ZetaChain announces the genesis Airdrop plan, is there still a chance for a breakthrough in the Layer1 track?

On January 23, ZetaChain, a full-chain interoperable Layer 1 network that had received $27 million in funding, announced its genesis Airdrop plan.

Under the program, ZetaChain will distribute 31.5 million ZETA to more than 800,000 users and contributors based on the amount of ZETA Points accumulated on the testnet, with a Snapshot date of August 20, 2023.

Currently, ZetaChain has published the Airdrop Eligibility Inquiry page on ZetaHub. The project team also said in the announcement that this testnet-based airdrop is just the beginning, and as ZetaChain continues to develop towards the mainnet and beyond, multiple products and programs will be implemented in the future to encourage users’ Mainnet adoption, which may indicate the possibility of further Airdrops in the future.

Basic Reward Rules

According to the Airdrop plan, interaction points and invitation points will be counted separately in order to provide rewards for different types of contribution behaviors, the specific details are as follows:

• Users with more than 50,000 points will be eligible to receive basic rewards based on interaction points or invitation points, and the rewards will not be issued according to the specific amount of points, but will be set at different levels according to the number of points, so as to avoid a small number of users receiving disproportionate excess rewards.
• Users with higher referral points can be rewarded based on the total number of referral points and the proportion of the invitee’s points.
• Users who enter earlier can receive a certain amount of reward increase based on the date they join (see below for the specific increase factor).
• Based on the user’s transaction records on each chain connected to ZetaChain (including Testnet and Mainnet), the base reward will be adjusted to a certain extent, and users without any transaction records will face a certain reward reduction, because the probability of witches at such addresses is relatively higher (see below for specific increases and reduction coefficients).
• The base reward for inviters and interactors of different tiers is 50 - 20,000 ZETA, and the two rewards will be calculated separately.
• Other ZetaLabs users will receive an Access Pack item to gain access to the ZetaChain 1.0 Mainnet. ZetaChain said that the amount of ZETA allocated to these users will be announced when the Airdrop launches, but the size of the batch allocation will be smaller than the Genesis Airdrop, which aims to allow as many participants as possible to try ZetaChain.

Based on the different contribution value, ZetaChain will assign different character badges such as Zeta Explorer, Zeat Jetsetter, Zeta Polit, Zeta Trailblazer, Zeta Racer, Zeta Boss, Zeta Cosmopolitans, etc. to all proposed Airdrop objects, and users can now check their badge and level status in ZetaHub.

Coefficient Adjustment Scheme

As mentioned above, in addition to the base rewards, ZetaChain will also fine-tune the amount of ZETA rewards that users can ultimately receive based on factors such as transaction type, witch probability, and participation time. The specific scheme is as follows:

• In terms of transaction type: Addresses that have made Mainnet transactions on each chain connected to ZetaChain (Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon) can receive a 10% increase in addition to the base reward, but if only interacted on the Testnet of these chains, the base reward will be reduced by 50%, which ZetaChain says aims to recognize its contribution but distinguish it from Mainnet interactions.
• In terms of Witch Probability: Users who do not have any transaction history on each chain connected to ZetaChain will only receive 10% of the base reward.
• Time factor: Depending on the date a user first joins ZetaLabs, the final reward amount will vary.

Users who enter from August 1, 2022 to November 17, 2022 will receive a 25% increase;

Users who enter from November 18, 2022 to February 15, 2023 will receive a 10% increase;

Users who enter from February 15, 2023 to April 5, 2023 will receive a 5% increase;

Users who enter from April 5, 2023 to June 20, 2023 will receive a 2.5% increase.

Witches also have rewards?

In order to ensure that the rewards that real users should receive are not encroached upon, ZetaChain has partnered with SocialScan to conduct a witch screen based on Address interactions, and ultimately weeded out more than 300,000 potential witch Address Address with nearly identical behavior patterns across all verticals and networks.

However, ZetaChain also mentioned that it will reward some of the Addresses with the highest scores in the witch group. ZetaChain explained that this does not mean that the project intentionally condones Sybil attacks, but that even the Witch Address helps ZetaChain stress test the Testnet to improve the stability of the network, which also shows that ZetaChain rewards any contribution in the Decentralization community.

A Layer 1 that takes a different path

At a time when multiple new chains rely on new concepts such as DA dismantling and parallel processing to roll up performance and cost, ZetaChain, which focuses on full-chain interoperability, is somewhat special in the Layer 1 track.

If other Layer 1 focuses on the breakthrough of the underlying carrying capacity, ZetaChain focuses on how to connect the major islands with increasing carrying capacity. ZetaChain hopes to break the current market’s reliance on bridges for cross-chain interoperativity, and instead use the native Omnichain Smart Contract to perform trustless fund transfers and message responses on each chain.

According to the vision officially described, what ZetaChain hopes to do is to abstract the concept of “chain”, allowing developers to build Omni-Dapps covering multiple chains based on Omnichain Smart Contract, allowing users to perform various operations involving cross-chain interoperativity through a single platform without perceiving the underlying Blockchain switch.

Native cross-chain interaction Layer 1, similar stories are not new in the crypto industry, but as the major ecosystems mature, whether ZetaChain can meet the market demand in the new cycle may be the core factor that determines the future development of the project.