May, the project conducted a snapshot in preparation for the highly anticipated token airdrop event. Since then, LayerZero has sparked controversy regarding the initiation—temporary halt—and subsequent restart of its "Sybil hunting" program.

According to CEO Bryan Pellegrin's disclosure, only 1/10 of the total 6 million wallets are genuine accounts. It is for this reason that after the snapshot announcement, activities on LayerZero gradually cooled, reaching record lows.

Recent token airdrops by the project like ZKsync, friend.tech, EigenLayer, and Starknet have elicited strong reactions from the cryptocurrency investment community due to underperformance. Nevertheless, under the comments section of LayerZero's snapshot announcement, the community remains optimistic and anticipates that the project will continue the success of previous airdrop events like Jupiter (JUP), Jito (JTO), Pyth (PYTH), Celestia (TIA).

Based on Messari's statistics, LayerZero users shifted $6.7 billion in crypto assets in the first quarter of 2024, generating $11.5 million in revenue.