Those of us who are seeing all the new found interest in cryptocurrencies when everything is green and rosy can sometimes feel a little bit overlooked. After all, there were many of us who stuck around when things were difficult and built up positions in the long, cold months of crypto winter! More to the point, we were the ones that using and testing the various platforms that now form the backbone of DeFi and other protocols, making this a much better place than the horrible ICO scams of the previous bull market.
So, it can be really quite nice when we see some of these protocols and platforms reward their long time loyal users with drops of tokens. Gone are the days of crazy airdrop tokens for doing nothing except dumping an Ethereum address. Now, the best drops are those that reward users for past use and new users for actual use. Odd notion, dumping free tokens on people for doing nothing only causes a dump... rewarding users (past and previous) for using the protocol makes much more sense.
Those that do retroactive drops for past use are even better! These are the ones that have regocnised that they wouldn't have gotten to where they are without the loyal support of their past users. Examples of these drops have be the UNI and SDT drops which have turned out to be nice presents for those who managed to collect them. It really starts to incentivise real usage behavior rather than chasing after the newest hyped fad.
The latest of the retroactive drops is the POOL governance token from the no-loss lottery PoolTogether on Ethereum. If you have used this no loss lottery, then you will have woken up to a pretty nice surprise! They have structured the airdrop to be more beneficial to users that have been staked to the protocol for a longer time, plus a little bit of tweaking to reduce the amount that larger stakers receive to even up the distribution!
Previously, the governance was conducted on a one vote per participating address. Similar to a normal democratic election, but in the end, it is really hard to distinguish between addresses and individuals. We know that, given a chance to game a system, someone is going to try and do it... So, unfortunately, this model of governance voting is prone in the crypto world to sibyl attacks.
POOL tokens will be used for governance, to open up official no-loss lottery pools... and there seems to be some interesting movement with the protocol opening up to community created pools. They have released the smart contracts, so anyone can start up their own lottery pools... and there seems to be some interesting movement with the protocol opening up to community created pools. They have released the smart contracts, so anyone can start up their own lottery pool! The first community pool is for the BOND token (BarnBridge, a protocol for hedging risk), which is running for 13 weeks with a roughly 13000 USD weekly payout!
Following my usual strategy with these airdrops, I have held some and sold some. With some of the unexpected windfall, it was possible to take smaller punts on some interesting ideas, and to move some to BSC for additional benefit on the less expensive chain!
During the first day of POOL trading on Uniswap, it has been an interesting rollercoaster ride for price discovery. From 8 USD per token up to over 20 USD, it is incredibly hard to predict where it is going to end up. I managed to get a pretty nice price for my swaps, so I have no complaints. Perhaps it will rocket up, or coming crashing down... who knows, and that is why you never go all-in one way or another... unless you are a crazy head with too much risk tolerance!
Of course, there is the eye-watering pain of the gas fees on Ethereum... I'm never really going to get used that, and ETH2.0 can't come soon enough. I'm actively considering using at least some of this to move to a Layer 2 on LoopRing or something like that... still, the price a few high price transactions... worth it!
Hi dear