Great analysis and perspective on the $ZK airdrop. If I could add a few things on the design: 1. Industrial Sybil Farming 2. Regulatory Regime 3. Unrealistic Expectations 4. What we could have done differently -- -- -- 🧑‍🌾 Industrial Sybil Farming Last year, all major TGE projects designed their airdrop to fight off sybils. I remember sitting on edge of my seat with every @PrimordialAA tweet about L0's sybil witch hunt. The reality is, industrial level sybil farming is nothing like you've seen. For ever farmer manually clicking buttons, there were 1,000 automated wallets performing the same activities. I'd go so far as to say that project weren't optimizing to reward their community. They were just trying to prevent sybils from taking the whole pie. What went to eligible users was determined through a process of elimination. For $ZK, our heuristic was time-weighted-average-balance (TWAB). It was our shortcut to cutting out sybils that optimized for transaction volume. Of course @fipcrypto is also right in that we wanted to reward and incentivize future deposits of liquidity onto Era. Liquidity is king in the L2 game. In the process, we probably did cut out some real users that didn't have a high enough TWAB. In hindsight, we could have done better here. But it also worked. After we released the checker, I remember reading a lengthy post written by an industrial sybil farmer claiming how we completely wiped out his operation. He spent all his capital farming $ZK thinking it would be easy money and he got nothing for it. -- -- -- ⚖️ Regulatory Regime Something else that really fucked us was the regulatory environment. We TGE'd during an extremely hostile and litigious administration. As such, we had to abide by extremely strict legal guidelines in what we could communicate about our token. Remember this tweet? This took me 4.5 hours to write with our legal team and it only hints at a token. (Peep my cover photo.) https://t.co/ITcxjFIyQ0 A token is a product. Naturally we would want product feedback prior to launch. In an ideal world, we would have taken a snapshot and released several different airdrop designs to see who was rewarded and who was not and collect feedback. But we couldn't, because any such communication would indicate an upcoming token and therefore violate some securities law. In what other industry are you forced to launch a high-stakes production level product with 0 user testing??? I'd say points were our industry's attempt to get around this problem and thankfully there is a much friendly administration now. -- -- -- 😱 Unrealistic Expectations Another reason the $ZK TGE backfired was because people already have very clear expectations. Various different checkers and influencers gave a blueprint of farming activity and led people to believe they were eligible. These people/checkers did not work at zksync, so how could they possibly know eligibility criteria? They couldn't. They sold hope and when reality crushed those dreams, blame fell on us, not the ones who sold false promises. Furthermore, we couldn't do anything to publicly correct the record thanks to our conservative legal stance which let the problem grow beyond our control. -- -- -- 🤔 What We Could Have Done Differently I still think that $ZK was a good airdrop. You can look at price action and say it sucked, but I think that's more an issue with generalized L2s, not airdrop. zksync is going after the chain-of-chain category now, so it remains to be seen if its underpriced. If $ETH wins the blockchain category with it's L2s, then maybe $ZK wins the L2 category with its interopable deployment stack. But anyways, I'll stop shilling my bags. The only material thing that I would have designed differently is making sure each wallet at least got enough tokens to make up for their fees spent. After we released the checker, I was not prepared to see how many people were upset that they spent hundreds or thousands of dollars in fees only to get a small allocation or nothing. Given that we gave out 17.5% of total supply in the airdrop, it wouldn't have cost that much to at least allocate tokens to make users net 0 on their fees spent. We were not obligated to do this, but I think it would have been a nice gesture and bought us a lot of goodwill. -- -- -- Anyway, that's all I have to say on this for now. The whiskey is wearing off. If you want to know more, please read @fipcrypto article below and these two docs pages that we spent a LOT of time on: https://t.co/r22Xx1rWHi https://t.co/aTh6Q47iuQ