The LayerZero ZRO Airdrop Rundown

Just days after ZKsync’s hotly anticipated token drop, LayerZero’s ZRO has arrived.

The cross-chain interoperability platform has been a fixture in many airdrop hunter routines in anticipation of a long-expected token distribution for users that were passing messages or bridging assets between blockchains using LayerZero technology.

On May 1, LayerZero announced that its airdrop snapshot had at long last been taken, providing confirmation of this much anticipated airdrop’s imminence. Today, ZRO tokens became claimable for 1.28M eligible wallets!

Here’s everything you need to know

Where to claim your ZRO Airdrop?

So, technically, LayerZero is not conducting an “airdrop,” a term suggesting that tokens were given away to users for free.

Instead recipients must donate $0.10 in USDC, USDT, or ETH per ZRO claimed to the Protocol Guild, a feature which could result in up to $18.5M of donation-matched funding for Ethereum’s core researchers and developers if all tokens are claimed before the September 20 deadline. The ZRO token is currently trading at $3.60, so don’t let the mandatory ‘donation’ dissuade you from claiming.

The easiest way to check for a ZRO allocation is through Bankless Claimables, our proprietary airdrop alert solution enabling anyone from anywhere to check up to 20 addresses simultaneously for eligibility in hundreds of onchain claim opportunities!

You can also check your eligibility through the official LayerZero Foundation website, however, usage of this method is restricted for IPs from certain nations.

ZRO recipients can choose to claim their tokens on the Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, BNB, or Avalanche networks.

How will ZRO be distributed?

ZRO comes with a fixed supply of 1B tokens, and 38.3% (383M) of the tokens have been allocated to the LayerZero community, composed mostly of the Protocol’s users and developers.

Initial ZRO user claim allocations fall under this category, with 8.5% (85M) ZRO directed towards retroactive incentives for eligible users who had interacted with LayerZero prior to the May snapshot date.

Allocations for “future incentives” and “ecosystem and growth,” which make up a respective 15.3% (153M) and 14.5% (145M) of the total ZRO supply, are included in the community category and enable the creation of numerous token reward structures, including a Discord community program and various types of grants.

LayerZero’s investors and advisors will receive 322M ZRO under the “Strategic Partners” distribution, meanwhile, “Core Contributors” (i.e.; present and future members of the LayerZero Labs team) will receive 255M tokens. Both buckets of insider allocations are subject to a one-year lockup followed by two years of linear monthly vesting.

How did users qualify?

User allocations come from two categories: Protocol RFP and Core.

Protocol RFP: 3% of ZRO Supply

Projects that had deployedcertain contracts to mainnet prior to the snapshot were eligible to submit Request for Proposals (RFPs) to allocate a share of the 30M ZRO set aside for application users.

Wallets listed in approved Protocol RFP submissions received a minimum of 5 ZRO and a maximum of 10k ZRO, with allocations determined on several factors including: 

• Number of messages sent before and after the snapshot
• Number of days since first LayerZero message
• Application category

Core: 5.5% of ZRO Supply

The remaining 55M tokens from the ZRO user allocation are designed to retroactively reward users for their activity, with this distribution taking into consideration the value of fees paid.

Anyone who transacted through LayerZero prior to the snapshot date was eligible to receive this allocation, with eligible addresses receiving a minimum of 25 ZRO and a maximum of 5k ZRO for allocations from this category.

While transactions under $1 and “valueless” NFT transactions were de-weighted by 50% (upsetting users who had attempted to farm the airdrop through these types of transactions!) early users and addresses that continued to engage post-snapshot received multipliers in recognition of their ongoing participation in LayerZero.

Durable Users

Due to extensive amounts of airdrop farming that occurred over multiple years LayerZero tainting the accuracy of transactional data, drastic steps were taken to ensure that durable users likely to continue interacting with LayerZero post-drop were maximally rewarded.

To do this, LayerZero implemented a multi-phase sybil identification process, first allowing sybils to self-report for 15% of their intended allocation before purging all sybils identified by an internal reporting and then allowing external bounty hunters to identify sybils for 10% of their intended allocation.

Although the detection process prevented 10M ZRO (1% of total token supply) from falling in the hands of sybils, it seems highly improbable that all sybil activity only comprised a minority of eligible transaction activity.

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