LayerZero Announces 1.28 Million Wallets Are Eligible For Airdrop

LayerZero’s highly-anticipated airdrop is set to be among the largest ever.

On July 19, Bryan Pellegrino, the CEO of LayerZero Foundation, revealed that 1.28 million wallets are eligible for the popular cross-chain interoperability protocol’s long-awaited token generation event.

Pellegrino said that 23.8% of the token’s supply is earmarked for LayerZero users and developers. He added that 8.5% of the said tokens will be claimable when the airdrop goes live, with 5% going to core contributors, 3% to ecosystem projects that have submitted requests for proposals (RFP) requesting an allocation, and 0.5% to its community pool.

The remaining tokens will be gradually distributed over three years, in addition to retroactive distributions every 12 months.

However, Pellegrino noted that the exact number of eligible wallets may change as the project finalizes its efforts to remove wallets engaged in sybil farming. Sybiling describes when a single entity uses multiple wallets to farm activity on a protocol in a bid to increase their airdrop allocation.

“We've been running a bunch of distr[ibution] sim[ulations] and given we haven't finalized the final Sybil or the final RFP, it's a bit hard to say exactly but a general shape is emerging,” Pellegrino said.

LayerZero users can now access an eligibility checker to their past on-chain activity qualifying them for the airdrop.

Airdrop anticipation builds

The news comes as excitement builds for LayerZero’s airdrop, which is among the most highly anticipated token generation events to date.

In April 2023, LayerZero activity tripled in one month in response to Arbitrum completing its record-breaking airdrop.

Airdrops are a popular mechanism used by web3 projects to decentralize by distributing governance tokens to early users, also incentivizing early adoption.

LayerZero confirmed it would conduct an airdrop on May 1 when it took a snapshot of users’ wallet addresses and past activity. LayerZero described the move as "snapshot #1,” hinting that additional snapshots and token distributions may take place in the future.

Pellegrino said the upcoming airdrop will distribute between 25 and 5,000 tokens to core contributors, and between 5 and 10,000 tokens to RFPs.

Anti-Sybil crackdown

On May 3, LayerZero announced it would wage an anti-sybil campaign against airdrop farmers.

LayerZero will exclude addresses identified as engaging in Sybil activity from the airdrop, while Sybil users that self-report to the project could still receive 15% of their expected token allocation.

Of the six million wallets that have used LayerZero to date, Pellegrino said roughly 1 million were engaged in sybil farming.

“Almost 10 million tokens that would have gone to Sybil [attackers will be returned] back to users,” Pellegrino said.

Pellegrino added that LayerZero will soon update its eligibility checker to include Sybil addresses.

According to Messari, LayerZero facilitated more than $6.7 billion worth of cross-chain asset transfers and 29.6 million messages in the first quarter of 2024, marking quarterly increases of 91% and 60% respectively.

LayerZero-based smart contract deployments also grew by 93% over the same period.

In April 2023, LayerZero successfully raised $120 million in a Series B funding round, valuing the company at $3 billion.