jakiro
Author: Kerman Kohli, founder of Defi Weekly; Translation: Bitchain Vision Xiaozou
Recently, Starkware began their expected airdrops.Like most airdrops, the airdrop also caused a lot of controversy.Sadly, this is no longer surprising.
So why do this happen again and again?You may hear some of this view:
· Insiders just want to cash out billions of dollars to throw their hands away
· The team doesn’t know what to do, and there is no suitable consultant
· Whale should be given more priority, because they bring TVL
· The democratization of cryptocurrencies is related to the democratization of cryptocurrencies
Without Farmer, there is no agreement to use or stress test
· Inconsistent airdrop incentives will continue to produce strange side effects
These views are not wrong, but these views themselves are not completely correct.Let’s analyze it to ensure that our opponent’s head problems have a comprehensive understanding.
There is a basic tension when there is an airdrop. You need to make a choice among the following three factors:
· Capital efficiency
· Decentralization
· Reserve rate
You often encounter such a situation: the airdrop has a good effect in one dimension, but it is difficult to achieve a good balance between two dimensions or all three dimensions.The retention rate is the most difficult dimension, and the retention rate higher than 15%is unheard of.
· Capital efficiency is defined as the standard of token to the participants.The more effective you are allocating your airdrops, the easier it is to become liquidity mining (one tokens are deposited in each dollar) -the whale users.
The definition of decentralization is who will get your token and get your tokens under what standards.Recent airdrops have adopted any standard approach to maximize allowing more users to get tokens.This is usually a good thing, because it avoids you from legal trouble and has given you greater influence because you make people get rich.
· The definition of retention rate is how many users will continue to hold airdrop tokens after the airdrop.In a sense, this is a way to measure whether the user’s intention is consistent.The lower the retention rate, the more inconsistent your user is.The 10%retention rate as the industry benchmark means that only 1/10 of the address appeared here for the right reason!
Let’s not talk about the retention rate, let’s study the first two factors in detail: capital efficiency and decentralization.
Capital efficiency
In order to understand capital efficiency, let us know a new term called “Sybil coefficient”.It can basically calculate the income brought by a $ one dollar to a certain amount of accounts.
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The result of your Sybil coefficient finally determines the degree of waste of airdrops.If your Sybil coefficient is 1, from a technical point of view, this means that you are running a liquidity mining solution, which will irritate many users.
However, when you reach the degree of Celestia, that is, the Sybil coefficient expansion to 143, you will see extreme waste behavior and rampant Farming mining.
Decentralization
This brings us to the second factor: decentralization.In the end, you want to help the “little man”, they are the real users, and hope they seize the opportunity to use your product as soon as possible -even though they are not rich.If your Sybil coefficient is too close to 1, then you will not be able to give anything “little people”, and it is more likely to benefit “whale”.
This is where airdrop disputes become fierce.There are three types of users here:
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Make fast money here, and then turn around the “little man” (probably using multiple wallets in the process).
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If you like your products, you will continue to leave the “little person”.
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“Industry miners who are active like many small people” will definitely take away most of your incentives at this stage, and then sell them before transferring to the next goal.
The third category is the worst user. The first category is acceptable, and the second category is the highest quality.How do we distinguish between these three types of users is a huge challenge for airdrops.
So how to solve this problem?Although I do not have a specific solution, I have the idea of how to solve this problem. I spent a few years thinking and conducted first -hand observations: project subdivision.
I will explain what I mean in detail.Now please think about a fundamental question: You have all users, you need to be able to divide them into different groups based on some value judgment.The value here is specific to the observer, so it will vary from the project.Try to blame some “magical airdrop filters” is never enough.Through researching data, you can start to understand the real appearance of your users, and start making data -based decisions to subdivide your airdrops.
Why does no one do this?I will talk about this in the future, but this is a hard data question that requires data expertise, time and money investment.Not many teams are willing to or be able to do this.
Retention rate
The last dimension is the retention rate.Before we discuss the retention rate, it is best to define the meaning of the retention rate.I summarize it as follows:
Number of people who get airdrop/number of people holding airdrops
Typical errors made by most airdrops are regarded as one -time.
To prove this, I think some data may be helpful!Fortunately, Optimism has actually performed multiple rounds of airdrops!I hope to find some simple Dune instrument panels to get the data I want, but unfortunately, I was wrong.Therefore, I decided to raise my sleeve to collect the data by myself.
I don’t want to over -complicate things. I want to understand a simple thing: how the percentage of users holding OP balance changes during the continuous airdrop.
I went to the Github website to find all the addresses to participate in the Optimism airdrop.Then I built a small scraper, manually grab the OP balance of each address in the list, and organize some data.
Before we continue, we need to remind that each OP airdrop is independent of the previous airdrops.There is no reward or link to the previous airdrop tokens.I know the reason, let’s continue.
First round airdrop
A total of 248,699 users obtain the airdrop token. The tokens obtained by the user can perform the following operations:
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OP main network users (92,000 addresses)
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Repeated OP main network users (19,000 addresses)
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DAO voters (84,000 addresses)
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Multiple signatures (195,500 addresses)
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Gitcoin donor (24,000 addresses) on L1
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Users who were squeezed out of Ethereum (74,000 addresses)
After analyzing all these users and its OP balance, I got the following distribution.0 balance indicates that users have discarded the tokens because the OP tokens that no one applies will be sent directly to the qualified address at the end of the airdrop.
In any case, compared with the previous airdrops I observed, the first round of air investment was unexpectedly good!Only 40%of people’s balances are zero, and this result is very good.
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Then, I want to know how the standards play a role in determining whether the user may retain the token.The only problem of this method is that the address may be divided into multiple categories, which will distort the data.I will not just look at it, this is a rough indicator:
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OP users once had the highest percentage of 0 balance users, followed by those users who were squeezed out of Ethereum.Obviously, these are not the most suitable market for allocating users.Multi -signatures account for the lowest percentage. I think this is a good indicator, because for the airdrop Farmer, the setting of multiple signatures is not obvious (you can sign a transaction for airdrop mining).
The second round of airdrop
This round of airdrop was assigned to 307,000 addresses, but in my opinion, this is far from so thoughtful.
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Governance commissioned rewards based on the number of commissioned OPs and the length of the commission.
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Provide some GAS buckles for active Optimism users who pay the GAS fee exceeding a certain amount.
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More rewards depend on the additional attributes related to management and use.
For me, this is a very bad standard, because governance voting is a very easy thing for robots, and it is quite predictable.As we will discover below, my intuition is not too outrageous.I am surprised that the retention rate is so low!
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The OP balance of the address of nearly 90%is zero!This is the data retaining data that people often see.I really want to understand the situation in depth, but I am more concerned about the airdrop tokens left.
The third round of airdrop
This is the best time to execute the OP team so far.Standards are more complicated and have “linear” elements than before.These airdrops are assigned to about 31,000 addresses, so although the scale is smaller, it is more effective.
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The total number of OP X days = the total number of commissioned OPs (for example, commission 20 OP, entrustment for 100 days: 20 * 100 = 2,000 commissioned OP).
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The commission must vote on the chain through OP governance at 0:00 on January 20, 2023 at 0:00 on January 20, 2023, UTC time.
A key detail that needs to be noted here is that the standard for voting on the chain is after the last round of airdrops.So the Farmer in the first round will think, “Well, I won’t do it, it’s time to go to the next goal”.This is very wise to do so, it is very helpful for analysis, please see these retention rate data!
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Only 22%of these airdrop receivers have zero tokens!In my opinion, this shows that the waste rate of this round of airdrop is far lower than any previous round.This confirms my point, that is, the retention rate is crucial, and more data shows that multiple rounds of airdrops are more effective than people expect.
The fourth round of airdrop
This round of airdrop distribution has a total of 2.3 addresses, and there is a more interesting standard.I personally think that the retention rate of this round of airdrops will be very high, but after thinking, I think the retention rate may be lower than expected. Why?
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You created an attractive NFT on the super chain.The total GAS on the OP chain (OP main network, Base, Zora), which is created by your address, will be 365 days before the deadline of the airdrop (January 10, 2023 to January 10, 2024)Measure in.
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You created an attractive NFT on the Ethereum main network.The total GAS on the Ethereum L1, which is involved in the NFT transfer transaction created by your address, will be measured within 365 days before the deadline of the airdrop (January 10, 2023 to January 10, 2024).
You definitely think that people’s creation of NFT contracts is a good indicator?Unfortunately, this is not the case.The data shows a very different situation.
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Although this round of airdrops are not as bad as the second round, but compared to the third round of airdrops, we have a big step back in terms of retention.
My idea is that if they make additional SPAM or legitimate filtration of NFT, the retention rate will be significantly improved.This standard is too broad.In addition, because the tokens are directly airpaced to these addresses (instead of applying for application), you will eventually fall into such a situation: the creators of the fraud NFT will say, “Wow, free money. It is time to throw it.”
in conclusion
When I write this article and find data by myself, I try to prove or refute some of my assumptions, and these assumptions were later proved to be very valuable.In particular, your airdrop quality is directly related to your filtering standards.Those who try to create a common “airdrop score” or the use of advanced machine learning models will fail, and it is easy to obtain inaccurate data or a lot of error information.Machine learning is great, but after you try to understand how it comes to the answer it gives, you don’t think so.
The main experience and lessons that the airdrop team should learn from it is:
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Don’t do a one -time airdrop!You are moving to stones to smash your feet.You should want to deploy an incentive mechanism similar to the A/B test.You can guide your future goals through a large number of iterations and learning lessons.
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Establish standards on the basis of previous airdrops, you will improve your airdrop efficiency.In fact, more tokens are given to those who hold tokens in a wallet.Let your users understand that they should insist on using a wallet, and only change the wallet only when absolutely necessary.
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Get better data to ensure more intelligent and high -quality subdivision.The bad data is equivalent to bad results.As we see above, the lower the standard “predictability”, the better the retention rate.
