EigenLayer opens airdrop claims till Sept. 7

Users can now claim EigenLayer’s native token, but the team has previously said that EIGEN will remain non-transferable.

The 120-day period to claim EIGEN started on May 10 and will continue until September for the first phase of EigenLayer “stakedrop”.

Participants can secure 6.05% of the token’s 1.67 billion supply during distribution, while the second phase allocation will increase existing tokens by 0.7%.

EigenLayer plans to distribute 113 billion EIGEN tokens to eligible users who have been depositing Ether (ETH) into its staking platform for months. According to the Eigen Foundation, the allocation will be distributed over multiple seasons and users will receive 15% of EIGEN’s total supply.

However, the roadmap sparked discontent within the crypto community as claimants were unable to send EIGEN through wallets and some regions were geo-blocked from the airdrop.

Users in the US, Canada, and regions in Africa and Asia cannot access the claims website. Typically, a VPN could get around this ban, but VPN users were also blocked, resulting in increased scrutiny of the EigenLayer protocol.

The controversial EigenLayer airdrop is one of several token distributions that shook the crypto community in the second quarter of 2024. LayerZero also received backlash for its anti-Sybil systems and “report to win” initiative.

Elsewhere, experts are skeptical about the promises of the EIGEN token and how the repurchasing giant contributes to the Ethereum ecosystem. Galaxy researcher Christine Kim said in X that the technical review of the protocol left much to be desired, and also called into question the issues identified by the team.

After reading the EIGEN white paper, you may be forced to ask whether an “intersubjective working token” is really *necessary* for a revaluation protocol that has not yet enabled the most basic attributes of reconsideration.

To clarify everything this whitepaper says eigenlayer does for: pic.twitter.com/0Z8hILOrnI

— Christine Kim (@christine_dkim) 30 April 2024