Bryan Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero Labs, stated that the post-airdrop price of LayerZero’s native token remained stable thanks to a combination of aggressive Sybil filtering and prioritizing developers and “resilient” users.

Pellegrino said at Korea Blockchain Week that LayerZero did a lot of “very unique” things during the airdrop and conducted a massive Sybil hunt to thwart bots and overscanning. With this strategy, they aimed to get LayerZero (ZRO) tokens into the hands of the users who support the network the most.

“It was our goal to reward real users, to reward the most dedicated and resilient users,” Pellegrino said.

ZRO’s price is a stark contrast to tokens from Ethereum layer-2 network rivals Starknet and ZKsync. These tokens were also released via airdrop in 2024.

Pellegrino stated that the primary goal when airdropping for any team is to “close the gap between expectations and reality,” and added that LayerZero works hard to achieve this balance.

“We did a big Sybil hunt,” Pellegrino said. “When we first announced Sybil, we had a very strong negative reaction because people didn’t expect it to happen,” he said.

“But once people started to see that we were really trying hard and that our goal was to provide a higher allocation to real users, they were positive about the Sybil hunt,” he said. LayerZero airdropped ZRO tokens on June 20, and according to CoinGecko data, the initial price in the market was determined as $ 4.40.

While it has received criticism for requiring users to donate to claim the airdrop — which Pellegrino acknowledged the team did not “give advance notice” of — ZRO’s price has fallen 23% since its launch. Starknet (STRK) token was airdropped to 1.3 million wallet addresses on February 20 and entered the market at $5.

However, Starknet’s token launch was marred by allegations that the project prioritized internal users and did not protect against “airdrop squatters.” It was alleged that these airdrop squatters manipulated metrics on GitHub to obtain a disproportionate amount of STRK tokens.

Pseudonym Banteg noted that an estimated 701,544 of the 1.3 million wallet addresses eligible for the STRK airdrop were associated with renamed GitHub accounts controlled by squatters.

The price of Starknet’s STRK token has fallen more than 91% since its launch, with the number of active addresses dropping from nearly 380,000 on February 20 to just 8,300 at the time of publication, data from Starkscan.

ZKsync airdropped the ZK token on June 17, and its initial price was set at $0.31, according to CoinGecko data. However, its price fell more than 67% to $0.10 at the time of publication.

Like Starknet, ZKsync’s airdrop has been criticized for implementing “almost no Sybil filtering” and it has been suggested that the airdrop was scanned by predatory airdrop hunters who were never a valid network user.

Mudit Gupta, chief information security officer of rival layer-2 network Polygon, said in an X post on June 11, “ZKsync airdrop is out. “Probably the most scanned airdrop,” he commented, adding, “There’s almost no Sybil filtering from what I’ve seen.” “Anyone who knew the criteria could easily scan this.”