👀Weekly Recap: EigenLayer's Airdrop Saga Unfolds

Happy weekend Defiers!

EigenLayer’s long-awaited airdrop was announced this past week, but many early adopters of the pioneering Ethereum restaking protocol were unhappy with its terms.

Users slammed EigenLayer for its linear distribution allocating few tokens to smaller users, EIGEN being non-transferable at launch, and its claims platform blocking VPN users and points holders from major jurisdictions including the United States and Canada. In a further sign of protest, around 14,000 wallets had executed withdrawals from the protocol within just a few days.

However, EigenLayer capitulated on May 2, announcing that users who interacted with the protocol before April 29 would receive additional allocations of 100 EIGEN each.

EigenLayer was not the only project to suffer backlash in response to a highly-anticipated airdrop, with Friend Tech copping flak for its token distribution and v2 rollout. Many users were left unable to claim their tokens while the price of FRIEND plummeted, while others slammed the project for seeding the token’s liquidity pool with minimal assets and placing heavy restrictions on FRIEND transfers.

In other airdrop news, LayerZero announced it also took a snapshot informing its airdrop on May 1. LayerZero described the capture as “snapshot #1,” suggesting additional snapshots will be taken in the future.

It was a volatile week for market action, with Bitcoin sliding to its lowest level since February amid bearish anticipation of the latest Federal Reserve meeting, U.S. economic data, and weak performances in the crypto ETF sector.

However, the markets most a strong bounce at the end of the week after The Fed chose to keep interest rates steady and reaffirmed its commitment to easing rates later this year.

Aave unveiled a new three-year plan, including the launch of the Aave v4 protocol and Aave Network. The upcoming iteration of the top DeFI lending protocol by TVL will feature a “cross-chain liquidity layer” aggregating assets from multiple networks.

Base, the Layer 2 network from Coinbase, announced its second annual “Onchain Summer” hackathon. Up to $2 million worth of prizes will be available to developers participating in the event.