On April 30th, the team behind EigenLayer made an exciting announcement about a giveaway for their project. However, their proposed conditions for the giveaway sparked a wave of criticism from the community.
The EigenLayer developers revealed that, in the first season, 5% of the entire offer would be distributed to the community, while the team and investors would receive 55%. This allocation didn’t sit well with many users who found it unfair.
In addition, the conditions surrounding the distribution of the tokens also received backlash. Users expressed dissatisfaction with the requirement to lock the assets and the volume of the airdrop. Some took to Twitter to voice their concerns, expressing their surprise at the perceived greed of crypto developers and venture capitalists.
There was also criticism regarding the restrictions placed on certain regions. Users from the USA, Canada, most CIS countries, and China were barred from participating in the airdrop, although they could still add assets to the protocol. This drew further criticism and raised questions about the inclusivity of the project.
The situation became more confusing when users of the Pendle service were initially led to believe that they would not receive the airdrop due to a technical error. However, the Eigen Foundation later clarified that these users would indeed receive a portion of the airdrop in the first season, albeit a reduced amount. This miscommunication had a negative impact on the price of the PENDLE token.
As a result of these issues, the total locked value (TVL) of the EigenLayer project decreased from $15.94 billion to $14.89 billion, as reported by DeFiLlama.
Interestingly, a similar situation occurred with the Starknet project, where developers chose to revise their conditions following criticism from the community. It remains to be seen whether EigenLayer will make any changes in response to the feedback they have received.