Smokey The Bera 🐻⛓@SmokeyTheBera
this one triggered some folks so naturally im doubling down. Some thoughts on airdrops and TGEs in general
for anyone reee-ing in the comments;
airdrops are a pretty nonsensical practice that have generally served three purposes
a) regulatory cover around decentralization of a network
b) a means of driving hype and increasing vanity metrics
c) rewarding beta testers / community members
Many teams including ourselves, Monad, and a host of pre-TGE projects have benefited from this in the past, to be clear
a) is becoming increasing irrelevant under the current administration (though there is an argument that this may not always be the case in the future, which is fair)
and b) does not matter in the slightest after launch. As someone who has seen both sides of this, and airdropped mid 9 figs worth of tokens to real people, no one care about anything but your chart after a couple of weeks.
And I'll tell you one more secret; a larger airdrop also translates into more potential sellers with no cost basis. In fact, a number of the larger APAC trading groups will often target coins with airdrops for short selling campaigns, for this exact reason.
So this has evolved into a much more insidious meta, where the majority of recent launches have involved teams doing a supply controlled "airdrop", often combined with something sketchy on the MM side, where 90%+ goes to insiders, misrepresenting the true float of the token and effectively lying to public market participants. And that's the worst of all of the potential options on the table imho.
my 2c - ICOs and public sales will come back in a big way. You don't get free Meta stock for trying out a new Instagram feature. How we settled upon people getting massive amounts of free tokens for using an app etc is still pretty wild to me.
I'm of the opinion that the majority of teams going forward will be best served by a very small airdrop (1-2%), accompanied with a public sale (perhaps 5-10%), which can either be explicitly injected into the charts, used strategically over time. Covers bases to some extent legally (i am not a lawyer), gives people a chance to get skin in the game, and leaves an amount of float in the market that can enable non-BS price discovery, and looks a lot more like the trad markets.
I'm sure this won't be a popular opinion for many retail participants as it roughly translates to less free money - but this whole space is intensely reflexive, and given how much a chart can impact a project's leverage, I think that many founders (including those in the Bera eco) may benefit from thinking this through in the most adversarially aware manner possible. And many retail participants who truly care about a given project will probably end up happier in the long run.
The underlying metagames which move some parts of the market are much messier than people think, and there are very few prizes for "doing the right thing", as I've learned the hard way. That doesn't mean that I'll change my approach, but it does mean that I've got to be cognizant about the spoken and unspoken standards which exist.
This also isn't salt - it's quite stupid to complain about the market. But it is something that I wish I was less naive about prior to going into a TGE and launch process, so I hope this provides some useful context for someone out there.
Godspeed to anyone launching new tokens, and always remember, *most* airdrop farmers are not your friends.
Berachain
