LayerZero Labs CEO Bryan Pellegrino credited aggressive Sybil filtering and focus on dedicated developers and users for the stability of LayerZero’s token price post-airdrop.
Bryan Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero Labs, asserts that the price of LayerZero’s native token remained stable following its airdrop as a result of a combination of aggressive Sybil filtering and a focused approach on developers and “durable” users.
At the Korea Blockchain Week, Pellegrino disclosed to Cointelegraph that LayerZero implemented numerous “extremely innovative” strategies during its airdrop. These included a “significant Sybil hunt” that aimed to prevent bots and excessive farming in order to distribute its native ZRO (ZRO) tokens to the network’s most committed users.
“Our goal was to reward the real users, the people who are the most dedicated and durable users.”
The price of LayerZero’s native token, ZRO, is in stark contrast to the tokens of Ethereum layer-2 network counterparts Starknet (STRK) and ZKsync (ZK), which were also introduced to the market through an airdrop in 2024.
Pellegrino stated that the primary objective of any team conducting an airdrop is to “bridge the gap between expectations and reality.” He also mentioned that LayerZero made a concerted effort to maintain equilibrium.
“We did this big Sybil hunt. When we announced the Sybil at the beginning, there was a very visceral negative reaction to it because people didn’t expect this to happen,” he said.
“But as soon as people started to see we were really putting a lot of effort in, and our goal was, for real users to get a higher allocation, people become very positive on the Sybil hunting.”
Despite a Decrease in price, ZRO Outperformed its Primary Competitor in Airdrops.
On June 20, LayerZero distributed its native ZRO (ZRO) token to users via airdrop. The token initially entered the market at a price of $4.40, according to CoinGecko data.
The price of ZRO is trading down by only 23% from launch, despite the fact that the team “didn’t give people a heads up” about the mandatory donation needed to claim the airdrop, which received backlash. Pellegrino acknowledged this.
The STRK token was airdropped to 1.3 million wallet addresses on Feb. 20 after debuting on the market at a launching price of $5.
Nevertheless, the introduction of Starknet’s token was tainted by allegations that the project had prioritized insiders over legitimate network users and neglected to implement safeguards against a significant number of “airdrop squatters.”
Allegedly, these airdrop squatters manipulated metrics on the developer platform GitHub to obtain disproportionately large amounts of STRK tokens.
Without a name Banteg, a developer at Yearn.finance, claimed that an estimated 701,544 of the 1.3 million wallet addresses eligible for the STRK airdrop were purportedly associated with renamed GitHub accounts controlled by squatters.
The price of Starknet’s STRK token has decreased by more than 91% since its launch, as a result of a significant decrease in the number of active addresses on the network. The number of active accounts has plummeted from nearly 380,000 on Feb. 20 to only 8,300 at the time of publishing, according to data from Starkscan, a Starknet explorer.
On June 17, ZKsync airdropped its ZK token to users at a price of $0.31. However, the token has since declined by over 67% to $0.10 at the time of publication, according to CoinGecko data.
ZKsync’s airdrop was criticized by critics for enforcing “almost no Sybil filtering,” which allowed predatory airdrop hunters who were never legitimate users of the network to mine the airdrop, similar to Starknet.
“The ZKsync airdrop has been completed.” Mudit Gupta, the information security director of rival layer-2 network Polygon, wrote in a June 11 X post that this was likely the most farmable and farmed airdrop ever.
“From what I can observe, there is virtually no Sybil filtering,” Gupta concluded. “Anyone who was aware of the criteria could have easily exploited it.”
