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Ethereum restaking protocol EigenLayer continues to cause debates due to ongoing airdrop event’s restrictive nature on claiming rewards. Smart contract developer and CEO of Kuyen Labs, Leandro Schlottchauer, stated that the era of high earnings from airdrop events has passed and that members of the crypto community need to adapt to this process.
What’s Happening at EigenLayer?
Meanwhile, Mohak Agarwal, CEO and founder of the liquid staking protocol Claystack, said that EigenLayer’s decision to announce the airdrop event as a surprise is not a viable long-term model, sharing the following remarks:
“While the mysterious approach initially excites, it often leads to disappointment later on. This model shows a tendency for projects to announce a small initial airdrop supply, anticipate user disappointment, and then offer additional tokens to placate them.”
EigenLayer, the second-largest decentralized finance protocol with a locked total value of $15.67 billion, revealed in a surprise blog post on April 29 that only 5% of the initial token supply will be allocated to early users among other processes.
Crypto Space and Airdrop Events
Following the announcement, members of the crypto community expressed their criticisms regarding the airdrop event. Particularly, the banning of airdrop events in many countries was condemned, and following these criticisms, the EigenLayer team announced on May 3 that an additional 28 million EIGEN would be distributed to 280,000 wallets that qualified for the airdrop event.
Despite increased development activities in the crypto ecosystem, recent airdrop events have generally failed to sustain initial interest. On April 4, the cross-chain messaging platform Wormhole transferred $800 million worth of W tokens to selected users, and the airdrop’s post-event valuation soared to a striking $22 billion measured by a completely diluted market value. However, since then, the token has lost more than 50% of its value and was trading at $0.6457 at the time of publication.
Similarly, the native token of the Ethereum Layer-2 network Starknet, STRK, has lost 43% of its value since its airdrop event in February. Allegedly, at that time, 701,544 eligible wallets were controlled by airdrop hunters who created copies of developer accounts on GitHub to claim STRK tokens.
