Author: Xiao Fei
Despite being in a fierce competitive environment with many old L1s, new L1s emerging, multiple L2 horse races, and bear market stock games, Sei Network has always had no shortage of traffic.
To be honest, when it comes to technological innovation, ecological projects, on-chain data, and financing scale, Sei may not be considered the best at the moment. But in terms of “marketing its own popularity” and “managing airdrop expectations”, Sei can be said to be remarkable, a series of combos that the community loves and hates.
In the past year, how Sei often relied on the news to “get the headlines”, and how he used a long-overdue “sunshine” airdrop when he launched Binance Launchpool to make him once again on the cusp of the storm, and the enthusiasm swept the encryption community. What about?
It is full of controversy and heat before it is online
Sei launched the incentive testnet in August 2022, and announced that 1% of the total supply of SEI will be used to reward testnet participants. At that time, Sei’s interactive tutorials for stroking hair had spread all over the community, and no one felt that the interactive steps of the testnet were really cumbersome. Not only did they need multiple interactions, but they also needed to fill in forms multiple times after completing the five major tasks. However, Lumao Studio continued to participate in the interaction in line with the principle of “the more troublesome it is, the more it should be done”.
On May 27, 2023, Sei officially tweeted that the Discord upgrade of the project has been completed, and users can now obtain the “Verified Seilor” role through Humanode face recognition verification. “Verified Seilor” is a user’s badge of authenticity, proving to be a real person on the Internet.
As soon as the news came out, the community exploded with criticism, accusing it of violating the spirit of Web3, and actually needing face recognition to receive airdrops?
However, on June 15th, the Sei Foundation tweeted to clarify that the so-called “Sei testnet incentives or airdrops require face recognition” is a misunderstanding. Participating in Sei’s testnet incentives or airdrops does not require face recognition or face recognition. KYC. Previously, after receiving feedback from Sei’s Discord that there were a large number of robot attacks, a third-party face recognition tool was added to DIscord. Sei will not use any form of face recognition and KYC. Sei is an open source, license-free Layer 1 .
**Although there is no actual change, Sei has earned a lot of attention and popularity in the media and social media discussions. **
Schrödinger’s airdrop and anxious community
Afterwards, the community has been circulating rumors that Sei will be listed on Binance. Until August 1, Binance announced that Sei will be listed on Binance Launchpool. Sei (SEI) will be listed at 20:00 on August 15 (UTC+8). Coin details are as follows: total tokens: 10,000,000,000 SEI; initial circulation: 1,800,000,000 SEI (18% of total tokens); total mining: 300,000,000 SEI (3% of total token supply).
** What makes the community dissatisfied is that even though it is clear that Launchpool is online, Sei has not announced the details and quantity of the airdrop for a long time, but only announced a brief economic model. After many questions from community members, Mod only replied: There is an airdrop plan, Everything is subject to official news. **
On August 11, the Sei Foundation stated: The mission of the Sei Foundation is to support the decentralization of the Sei blockchain from the beginning. Mainnet includes Sei airdrops and incentivized testnet rewards. The first major token distribution aims to recognize loyalty and strengthen the global reach of the Sei blockchain as the best place to build Web3 applications**. **
** At this time, many people in the community have noticed that in Sei’s official statement, the two words, airdrop and testnet incentive, have always been separate and do not seem to be equivalent. **
Until the eve of the launch, Sei finally announced the detailed token economics: 48% tokens are allocated to ecology; 20% tokens are allocated to the team; 20% tokens are allocated to investors; 9% tokens are allocated to the foundation; 3% of the tokens are allocated to Launchpool; 48% of the tokens are allocated to ecological tokens for staking rewards, ecological initiatives, and Sei airdrops and incentives. The Season 1 airdrop will distribute 3% of the SEI token supply to reward community users.
However, the specific rules of the airdrop have not yet been announced.
Cross-chain blind box airdrop ignites the community again
**But until the day when SEI was listed on Binance and started trading, the airdrop rules came late, but it was beyond everyone’s expectations, and once again ignited community discussions, full of topics. **
Sei issued a document announcing that a “cross-chain” airdrop will be carried out to active users of the six major ecosystems when the Pacific-1 mainnet is launched. The specific rules are as follows: Active users on chains such as Solana, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, BNB Chain, Osmosis, etc. have the opportunity to be selected to participate in the white list of airdrops. To claim it, you need to create a Sei wallet after the mainnet is launched and bridge the specified assets to Sei network.
Participating in Sei’s Atlantic 2 testnet and/or ambassador program has separate reward rules and is not called “airdrop”.
**This seemingly “sunshine” airdrop rule made the community boil, but some users said that this set of rules is exactly the same as the cross-chain operation of Cosmos, similar to the evmos airdrop back then, but it is not common in public chain airdrop rules, but Sei Not surprisingly, the team itself hails from Cosmos. **
**The actual test in the community found that when receiving SEI airdrops, you can choose one of the “Airdrop Treasure Box” and “Cross-chain Treasure Box” to receive them. Users who choose “Cross-chain Treasure Box” will have at least $500 worth of encrypted assets such as ETH or USDC, and bridged to Sei will get a certain amount of SEI, and the number of airdrops obtained depends on the value of the bridged assets. **
**This open whitelist for multi-chain active addresses, using a random number of airdrops, let the community frantically discuss how to get more airdrops. Finally came to a conclusion: ****Basically, the more the whitelist address participates in the cross-chain, the more the number of airdrops. Some people received more than 10,000 SEI airdrop screenshots, and more people rushed in. Many people borrowed cross-chain chain. **
Afterwards, Sei immediately announced that due to strong demand, the Sei Foundation increased the number of eligible wallets for cross-chain airdrops from 500,000 to 1.5 million, allowing more people to roll up. Because many people choose Osmosis, which is relatively unpopular across the chain, and must exceed 500 U to get the airdrop, which briefly raised the price of OSMO.
Of course, except for a very small number of big whales, most of them just accompanied them to get a “pig’s knuckle meal”, but Sei’s cross-chain data soared in a straight line.
Such rules have made many people praise Sei for his hard work and innovative mechanism, but it has also caused dissatisfaction among others. First, users who have done complex incentive tasks on the testnet before think that their contributions are not as valuable as those who cross-chain easily. , the project side does not pay much attention to the community; second, some users reported that they had a large amount of cross-chain, but received very little rewards, and the blind box was unreliable, and they were dissatisfied on Discord.
Last night, perhaps because the airdrop was in full swing and the network was congested, many community users reported that they got stuck when receiving the cross-chain airdrop on the Pacific-1 webpage, and the page stayed at the third step for a long time, unable to complete the Claim smoothly.
What’s worse is that in the early morning of this morning, Bitcoin, which had been sideways for a long time, plummeted, falling by nearly 40,000 US dollars in a short period of time, and other tokens naturally fell in response. Some users said on social media that they borrowed money to cross-chain and wanted to get Sei’s airdrop, but they were still stuck on one side and liquidated on the other side. Even if they were not liquidated, the airdrop they received might not be able to cover the price drop… .
write at the end
In any case, Sei’s case seems to be a “success” in one dimension, with innovative mechanism design and full of topics. But in the long run, it may also be another dimension of consumption and overdraft. In addition, it is also necessary to keep up with follow-up operations.
Whether the project party should airdrop and how to formulate rules and standards has long been a common topic in the encryption industry.
Originally, the airdrop was aimed at motivating active users and completing a cold start. However, under the encouragement of the myth of creating wealth, countless sluts came to work with dreams in mind. Once their dreams were free, many studios came into being. Unexpectedly, they gradually fell into the dilemma of PUA, tug-of-war, falling in love and killing each other. However, as the market continues to drop and project parties are tightening their belts, “airdropping to make money” is becoming more and more difficult, and it has become crazy. Recently, according to media reports, many lumao studios have failed to make ends meet, unable to support and closed down.
Admittedly, this is also the result of industry reshuffle iterations. DeFi OG Mindao once said bluntly on Twitter: Nowadays, airdrop farmers have become industrialized, and now the airdrop rules are so predictable, it is impossible for witches to resist. Allocated to ordinary liquidity mining.
However, so far this discussion has not reached a convincing conclusion. Perhaps we can only hope that when the market improves again and new traffic enters again, the industry will form a healthy ecological cycle.
Additional reading
A Complete Guide to Sei Airdrops: Cross-chain Airdrops Covering Six Mainstream Public Chain Users
Delphi Digital: Why are we optimistic about Sei Network?
