When the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) launched the $ENS airdrop sometime in early November, members of the NFT community went nuts. In only 30 days, the airdrop was predominantly viewed as an ideal model, especially when offering rewards to users.
In this case, .eth domain holders received the reward, which amounted to 100M $ENS tokens.
OpenSea Users Were Rewarded
It appears that the ENS modeling is also acclimated around NFTs. It began about a week ago with project OpenDAO’s token airdrop called $SOS. This project isn’t affiliated or connected with OpenSea in any way, but it gave rewards to about 250,000 OpenSea users.
The rewards took the form of an $SOS token airdrop, and the basis for the amount was how much the user spent on the NFT marketplace. Due to the unexpected Christmas surprise, the $SOS token quickly grew more than 1000% in value, ultimately moving the market cap a little over $250 million.
As more and more people took notice of the token, various crypto exchanges like BKEX and LBank began listing $SOS on their platform. The market cap and the token price have since mellowed down.
However, some NFT community members voiced out there concerns and skepticism regarding the token code during the early hours of the airdrop event. They asked questions such as “was it safe to claim?” and “could it somehow compromise their safety, security, or funds?”
Some users mentioned that the $SOS tokenomics only distributes 50% of the token’s overall allocation to the user base. Many were concerned that the project might be vulnerable to a rugpull in the future.
Dune Analytics says that about 52% of the $SOS holdings are stored in the DAO treasury and staking incentives. Despite all the chaos and confusion, and although the future of OpenDAO remains to be seen, it seems another similar project called GasDAO is following in its footsteps.
Is There a Hidden Agenda to All This Airdropping?
For the past few days, GasDAO held its $GAS airdrop. This time, the reward was sent to Ethereum users who qualified for specific criteria. However, it seems that GasDAO doesn’t have that much gas in the tank as OpenDAO.
Similarly, users who received the reward also had their concerns. However, their concerns didn’t focus much on the contract code itself but rather on the project’s token distribution. According to GasDAO’s tokenomics, 15% to 25% are allocated to core team members. Compared to $SOS, $GAS hasn’t had a considerable rise and fall in value.
2/ An outsized benefit goes to the project creators, for little to no effort. GasDao (sorry, picking on y'all for this example) development started 15 hours ago. Very little (if any) of the code is unique, meaning that it may have taken as little as an hour or two to create. pic.twitter.com/OdoBlRy9ct
— quit (@0xQuit) December 29, 2021
4/ Why does this matter if the tokens are free? Well, the more activity there is, the more uninformed users will see this as safe to purchase. Inevitably, when no product is released and no value is driven to the token, the value will evaporate.
— quit (@0xQuit) December 29, 2021
So, what’s the overall purpose here? Are these projects leading up to something? Only time can answer these questions, especially since both OpenDAO and GasDAO don’t have a clear and established roadmap just yet.
Nevertheless, one thing’s for sure. These recent ENS airdrops successfully engaged users.
