A lot of anger today on the TL re the
@Kinetiq_xyz airdrop. Somewhat interesting timing, because
@weremeow and myself have spent the better part of the last 2 months discussing alignment and tokens re
@JupiterExchange. And
@weremeow and
@0xOmnia are the two most 'community'-first mavericks I know.
Some personal thoughts.
I often think of blockchain project ecosystems as nation states. For instance when America was founded, there was a social contract between the founding fathers who led the revolution and the revolutionaries who risked live and limb to make it happen.
In the case of a TGE, its the creation of a social contract between the team and the first airdrop recipients.
The pioneering generation (team and airdrop recipients) had to work together to create something based on trust. In crypto projects, you trust the team to use an early stage product and in return the team gives you a share of the ecosystem.
Initial airdrops fairly done are always beautiful. The community shares in the fruits of their labor and the team commits to a future roadmap. The airdrop recipients can either choose to move on, or lock in together to build for the future.
But airdrop two is always hellish. There simply is no good way of doing a second airdrop. Maybe
@chameleon_jeff can figure something out. But literally nobody has done it. If I had to take a guess, it would be to disproportionately drop more to those who had staked day one and continued using the project - but this would simply lead to screams of unfairness.
Because it is unfair. Its PvP between the pioneers and the immigrants - the immigrants being those who came after the project was successful. The immigrants didn't have to take the risk of project failure, or shitty smart contracts. You literally have a liquid trading token as a reference price or calculating your EV.
You see nation states deal with this in a variety of ways. Immigrants have to pay more to reap the benefits of the existing infrastructure. Naturalisation processes to ensure immigrants have to actually put down roots to become citizens, rather than extract benefits and leave. Immigration is an unsolved problem - even in the real world today.
The recurring question, asked by every visionary blockchain community founder today is how do I permissionlessly create long term alignment with long term people?
Kinetiq's way of doing it is in my biased opinion as a friend and angel, brilliant, all things considered. I'd perhaps have gone further by extending the exercise window to say a year by paying a price, rather than creating a 10 day window (which pins price and may just lead to a lot of people not exercising).
The reason being you have very few options when doing a second airdrop as a founder. These are the common ones I've seen.
1. Airdrop size similar to first airdrop. Farmers dump on the long-term holders (the most important group). Opportunist tourists gain at the expense of the risk-taking pioneers. Jupiter did this and the community suffered immensely for it.
2. Airdrop size smaller than first airdrop. Farmers dump (less), and incessantly bitch about how unfair everything is. Long-term holders still eat pain.
3. Extend points season forever. Cynically, probably the most effective but very bad for the soul. But you could theoretically just keep delaying points and people will keep using the protocol because of sunk cost.
I personally think the
@Kinetiq_xyz mechanism isn't bad at all, because a wide drop of zero cost basis tokens is untenable and frankly, retarded.
If I designed an airdrop mechanism, I'd probably go for an incredibly heavy weight towards long-term stakers, perhaps even disqualify non-stakers altogether. Or here's some free tokens, stake and continue using the protocol to unlock (
@shufflecom did something like this on their first airdrop). Would probably piss people off anyway.
There will be a lot of anger at
@0xOmnia on the timeline for this. But a lot of that anger will be from people that matter less. The real pain (from experience in the Jupiter seat) is placating the short-termers at the expense of the long-termers.
Because those are the people that really matter.
Obv usual disclaimer that nothing I say is representative of Jupiter / Kinetiq etc. Personal opinions etc.