The launch of the ZRO token of the LayerZero omnichain protocol on June 20 provoked an increase in commissions in the L2 Arbitrum network, which led to a jump in the daily income of the blockchain to a record $3.43 million.
Data: Dune.Revenue exceeded the previous day's figure by 16,680%.
The average amount of network fees in the Arbitrum jumped to $0.89 on June 20. At the time of writing, the value has returned to the usual levels around $0.005.
Data: Dune.At the launch of ZRO, the LayerZero Foundation requested mandatory donations of $0.1 in USDC, USDT or ETH from users who meet the distribution criteria for branding each governance token through the Proof-of-Donation mechanism. The decision, which caused a mixed reaction in the community, presumably led to a sharp increase in commissions in the Arbitrum.
The previous jump in fees was recorded online on December 15, 2023. Then the daily income of the blockchain increased to $2.13 million. However, the publication of data in Ethereum cost the L2 network $1.72 million, which left a net profit of ~ $414,000.
On June 20, the costs of Arbitrum for basic level services barely exceeded $140,000, which provided a record "profit" of $3.29 million.
Airdrop or tokensale?
During the distribution of LayerZero tokens, which started on June 19, 85 million ZRO or 8.5% of the total issue of 1 billion ZRO were distributed among 1.28 million selected wallets.
According to the tokenomics of the project, the total share of the community ultimately relies on 38.3%.
Introducing ZRO
25% unlock Day 1 – 8.5% at TGE. 11.0% for future Snapshots and RFPs. 5% to LayerZero Foundation. 0.5% to community members.
Claims open on June 20 at 11:00 am UTC.
🔗https://t.co/UCYPPoIe26 pic.twitter.com/tsdTR4xDC8
According to the results of the launched first stage of token distribution on the Polymarket prediction platform, users had a dispute. Some commentators considered that the introduction of mandatory donations means that the team conducts a tokensale.
A similar opinion was expressed by the developer of Yearn.Finance under the pseudonym banteg, comparing the distribution of ZRO with the "glorified ICOs" — the initial coin offerings.
mandatory donations sound more like a glorified ico.
and stop bulk funding protocol guild, it's been wildly successful at attracting funds, find other smaller initiatives to support.
However, a number of opponents disagreed with such conclusions.
"This is an airdrop, since only users who interacted with the protocol could request free tokens, but some of them should be donated to charity. Not to the team that sells coins, but to everyone who wants to buy them. If it's not an airdrop, then what is it?" one user wondered.
Another commentator noted that you can get ZRO from the distribution without donations by taking a flash loan for this purpose.
"In this case, you will just come and get free money in the form of ZRO, which is essentially an airdrop. This is not an ICO, tokensale or something like that, because you can immediately sell an asset for an amount much higher than the donation amount," he stressed.
In a statement explaining the essence of the introduction of mandatory donations, the LayerZero team itself proposed not to apply the term "airdrop" to the distribution of ZRO, replacing it with the concept of "token issuance".
The developers explained that the option of encouraging early users of projects with coins, initially initiated in 2020 by DEX Uniswap, does not fulfill its role of attracting long—term interest. In their opinion, the tool led to the use of token distributions by speculative capital to make quick profits.
Recall that from the beginning of the year to the middle of June, crypto projects distributed assets of about ~ $4 billion through airdrops.