ENS airdrop myth: A college student received $2.78 million, while others missed out on tens of millions

"Money comes from the wind. If you feel it is tiring to make money, then there is something wrong with you." I don't know if the phenomenon of strong winds blowing away money exists in other industries, but in the blockchain, strong winds can indeed blow in a lot of money.

Airdrops are a common practice in the crypto world. Many projects prosper and build their ecosystems by distributing tokens for free to early users, developers, builders, and other ecosystem participants. Remember last year's airdrop by Uniswap, the world's largest decentralized trading platform, which made the industry feel like Chinese New Year. At the price at the time, it was also the level of one iPhone per person.

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

This is an OG project in the industry for many years, the Ethereum domain name. Since the NFT avatar can be explained in the story of the metaverse, then in the Ethereum network, which is closest to the real metaverse, the domain name is also a representation of identity and has its own value.

The wealth effect caused by this OG airdrop is truly amazing.

A piece of news circulated in the community: a Chinese community builder was successfully selected as an ENS contributor and received a contributor airdrop of 46,000 tokens. The user is quite young and is currently studying at university. He did not invest a large amount of capital in the crypto market, but "accidentally" achieved financial freedom through community building, which aroused the envy of many investors.

Based on the current price, one ENS costs about US$60, and the airdrop of 46,000 ENS is equivalent to approximately US$2.78 million.

As long as you have registered an ENS domain name before, you can get the airdrop qualification, and the community, contributors and other people involved in the ecological construction can get more substantial airdrops. This airdrop covers 138,000 addresses, which is another large-scale carnival.

The generosity of ENS is certainly one of the reasons for this large-scale carnival of getting rich through airdrops, but the value of ENS is more important. After all, without market recognition, the price of ENS tokens would be difficult to reach its current high.

ENS: Domain Name System in the Web3 Era

In the Web2 era, we usually manually enter domain names when accessing network services. This habit has been deeply rooted for so long that we almost forget that the domain name service did not appear when the Internet was born.

In the early days of the Internet, communication between devices still relied on IP addresses, a combination of four segments, each with three digits, which is still occasionally used by ordinary users, such as 192.168.1.1 when you set up a router.

It is almost impossible for users to remember the corresponding IP address of each website manually, and the emergence of DNS service solves this problem. DNS service binds domain names and IP addresses, allowing users to access a specific IP address through a more memorable letter combination.

When we enter the decentralized blockchain world, this function becomes even more important. A 12-digit IP address is already inconvenient to use, so what about a 42-digit combination of numbers and letters?

Think back to the scenario where you need to enter a wallet address. Each time you confirm the address, you have to check the 42 characters one by one. If you enter a wrong character, you will face asset loss. In contrast, in the Web2 era, whether it is a URL, email address, or account name, most of the conventional Internet products we come into contact with only require a user-defined alphanumeric combination to accurately and conveniently find the required address.

Although the concept of decentralization is very attractive, Web3 is still far inferior to the basic services of the Web2 era in terms of user experience. The birth of ENS domain names has improved this problem to a certain extent, providing a DNS-like service for the crypto world.

After using the ENS domain name, users can resolve the customized example.eth to the corresponding Ethereum address. In the transfer, transferring to the .eth address is equivalent to transferring to the 42-bit Ethereum address. On platforms or tools that support ENS, such as OpenSea and chain browsers, the user address will also be directly displayed as a .eth address.

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

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 full integration of DNS Namespace on Ethereum, allowing users to associate any ".com" domain name with an Ethereum address. ENS services now support 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 limitation is no longer applicable. The trend of ENS domain names has even spread outside the circle. In August this year, the beer brand Budweiser purchased "beer.eth" for 30 ETH.

Unlike traditional DNS domain names, ICANN has certified hundreds of service providers that provide domain name registration services and charge registration fees in the traditional Internet. On the Ethereum network, ENS is the most widely used domain name system.

Airdrop financial freedom, participation in the community will eventually pay off

The description of receiving airdrops to gain financial freedom may be a bit exaggerated, but among the users who received ENS airdrops, the amount of airdrops received by some individual addresses is astonishing.

Currently, the price of ENS is about $60. Based on this price, how much assets did the users who received the most airdrops get? After querying all the airdrop recipient addresses, we found the addresses that received the most airdrops.

On-chain data shows that a total of 6 addresses received more than 100,000 ENS airdrops.

Among them, a contract address with the first four digits of "0xd7" may be the biggest winner of this airdrop. It received 1 million ENS, equivalent to about 60 million US dollars.

The number of airdrops received by "0x3a" ranked second, and it received 294,000 ENS, equivalent to about 17.64 million US dollars. beccaliebert.eth received 170,000 ENS, which is the third address to receive the most airdrops, equivalent to about 10.2 million US dollars. "0xfe" received 165,000 ENS, ranking third in the number of airdrops, equivalent to about 9.9 million US dollars.

Just like the college student mentioned at the beginning of this article, there are “only” 46,296.3 contributor airdrops, and 46 addresses have already received them.

The huge airdrops of up to tens of millions of dollars may make users who did not receive the airdrops regret it. But looking back at the airdrop rules, you may get a little comfort: these airdrops of up to 100,000 or 1 million coins are not necessarily for individuals. 25% of the total supply of ENS will be airdropped to ENS contributors, and these contributors include more than 100 individuals and teams. In other words, part of these huge airdrops are shared by a team, which may be the reason why several contract addresses appear in the airdrop receiving address.

A fairer airdrop scheme caused domain name dealers to miss out on tens of millions of dollars

Domain name speculation has been around since the Internet era, and there are naturally many domain name merchants in decentralized domain name services. The number of ENS domain names held by domain name merchants is extremely large. Etherscan data shows that there are 20 wallet addresses holding more than 1,000 domain names.

ENS airdrops adopt a more fair calculation mechanism: independent addresses are used as the basis for calculation, and holding multiple domain names does not increase the number of airdrops. This means that holding more ENS domain names in one address does not allow you to receive more airdrops. Although this distribution method is less friendly to large users, it is relatively fairer. This plan also avoids the behavior of wool party members in previous airdrop activities to the greatest extent by brushing transaction volume, position and other data to receive airdrops in batches.

Domain name traders usually hoard a large number of domain names in the same address, which causes them to miss out on airdrops that are several, dozens, or even hundreds of times higher.

Dune Analytics data shows that 403,000 ENS domain names have been created so far, but there are only 152,000 unique addresses holding domain names. This also means that a large number of addresses hold multiple domain names at the same time.

ENS exists on the chain in the form of ERC-721 token, so we can estimate the domain name holdings from the token holdings.

After the ENS domain name expires, the domain name can no longer be resolved normally, but the ERC-721 token will not be destroyed immediately. After the domain name is registered by another address, the original ERC-721 will be sent to the black hole for destruction. Therefore, the Etherscan data is not accurate and can only be used as a reference.

The ENS ERC-721 tokens held by the top four addresses alone account for more than half of the total ENS domain names. For example, the address ending in "28e2" holds up to 40,798 ENS domain names, making it the largest ENS ERC-721 token holding address, accounting for 29.1% of all ENS.

The address "28e2" will not receive more airdrops for holding 40,000 domain names. This airdrop will issue 25 million ENS to ENS users, with an average of 180 ENS per address. Assuming that the 40,000 domain names have not expired and are held by 40,000 addresses, it can be simply estimated that the user will receive 7.2 million ENS, equivalent to approximately US$432 million.

Leading project tokens are launched, and the value of the track is put to the test in the market

There are more than 137,000 addresses eligible for this airdrop, and the scale of this airdrop is gratifying. Just two months ago, the large-scale airdrop of dYdX once ignited the enthusiasm of the market, and the number of users who were eligible to receive dYdX airdrop was "only" 36,000, less than one-third of this airdrop.

Through a set of official public data, we can have a clearer understanding of the airdrop amount: a total of 25 million ENS were airdropped to users, with an average of 180 per address. Independent addresses that meet various conditions and have reached the upper limit of registration time can receive up to 1,179.

The airdrops are still being claimed, and the feast is still going on. The price of ENS has also become the next issue that people are concerned about. The price of ENS has been rising from about $30 when the liquidity pool was first created, and is currently hovering around $60.

Dune Analytics data shows that 55,000 addresses have received the airdrop, with a total of 11 million ENS, and 56% of ENS has not yet been received. It is still difficult to determine whether these ENS will impact the market after being received.

As a concept that is not new, the decentralized domain name track has returned to the center of the market. After years of development and construction, the value of ENS domain names has finally been tested by the market. After the short-term hype at the beginning of the issuance, where the ENS market value will stabilize may determine the market potential of the entire track.