The myth of ENS airdrop: a college student received 2.78 million dollars, while someone missed out on tens of millions

Author: Rhythm Research Institute

"Money comes from the wind. If you feel that making money is very tiring, then you have a problem." I don't know if other industries have the phenomenon of money blowing in from the wind, but in the blockchain space, the wind can indeed bring in quite a bit.

Airdrops are a common practice in the crypto world, where many projects distribute tokens for free to early users, developers, builders, and other ecosystem participants to thrive and build their ecosystems. Remember last year's airdrop from Uniswap, the largest decentralized exchange globally? It felt like a festival in the industry, and at that time's price, it was equivalent to the cost of an iPhone per person.

This year's celebration comes from a project called ENS.

This is a long-standing OG project in the industry, Ethereum domain names. Since NFT avatars can tell stories in the metaverse, domain names on the Ethereum network, which is closest to the real metaverse, also represent identity and have their own value.

The wealth effect triggered by this OG's airdrop is truly astonishing.

A message circulated in the community: a builder from the Chinese community successfully became an ENS contributor and received an airdrop of 46,000 tokens. This user is quite young, currently a university student, and has not invested a large amount of capital in the crypto market but has "accidentally" achieved financial freedom through community building, sparking envy among many investors.

At the current price, one ENS token is about $60, making the 46,000 ENS airdrop worth approximately $2.78 million.

As long as you registered an ENS domain name beforehand, you are eligible for the airdrop. Community members, contributors, and others participating in ecosystem building can receive even more substantial airdrops. This airdrop covers 138,000 addresses, marking another large celebration.

The large-scale celebration of wealth from this airdrop is partly due to ENS's generosity, but more importantly, it reflects the value of ENS. After all, without market recognition, the price of ENS tokens would be hard to reach today's heights.

ENS: The Domain System of the Web3 Era

In the Web2 era, we usually manually enter domain names when accessing web services. This habit has been ingrained for so long that we almost forget that the domain service did not exist from the very beginning of the internet.

In the early days of the internet, communication between devices relied on IP addresses, those four-part, three-digit combinations that are still occasionally used by regular users, such as 192.168.1.1 when setting up a router.

For users, remembering the corresponding IP address for every website is nearly impossible, and the emergence of DNS services solved this problem. DNS services bind domain names to IP addresses, allowing users to access a specific IP address through a more memorable combination of letters.

As we enter the decentralized blockchain world, this function becomes even more critical. Just a 12-digit IP address is already inconvenient; what about a 42-character alphanumeric combination?

Think about the scenario of entering a wallet address. Each time you confirm the address, you have to check a long string of 42 characters, and if you make a mistake, you risk losing your assets. In contrast, in the Web2 era, most conventional internet products, whether URLs, emails, or usernames, only require a user-defined alphanumeric combination to accurately and conveniently find the needed address.

Although the concept of decentralization is very appealing, in terms of user experience, Web3 still lags far behind the basic services of the Web2 era. The birth of ENS domain names has somewhat improved this issue, providing a service similar to DNS for the crypto world.

After using an ENS domain name, users can resolve a custom example.eth to the corresponding Ethereum address, meaning that transferring to a .eth address is equivalent to transferring to a 42-character Ethereum address. On platforms or tools that support ENS, such as OpenSea and on-chain browsers, user addresses will also directly display as .eth addresses.

（Many crypto industry celebrities, including Vitalik Buterin, have set their .eth addresses as their Twitter names）

ENS provides a more user-friendly address and identity system for the crypto world. A large number of crypto celebrities have bound their wallet addresses to .eth addresses.

At the end of August this year, ENS officially announced the complete integration of the DNS namespace on Ethereum, allowing users to associate any ".com" domain name with an Ethereum address. The ENS service now supports most traditional domain names, such as .com, .org, .io, etc. Previously, only .eth domain names could be correctly resolved in on-chain transfers, but this restriction has now been lifted. The trend of ENS domain names has even spread beyond the crypto circle; in August this year, the beer brand Budweiser purchased "beer.eth" for 30 ETH.

Unlike traditional DNS domain names, where hundreds of service providers certified by ICANN offer domain registration services and charge registration fees, ENS is the most widely used domain system on the Ethereum network.

Airdrop Financial Freedom, Community Participation Will Eventually Be Rewarded

The description of achieving financial freedom through airdrops may seem a bit exaggerated, but among the users who received the ENS airdrop, some addresses received astonishing amounts.

Currently, the price of ENS is about $60. Based on this price, how much asset did the user who received the most airdrop get? After checking all the airdrop receiving addresses, we found several addresses that received the most airdrops.

On-chain data shows that a total of 6 addresses received over 100,000 ENS tokens in airdrops.

Among them, the contract address starting with "0xd7" may be the biggest winner of this airdrop. It received 1 million ENS tokens, worth approximately $60 million.

The address "0x3a" received the second-largest amount of airdrop, with 294,000 ENS tokens, worth about $17.64 million. The address beccaliebert.eth received 170,000 ENS tokens, making it the third-largest recipient of the airdrop, worth about $10.2 million. The address "0xfe" received 165,000 ENS tokens, ranking fourth with a value of about $7.9 million.

And like the university student mentioned at the beginning of this article, who received "only" 46,296.3 ENS tokens, there are currently 46 addresses that have completed the claim.

The tens of millions of dollars in airdrops may leave users who did not receive them regretting their missed opportunity. However, looking back at the airdrop rules may provide some consolation: these airdrops of hundreds of thousands or millions of tokens are not necessarily claimed by individuals. 25% of the total supply of ENS will be airdropped to ENS contributors, which include over 100 individuals and teams. This means that a portion of these massive airdrops is shared among teams, which may also explain the presence of several contract addresses among the airdrop receiving addresses.

A Fairer Airdrop Scheme, Missing Millions for Domain Traders

The speculation of domain names has been around since the early days of the internet, and naturally, there are domain traders in decentralized domain services as well. Domain traders hold a vast number of ENS domain names; Etherscan data shows that there are already 20 wallet addresses holding over 1,000 domain names.

The ENS airdrop adopts a fairer calculation mechanism: it uses independent addresses as the basis for accounting, meaning that holding multiple domain names does not increase the amount received. This means that a single address holding more ENS domain names will not receive more airdrops. Although this distribution method is less friendly to large holders, it is relatively fairer. This approach also maximally avoids the behavior of "farming" airdrops by artificially inflating transaction volumes and holdings in previous airdrop activities.

Domain traders typically hoard a large number of domain names in the same address, causing them to miss out on multiple, tens, or even hundreds of times the airdrop.

Dune Analytics data shows that as of now, 403,000 ENS domain names have been created, but only 152,000 independent addresses hold domain names. This indicates that many addresses hold multiple domain names simultaneously.

The top 4 addresses alone hold more than half of the total ENS domain names. For example, the address ending in "28e2" holds as many as 40,798 ENS domain names, making it the largest holder of ENS ERC721 tokens, accounting for 29.1% of all ENS.

The address "28e2" will not receive more airdrops simply because it holds 40,000 domain names. This airdrop distributed 25 million ENS tokens to ENS users, with an average of 180 ENS tokens per address. If the 40,000 domain names were held by 40,000 separate addresses, it could be roughly estimated that this user would receive 7.2 million ENS tokens, worth about $432 million.

Leading Project Tokens Land, Market Value Faces Testing

This airdrop had over 137,000 eligible addresses, making the scale of this airdrop quite impressive. Just two months ago, the large-scale airdrop from dYdX had ignited market enthusiasm, and the number of users eligible for the dYdX airdrop was "only" 36,000, less than a third of this airdrop.

Through a set of publicly available official data, we can gain a clearer understanding of the airdrop amount: a total of 25 million ENS tokens were airdropped to users, with an average of 180 tokens per address. Independent addresses meeting various conditions and with the maximum registration time could receive up to 1,179 tokens.

The airdrop is still ongoing, and the feast continues. The price of ENS has also become the next question of interest. The price of ENS has risen from about $30 at the beginning of the liquidity pool's creation and is currently hovering around $60.

Dune Analytics data shows that 55,000 addresses have completed the airdrop claim, collectively receiving 11 million tokens, while 56% of ENS tokens remain unclaimed. Whether these ENS tokens will impact the market after being claimed remains uncertain.

As a concept that is not new, the decentralized domain track has returned to the center of the market. After years of development and construction, the value of ENS domain names has finally faced market testing. After the short-term speculation in the early issuance, where ENS's market value stabilizes may determine the market potential of the entire track.