The airdrop of Taiko is not over yet, and its reputation is still in question. On May 23rd, in the early morning, Taiko released the airdrop query page and TKO token economic model. However, due to the airdrop being much lower than expected and the lack of transparency in the airdrop rules, Taiko faced criticism from many community users.
Being criticized for the airdrop issue is not something new, but the strong statements made by Taiko co-founder and CEO, Wang Dong (Daniel Wang), completely ignited the anger of the community users, putting himself in the center of the storm.
First, Wang Dong posted on X, stating, “To avoid unnecessary debates, we will not disclose detailed TKO airdrop rules. Our goal is fairness, but we cannot satisfy everyone. Congratulations to those who received TKO, and apologies to those who didn’t.”
Shortly after, with the increasing doubts and even insults on the X platform, Wang Dong seemed to be provoked and made another statement on Discord:
Zero tolerance for any related insults;
Taiko is a partner of Galaxy and not just a working relationship. The ranking on Galaxy is not a reference, and the weight of participating in Taiko-related activities on Galaxy is not significant;
If you did not receive the airdrop, it is because others had higher scores;
The lack of transparency in the rules is because transparency cannot solve disputes, and the definition of “fairness” is highly subjective.
With these words, Taiko fell into a whirlpool of public opinion. Some users complained that it was the worst PR response they had ever seen, and some users called for major exchanges to firmly resist such opaque crypto projects.
Taiko: Born with a golden key, Ethereum Layer 2 Taiko has attracted a lot of attention since its establishment in early 2022. This is mainly because its core team is composed of almost the same members as the well-known Ethereum Layer 2 ZK-Rollup protocol, Loopring. Taiko’s three co-founders, Wang Dong, Brecht Devos, and Matthew Finestone, all come from the Loopring team. The co-founder and CEO of Taiko who made the statement in the community, Wang Dong (English name Daniel Wang), is also the founder of Loopring. Loopring was the first ZK-Rollup deployed on Ethereum, and it went public on Coinbase in 2020, becoming the first Chinese project listed on Coinbase. It was subsequently listed on exchanges such as Binance and OKX, enjoying great popularity. Before joining Web3, Wang Dong served as the technology leader of Zhongan Insurance and JD, the technical director and senior software engineer of Google, and participated in the founding of companies such as Yunrang Technology and Coinport. With a background in traditional Web2 giants, serial entrepreneurs, and Web2+Web3, and having founded successful Web3 projects, Wang Dong can be said to be a type of founder favored by investors.
After its establishment, Taiko quickly attracted investment from many well-known investment institutions. According to RootData, Taiko has raised a total of $37 million in funding in about two years, with traditional investment institutions such as Sequoia China, Yunqi Capital, BAI Capital, GGV Capital, as well as well-known exchanges or market makers such as OKX Ventures, GSR, Wintermute, and native crypto capital such as Hash Global, IOSG Ventures, Generative Ventures participating.
Taiko is a Type-1 zk-EVM (reference article: “Vitalik: The Future of Different Types of ZK-EVM”), which is a fully decentralized ZK-Rollup equivalent to Ethereum. The zkEVM that Taiko wants to build was originally part of what Loopring wanted to do. However, during the development stage, Wang Dong and the team believed that Loopring was an application-specific extension, while Taiko wanted to build a general extension. Mixing them together would cause great confusion. Therefore, Taiko separated from Loopring and developed independently.
Why did the Taiko airdrop cause dissatisfaction? On December 27, 2022, Taiko released its first public testnet, Alpha-1 Testnet. In January of this year, Taiko announced the launch of its sixth testnet, which is the final testnet, Katla. In a year and a half, Taiko has released six testnets and has had multiple Galaxy missions during this period.
Although it took a long time and there were many tasks to participate in, with star founders and star capital, Taiko has always been a key project for the community users, and their expectations for it were relatively high. According to official data disclosed by Taiko in February, after the release of the six testnets, Taiko has over 1.1 million unique wallets, over 30,000 decentralized proposers, and over 14,000 decentralized validators, showing the high enthusiasm of users to participate.
Currently, according to official information from Taiko, the total supply of TKO is 1 billion tokens, with the genesis airdrop accounting for 5%, mainly airdropped to Taiko users and the Loopring community. However, after the announcement of the airdrop during the testnet phase, some users found that despite participating in multiple testnets and Galaxy missions, they received no airdrop tokens. Although some users did receive some airdrop tokens, the quantity seemed to be far below expectations.
For the community users, what is more frustrating than spending a lot of time interacting but not receiving any rewards is the lack of knowledge about where they went wrong. The lack of transparency in Taiko’s airdrop rules has raised doubts in the community. The task points on the Galaxy platform recorded user interaction behavior and were considered as a rough estimate of the airdrop. However, some community users claimed that accounts with the same Galaxy score had significantly different airdrop results. Combined with the project’s failure to disclose detailed conditions for the witching hour and snapshot, there are reasons to suspect that the project team engaged in insider trading.
In response, Wang Dong emphasized on Discord that Taiko is a partner of Galaxy and not just a working relationship. The ranking on Galaxy is not a reference, and the weight of participating in Taiko-related activities on Galaxy is not significant. For participating users, since the weight of Galaxy missions is not significant, why does Taiko continue to release a large number of Galaxy missions to encourage user participation?
Even though the airdrop is not over yet, will the reputation of Taiko be reversed? It is not uncommon for some users to criticize the project team for not meeting their airdrop expectations. Although many users did not receive any airdrop, there are also many users who have received good returns. Taiko has now released the data related to the airdrop, stating that there have been 300,000 addresses claiming over 50 million tokens. Some users have received TKO tokens ranging from 3,000 to 9,000, which, if estimated at the current AEVO pre-market price of $5, is worth about $15,000 to $45,000.
The airdrop during the testnet phase is usually just the appetizer, and Taiko has stated that 10% of the tokens will be used for future airdrops.
In March, Taiko stated that the mainnet would go live within three months after the upgrade in Cancun. With the mainnet approaching and the experience of the first airdrop, will Taiko learn from its lessons and win a reputation reversal?
Tags:
Brecht Devos
ChainCatcher
Coinbase
Loopring
Matthew Finestone
OKX
Taiko
Ethereum
Binance
Wang Dong
airdrop
Source link:
https://www.chaincatcher.com/article/2125860
Note: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute investment advice.
Original article link:
https://www.bitpush.news/articles/6784546
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