Taiko airdrop controversy: a project that claims to be completely decentralized

Author: flowie, ChainCatcher

In the early morning of May 23, Taiko announced the airdrop query page and TKO token economic model, but because the airdrop was far below expectations and the airdrop rules were not transparent, Taiko was questioned by many community users.

Being criticized for airdrop issues is not new, but the tough speech of Taiko co-founder and CEO Daniel Wang completely ignited the anger of community users and put himself at the forefront.

Wang Dong first posted on X, “In order to avoid unnecessary arguments, we will not disclose the detailed TKO Genesis airdrop rules. Our goal is fairness, but we cannot satisfy everyone. Congratulations to those who received TKO, and apologize to those who did not.”

Soon after, as more and more doubts and even insults were raised on the X platform, Wang Dong seemed to be angered and spoke again on Discord:

1. There is zero tolerance for any related insults;

2. Taiko is a partner of Galaxy, not an employee relationship, and is not used as a reference in the Galaxy rankings. The weight of participating in Taiko-related activities on Galaxy is not large;

3. If you did not get the airdrop, it is because others have more points;

4. The rules are not transparent because transparency cannot resolve differences, and the definition of "fairness" is highly subjective.

As soon as this was said, Taiko was completely caught in the whirlpool of public opinion. Some users complained that "this is the worst public relations response I have ever seen", and some users called on major exchanges to resolutely resist this opaque encryption project.

Taiko: Ethereum Layer2 born with a golden key

Taiko has attracted much attention since its establishment in early 2022, because its core team is almost the original team of the well-known Ethereum Layer 2 ZK-Rollup protocol Loopring.

Taiko's three co-founders Wang Dong, Brecht Devos, and Matthew Finestone are all from the Loopring team.

Daniel Wang, co-founder and CEO of Taiko, who spoke in the community this time, is also the founder of Loopring.

Loopring is the first ZK-Rollup deployed on Ethereum. In 2020, Loopring was listed on Coinbase, becoming the first Chinese project to be listed on Coinbase. Later, it was also listed on exchanges such as Binance and OKX, and it was in the limelight for a while.

Before joining Web3, Wang Dong was also the technical director of ZhongAn Insurance and JD.com, the technical director and senior software engineer of Google, and participated in the establishment of Yunrang Technology and Coinport.

With a composite background of traditional Web2 giants, serial entrepreneurs, Web2+Web3, and having founded good Web3 projects, Wang Dong can be said to be the most favored type of founder by investors.

Taiko quickly attracted a large number of investments from well-known investment institutions after its establishment.

According to RootData data, Taiko has received a total of US$37 million in financing in the two years since its establishment. Investors include traditional investment institutions such as Sequoia China, Yunqi Capital, BAI Capital, and GGV Capital, as well as well-known exchanges or market makers such as OKX Ventures, GSR, and Wintermute, as well as crypto native capital such as Hash Global, IOSG Ventures, and Generative Ventures.

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 Loopring's work, but 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, and mixing them together would cause great confusion, so Taiko was developed independently from Loopring.

Why did Taiko's airdrop cause dissatisfaction?

On December 27, 2022, Taiko released its first public testnet, the Alpha-1 testnet. In January of this year, Taiko announced the launch of its sixth testnet, the final testnet, Katla.

In a year and a half, Taiko has released a total of 6 testnets, and there have been multiple galaxy missions during this period.

Although the time period is long and there are many tasks to participate in, with the halo of star founders and star capital, Taiko has always been a key project of the "Mao Party", and community users have high expectations for it.

According to official data disclosed by Taiko in February, after the release of the sixth test network, Taiko has more than 1.1 million independent wallets, more than 30,000 decentralized proposers and more than 14,000 decentralized validators, which shows the high enthusiasm of users to participate.

According to official news from Taiko, the total supply of TKO is 1 billion, and the Genesis airdrop accounts for 5%, which is mainly airdropped to Taiko users and the Loopring community.

However, after the airdrop of this test network phase was announced, some users found that although they participated in multiple test networks and galaxy missions, they ended up being completely accompanying and their account airdrops were 0. Although some users also received some airdrops, it seems that the number is far lower than expected.

For community users, what is more frustrating than spending a lot of time interacting but getting nothing in return is that they don’t even know where they “died”? The opacity of Taiko’s airdrop rules has aroused doubts from the community.

The task points on the Galxe platform record user interaction behaviors and have always been regarded as an estimated voucher for the approximate magnitude of the airdrop.

However, some community users said that different accounts with the same Galaxy score had very different airdrop results. In addition, the project owner did not disclose the detailed conditions of the witch and snapshot, so there is reason to suspect that it was a rat warehouse of the project owner.

In this regard, Wang Dong emphasized in discord. Taiko is a partner of Galaxy, not an employee relationship. It is not used as a reference in the Galaxy ranking, and the weight of participating in Taiko-related activities on Galaxy is not large.

For participating users, since the weight of Galaxy tasks is not large, why does Taiko continue to release a large number of Galaxy tasks to guide user participation.

After the token airdrop, Taiko still releases new tasks in Galaxy. Will there be users participating in these tasks?

The airdrop is not over yet, will Taiko's reputation turn around?

Every time the project party airdrops, some people are happy and some are worried. It is not new to scold the project party because the airdrop is not as expected.

Although many users did not receive any airdrops this time, many users also received good returns.

Taiko has also released data related to the airdrop, indicating that 300,000 addresses have claimed more than 50 million tokens. Some users received TKO tokens ranging from 3,000 to 9,000. If the current AEVO premarket over-the-counter price of $5 is estimated, the value they received is about $15,000 to $45,000.

The airdrop in the testnet phase is usually just an appetizer. Taiko said that 10% of the tokens will be used for subsequent airdrops.

In March, Taiko said that the mainnet will be launched within three months after the Cancun upgrade. With the mainnet coming soon, after the first airdrop, will Taiko learn from its lessons and win a reversal in reputation?