Why the Scroll Layer 2 token airdrop, announced today, annoys some users

“Our first airdrop fairly rewards key contributors within the Scroll ecosystem. The allocation of SCR tokens reflects the importance of participation, involvement, and community support,” according to a Monday morning blog post by Scroll. 

Over 570,000 wallets are expected to receive 5.5% of the token supply, including more than 600 open-source contributors, 115 technical contributors, over 100 ZK researchers and more than 10 public goods organizations and data providers.

These recipients of the “community drop” will collectively receive 55,000,000 SCR tokens, worth approximately $77,000,000. The majority of that amount, 40 million SCR tokens, will be “proportionally allocated among onchain participants who have accumulated” Scroll’s version of points, called marks, as of a snapshot on Oct. 19.

The SCR token’s price is up 6% on the day, currently trading hands at $1.40.

An additional 10 million tokens, representing 1% of the total token supply, is set aside as a “Flat Boost,” a program Scroll designed to ensure all onchain participants “receive a meaningful drop” regardless of how many marks they collected. 

Scroll, a network that uses zero-knowledge proofs to scale Ethereum, is one of the last established Layer 2s to airdrop a native token. 

Although the token distribution was much anticipated, many community members have expressed concern over how the token generation event was designed. 

“The problem is the team's approach to airdrop design in general, which apparently will not take into account the interests of regular users (retail) - which in my opinion is a bad trend for the cryptocurrency market in general,” user Andrew 10 GWEI told The Block in a direct message. 

In particular, some have expressed dismay that 5.5% of the tokens were given to Binance Launchpool, which created a situation where “Binance/BNB whales or any other whales just grabbed most of the tokens for themselves” while token farming with a two-day lead, Andrew said. They will be a “subsequent dump from people who have never once used the scroll network.”

“In other words, we have two categories of users — Binance users and the Scroll users,” he added. 

Additionally, the top 10 wallets own more than 10% of all accrued marks, while the top 100 wallets have a total of around 250 million marks, or about 30% of all the points accrued to date.

“It's hard to call it decentralization when such a large share of token supply falls into the hands of a few people,” Andrew said. 

This point was echoed by @katexbt, who launched an online store on  Scroll  and thinks that the airdrop is designed to benefit Sybil  farmers or users who run bots to game it.  

Finally, there are concerns that SCR’s tokenomics are heavily weighted toward the team. With 23% of the total supply allocated to the team and 10% to fundraising, that represents tokens worth $322 million at current prices.

“I don't see any fair justification for the team to claim airdrop allocations aimed at rewarding loyal users,” Andrew said. “I realize that ‘making everyone or the majority happy’ is impossible in the current market conditions, but it is worth trying not to leave them completely disappointed, which is more realistic. "