Original author: Alex Liu, Foresight News
On the evening of March 5, RedStone opened an airdrop query. Since its listing on the Binance pre-market on February 28, RED has hit Binances latest price limit mechanism for three consecutive days. After the price limit was lifted, it once hit above $1.4. It is now at $0.87, with a market value of $34 million and a fully circulated market value of $860 million.
RedStone is the latest Launchpad project of Binance, and many people participated in the airdrop activities, which attracted much attention in the community. As a price oracle provider known for its low prices, the project has not had any major pricing errors since its launch, and has also received support from well-known investment institutions such as Coinbase Ventures and Blockchain Capital. However, after the airdrop query page of this dazzling star went online last night, the reputation of the community took a sharp turn for the worse, and some netizens even called it a scam project. Why is this?
Looking at its token economics, the 10% community airdrop ratio is not small, and it is not enough to explain the problem. On social platforms, some community users reported that they participated in many years of tasks (such as mining activities in seasons S 1-S 3, hundreds of Zealy tasks, Spring Festival activities, etc.), but still did not receive airdrops. The author found the answer in RedStones official statement.
As long as you don’t have a specific role in the RedStone Discord, you will not be able to get tokens! Eligible roles include Vein Master, Deep Miner, Professor, IRL (participated in offline activities), etc., and less than 2% of the nearly 230,000 community members in the RedStone Discord have any of the above roles!
The fact that tokens are given out in small amounts alone may not make community users so angry (RedStone DC has already entered “slow mode” due to too many criticisms), but the inconsistency between the actual reward mechanism and the project’s publicity has caused many users to “waste their efforts”, which is probably the crux of the problem.
In past publicity, the project team directly said, Your points will become the key basis for future airdrops! But in fact, the top 10 users in RSG points, including the 5th and 7th, are not eligible to receive RED tokens because they do not have Discord roles. There are more than 170,000 people in the rankings, and only 2,296 addresses are eligible. There are about 200,000 members in the entire community, but in the end only about 4,000 people meet the conditions for airdrops, and many of them only receive a few hundred tokens. Its allocation logic is extremely selective compared with other mainstream projects on the market.
Data from: @OshinoAJ_eth
So what really aroused the anger of community members was that RedStone’s event design was full of high-intensity PUA marketing: by constantly releasing tasks to attract user participation, creating an illusion that as long as you are diligent enough, you can get rewards, but actually setting up invisible barriers in the threshold setting, so that ordinary users who have invested a lot of time and resources are excluded at the last minute.
This goes against industry practice. Other airdrop projects in the industry usually focus more on the breadth of user participation in the distribution mechanism. In dYdXs airdrop activities, tens of thousands of participating and qualified users can generally obtain a certain number of governance tokens; while projects such as Optimism have clear, fair and transparent airdrop rules, striving to cover more ecological users.
In contrast, RedStone’s “special role” threshold seems too narrow to motivate long-term activity and trust in the entire community.
Conclusion
The project team may try to implement a more sophisticated incentive mechanism in airdrop distribution to ensure that core users can receive a higher proportion of rewards, but this approach undoubtedly ignores the efforts and expectations of the majority of participants.
In the long run, airdrops are not only a promotional tool to attract users, but also an important indicator to measure the transparency of project governance and the health of the ecosystem. The current controversy has undoubtedly sounded the alarm for the entire industry: only by establishing a fair, open and reasonable incentive distribution mechanism can users truly feel the value of participation, thereby promoting the continued prosperity of the entire ecosystem.
