TL;DR

• Imagine waking up to find you’ve been airdropped almost $2M into your crypto wallet (this actually happened to someone during the Ethena airdrop).

Full Story

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!