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Imagine waking up to find you’ve had almost $2M dropped into your crypto wallet…
Seems a little too-good-to-be-true, right?
Well, it’s not.
This actually happened to someone earlier this week, during the Ethena Labs airdrop (aka crypto giveaway) campaign, and after looking into it — it seems like a helluva strategic move by Ethena.
Here’s what we mean:
Ethena Labs runs a synthetic dollar cryptocurrency, $USDe. At launch, they created the ‘Shard’ campaign which incentivizes people to contribute to their ecosystem.
You could earn points (or shards) through purchasing and staking $USDe or by telling your friends to interact with the ecosystem (like a crypto referral program).
The main objective here was to onboard people into the ecosystem.
(Which our man with the $2M airdrop maxed out on).
But this is where Ethena got really freaking smart.
The airdrop didn’t reward early users with $USDe, but instead, Ethena’s new governance token $ENA.
(Where, for every $ENA token someone holds, they get one vote in any changes made to the network).
In doing so, Ethena was able to reward early users without diluting the supply of $USDe, and simultaneously incentivizing users to vote, participate, and help to grow its ecosystem.
Round of applause to the Ethena Labs team!
