Paradrop Airdrop Assessment — How to qualify for an effective airdrop?
For introduction, paraswap is a dex aggregator on Ethereum and EVM-compatible chains: Polygon, Avalanche, BSC which aggregate all the dex to find the best route for lowest slippage and cost. Recently paraswap airdrop their governance token PSP to those who eligible for the airdrop. This PSP token also act as an important factor in improving the efficiency and decentralization of the service. However we will not go into details of those mechanism behind and instead we will focus on the airdrop section.
Overall comparison in recent airdrop
First let us compare all the huge popular airdrop across ethereum ecosystem first. We try to sort it out by difficulty with uniswap the most easiest airdrop ever claimed. To eligible uniswap airdrop, users just need to interact with uniswap contract 1 times, even if your transaction failed also will get the 400 UNI airdrop which currently worth 12k when UNI ATH. Next come with ENS airdrop. Anyone who owned a ENS domain will get the governance ENS token airdrop worth 4 digit at least. Going up we have DYDX token with the requirement of trading on their layer 2 perpetual protocol. DYDX airdrop over half of their total supply to early users. Finally we have PSP token airdrop. The condition is being the ‘MOST ACTIVE USER’. Only 20k address eligible in claiming their airdrop.
Above we compile the up to date airdrop claiming state. The highest percentage claimed is DYDX protocol which over 37.4k users had claimed their DYDX token. Next we have UNI airdrop with over 126M of UNI had being claimed by over 315k users. This 315k users are not accurate and might be less since those might get UNISOCK and others. By just comparing the wallet claimed, we can see the largest is UNI, followed by ENS, DYDX and finally PSP. This also implied the difficulty assumption we made just now is tally. The lesser the number of wallets eligible the harder the users will get to claim the airdrop. So is PSP users the hardcore users?
Up until now there is 13.3k wallets had claimed their PSP airdrop. From these 13.3k users do they claimed other airdrop? From Flipside Crypto data, we compile and find out at least 2k of them also claimed ENS, UNI or DYDX airdrop. (Do note that there might be overlap of those claimers means one would had claimed all three). This means more than 10% of PSP airdrop claimers are active in ethereum ecosystem and quite often interact with them. We would say this airdrop is quite specific and accomplish the goal of rewarding those with active activities on ethereum ecosystem. Ok the 10% of those PSP claimers might be worthy but what about others? Is there any whale behind the claimers trying to hunt for airdrop only?
PSP token claimed by proportion
Paraswap had make 3 tier for the airdrop. A users with more than 7 point or above will get the maximum of 10400 of PSP airdrop. Here we would like to clarify that whale should be in this category. A whale should score more than 7 point which require them to swap more than certain value, more than 1 chain and swap more certain frequency. Fortunately, around 80% of PSP token is airdrop to RETAILS instead of whale. This is those who claimed 5200 or 7800 of PSP airdrop. We would say this is a fair airdrop which not mainly monopolize by whale. But still a lot of those called ‘TRADERS’ not satisfy saying they did quite some number of transactions over paraswap but did not get anything indeed. Paraswap also checking strictly if there is any airdrop hunter which utilize bot or tools for swapping over paraswap.
It became quite clear that these addresses were not real users but were most likely operated by Airdrop Hunters — by paraswap
Example of transactions
https://polygonscan.com/tx/0xb3b33918f4151a9a28bc0a0f823824a021fdac3e5a48c51527978eac9ec06345
Here we will look into the transactions on paraswap by category of eligible claimers and non-claimers.
Eligible claimers vs non-eligble
Paraswap had one condition for the eligibility of airdrop, that is swap more than 6 times in the last 6 month. Hence we will only focus the past 6 month before snapshot which is 8 Oct. In compiling the data from Flipside Crypto, we proved that the eligible claimers had swapped more than 6 times on both chain (ethereum and polygon). On the other hand, we can see the non-eligible users swapping less than 5 times in past 6 month.
Average Swap Volume before snapshot date (on Eth & polygon)
Please look at the legend first before comparing the chart. There is some limitation on plotting the chart over Flipside Crypto
Here we simply compared the average daily trading by both type of users. Except during the market crash on May, we see all other time that the eligible claimers had higher average daily trading volume on paraswap. The average daily trading volume is around 100k to 200k by the eligible users. On polygon side also the eligible users has way higher average trading volume although the volume is very less compared to ethereum. Nevertheless there is still some consistent average trading volume of around 50k (on eth) and 500 (on polygon) by the non-eligible users. Let us assume that this group of users are retailers and new.
Average Swap Volume after snapshot date (on Eth & polygon)
Please look at the legend first before comparing the chart. There is some limitation on plotting the chart over Flipside Crypto
Now let see the daily average trading volume over paraswap. On both eth and polygon, we seeing the overwhelming daily volume from those who eligible for airdrop. There is roughly daily volume of 250k on eth and 6k on polygon. Even after the PSP airdrop on Nov 15, the daily volume is till consistent overtime. Perhaps the PSP airdrop do encourage the users? Although we seen all the bad comment about paraswap for their bad airdrop mechanism and requirement, we still seeing some trading volume from those non-eligible for the airdrop. So come back to the airdrop topic. What did they do with those airdrop?
What airdrop claimers do after claimed?
From the bar chart above we can see up until now the selling had paused. On first day there is over 20% of PSP being sold after claimed. (Of course users want to take profit since it free money). The good things is the percentage of PSP being stake has increasing day over day and until now around 48% of those PSP claimed had being staked into paraswap. Since the selling pressure had stop, we should see the price of PSP stable around 0.40$ and will go up with time. Overall only 25% of those PSP claimers had sell their PSP token. There is still 75% of PSP ‘supporter’.
Conclusion
Ok this article is a bit too messy and long, let me summarize in final words. PSP token did quite a good job in ensuring those truly PSP users and those active on DEX and DeFi get their PSP airdrop. Fair distribution between retailers and whale, airdrop amount restriction, bot hunter prevention and targeting rewards system had ensured those worthy claimed their PSP airdrop.
Dashboard :
https://app.flipsidecrypto.com/dashboard/4-elite-paradrop-airdrop-assessment--kE1XG
by Ah Kek
data by Flipside Crypto
