LayerZero Foundation to begin ZRO token airdrop claims today

LayerZero Foundation, the organization that supports the cross-chain interoperability platform LayerZero, announced that the claims for the airdrop of its native token ZRO will open today at 7 a.m. ET. This comes after the foundation released an eligibility checker for users yesterday.

“The launch of ZRO marks a pivotal step for the protocol: making it publicly owned, immutable infrastructure,” the foundation stated in a blog post. The platform’s native token has a fixed supply of 1 billion, 38.3% of which will be distributed to its users, developers and community members.

On Thursday, the first day of distribution, 8.5% of the total 1 billion supply, or 85 million ZRO tokens will be claimable by eligible participants. The remaining tokens of the community-allocated portion will be reserved for future distribution programs and for ecosystem growth.

15.3% of the overall ZRO supply is reserved for direct future distributions to users, protocols, infrastructure builders, and community members through future Snapshots and methods such as RFPs, the foundation noted.

LayerZero plans to distribute 32.2% of the total token supply to strategic partners and 25.5% to its core contributors, both subject to a three-year vesting period with a one-year lock and a monthly unlock over the following two years. It claims to have also repurchased 40 million ZRO tokens, which it said is “pledged to the community bucket.”

LayerZero Labs CEO Bryan Pellegrino said yesterday that he identified a total of 1.28 million wallets eligible for airdrop claims. Meanwhile over six million unique wallet addresses have interacted with LayerZero protocol.

Holders of ZRO will be given privileges of having a vote on deciding LayerZero protocol’s fee switch. “An immutable voting contract enforces a public onchain referendum every six months,” the foundation explained.

Airdrop eligibility for LayerZero users

LayerZero Foundation said it was challenging to execute the airdrop event in a “correct” method, as it said LayerZero is one of the most used and farmed protocols of all time. 

“While the ZRO distribution is not perfect, we think it is correct: rewarding durable users in a way that maximally aligns them with the LayerZero protocol going forward,” the foundation wrote.

The foundation noted that the airdrop eligibility was outlined with three main factors — Sybil filtering, Request for Proposal (RFP) and eligibility criteria. LayerZero set stringent measures to eliminate token distributions to Sybil attackers, who create multiple fake accounts to unfairly gain a larger share of free tokens being distributed. The measures include self-reporting, bounty-hunting and collaboration with on-chain security firms.

LayerZero said it is distributing 3% of the total supply to 211 approved RFPs, which are unique proposals to improve the protocol. Then, every user that transacted on the protocol prior to the snapshot are eligible to receive the airdrop, with a minimum allocation of 25 ZRO and a maximum of 5,000 ZRO, weighted by the amount of protocol fees paid.

“All unclaimed tokens at end of claim period will be redistributed to those who did claim based on [LayerZero] Core allocation,” Pellegrino said in an X post.