Original author: Alex Liu, Foresight News
introduction
Avail, another major player in modular narrative, announced the Unification Drop token airdrop on April 19. 354,605 eligible addresses will be eligible to claim a total of 600 million tokens, and the claim period ends on May 4.
AVAIL claim interface
This is not surprising. As early as a week ago, a screenshot of what appeared to be the Avail airdrop qualification criteria had been circulated on X, and was eventually confirmed by the team as a leak, which aroused peoples expectations.
Qualification criteria for early outflow of airdrops
However, the subsequent airdrop claiming website disappointed many people. Many testnet participants and L2 heavy active users who were sure they would gain something received the result of Not Eligible in the qualification query. For a time, there was constant criticism online, complaining about the rules and standards, and even questioning the fairness. Many users even called the project party rat trading.
What standards did Avail set? To whom did it distribute the tokens? Are users’ doubts reasonable? After reading this article, I believe you can come up with your own answers.
rule
The official airdrop rules are the same as those leaked before. There are 5 categories:
Blockchain ecosystem developer. A total of 90 million AVAIL.
Incentivize testnet contributors. A total of 49.5 million AVAIL.
Rollup users. A total of 380 million AVAIL.
Polygon PoS stakers. (i.e. MATIC stakers on the Ethereum mainnet), a total of 70 million.
Those who have made significant contributions to the community. A total of 10.5 million tokens.
Avail the official airdrop standard
Why do such rules cause so much controversy?
dispute
No DYM pledgers
As a member of the modular ecosystem, everyone has been expecting Avail to airdrop tokens to Dymension token stakers, just like TIA stakers received DYM airdrops. As a modular settlement layer, Dymension is objectively a client of Avail DA. These connections have caused many users to buy DYM and stake it in anticipation of Avails airdrops.
But in the end, the airdrop was not given to DYM stakers.
The founder of Dymension also seemed unhappy with this. He tweeted after the Avail airdrop details were announced: Who is building a Substrate-based DA that actually knows how to airdrop?
Tweet from Dymension founder
Avail is a DA built on Substrate. Its connotation is self-evident.
Testnet Node Lottery
The operators of light nodes belong to the second category of incentivized testnet contributors. However, many users who have run nodes for months are not eligible to claim tokens. Why is this? Official explanation:
The top performing light client operators who participated in the Light Client Lift-off have also been randomly selected for AVAIL rewards.
Random selection turns the time and energy that users have invested into a lottery determined by luck, and puts their fate in their own hands. And because there is no more information disclosure, it is questionable whether the random selection process is fair. Criticisms of this seem to be understandable.
Polarization and opaque standards
Among all the qualification criteria, the one with the largest total allocation and the most chance for ordinary retail investors to obtain it is Rollup users. But is this really the case?
Avail officially claims that the top 50,000 addresses in each L2 ranking are eligible, but in reality reaching the top 50,000 is much more difficult than imagined.
You may have had a similar experience to the author: you saw the Avail airdrop news brought by the big Vs and KOLs in the airdrop field on X, and saw that they attached screenshots of being eligible to receive thousands or tens of thousands of AVAILs, and claimed that every account had them. This was a big deal. So you excitedly went to the official website to verify the eligibility of each address one by one, and gradually found something wrong - including your most frequently used and most active L2 address, which was completely wiped out.
This is a common situation for the author and his friends. However, some friends’ regular accounts are not eligible, but a small account with unknown special features can receive thousands of coins. Why is this? The answer is: I don’t know. Avail states that the airdrop qualification refers to the number of transactions per week, transaction volume, gas fees, etc., but the specific data used to divide the standards is not transparent.
However, the number of transactions should indeed account for a large weight. The community has responded that most of the addresses that have been inscribed on L2 and have many transactions are eligible.
Able to obtain AVAILs L2
The relatively vague standards make it possible for the community to accuse the project party of insider trading. You know, in the end, the tokens are collected by the wallet addresses of the Polkadot ecosystem. After the tokens are collected, no one can know which L2 addresses are eligible to receive them.
Too many contributors
Lefteris Karapetsas, a well-known open source developer of Ethereum, wrote in a related post:
I have several private Rollup addresses that are very active but received nothing, except for one address that received ~300 tokens. And my Github, Twitter, and public addresses received ~87,000 tokens combined!!! 🤯Same for Starknet. Yes, Im 1 of 8 users. Dont get me wrong, I really appreciate the recognition. But I wonder why the multiplier for Rollup/Starknet activity is so much smaller than that of well-known people like me? My lefteris.eth is not an active Rollup user. Just a governance participant. And yet it received 80x more tokens than the most active Rollup address I have. 🙏 Thanks again for the recognition, but it seems a bit unfair to most users and favors well-known people/OGs like me.
Screenshot of the airdrop query attached to the post
As shown in the figure, in addition to the 13,333 tokens he received as a developer, connecting to Twitter brought him a full allocation of 50,000 tokens. As a user, he could only get 300 tokens. The disparity in allocation made him feel indignant for ordinary users.
According to the authors observation, the people who received 50,000 community contributors were not all respected open source contributors like Lefteris. Some of them seemed to be project parties with friendly relations with Avail, and some were even just KOLs who had advertised for Avail.
The disparity in shares and the varying quality of the so-called community contributors also caused anger in the community.
Summarize
Avails airdrop seems to have a lot of bad points this time.
Qualified node addresses are selected by random lottery, and the specific L2 standards are not transparent—> There is a lot of room for maneuver
If you use the Polkadot wallet to collect coins, even if there is insider trading, you cannot provide evidence.
Many so-called community contributors with large shares have friendly relations with the project parties.
I hope everyone can draw some conclusions from this and become smarter “airdrop hunters” in the future. However, no matter how smart and savvy the “airdrop hunters” are, the success or failure of the airdrop is in the hands of the project owner.
