I feel like I've talked a lot about liquid staking tokens for Ethereum and possibly moving into Solana now but I never really touched much on the platform that started it all and that platform is Eigenlayer.
EigenLayer.xyz is where the idea of restaking Ethereum was born and it seems to be taking the proof of stake world by storm.
Since this Eigen and the community has hinted on a possible airdrop of EIGEN tokens for a long time now. With some news now coming out about it we know a few things already.
The first of which these tokens will be non tradeable. However they could possibly be traded still on side markets or DMs etc. which is currently pegging the price of around $9 per token which is actully pretty high.
A total of 1.67 million tokens have already been issued coming in at roughly a 15 billion yes BILLION dollar token at launch.
The other issue is even though these drops are happening they are also geolocked meaning unless you're in one of the approved countries you can't claim your drop tokens.
Eigen Next Steps
It should come as no surprise the EigenLayer has dominated the restaking scene and because of that they have a treasure trove of wealth and possibilities to continue to build.
The main focus for Eigen is still Ethereum and opening up possibilities with it's restaking feature. To me this is a good bet as you would want to make what made you a success in the first place a primary on going focus.
They are also looking to expand future contacts via perps or perpetual futures contracts. These are contracts that have no expiration date where people simply allow people to speculate the future price of a asset without trading it outright.
Universal Intersubjective Work Token
Maybe the worlds worst name ever otherwise known as UIWT or UIW is a under the hood system of powering the EigenLayer platform.
The airdrop however has come under a TON of backlash in terms of how the company has gone about it. It's pretty clear that the company is afraid of SEC and other oversight and is trying to be as critical and careful as possible. Which all this is doing is either counting a ton of people out of the airdrop that should be getting it for no reason at all except for the platform being scared of regulatory backlash.
Which let me stop on that point...
Regulation like the SEC is suppose to BOOST confidence for investing. Not destroy it which is all the SEC has managed to do for a very long time now. This is one of those very clear example of how regulation is doing the opposite.
Because of the confusing laws and randomness of SEC attacks it's always unclear to many companies if they can launch a airdrop token or not or if they are going to a year or a few months later (even after getting the greenlight from the SEC) be attacked and sued because of what they did. It's a seriously HUGE issue right now and has been for a while that needs to be corrected and I'm going to be honest I'm not so faithful that the house, president etc are going to be capable of doing that.
I do love my country but I would give my life for my plot of land that I own over defending a government that has becoming increasingly aggressive towards it's population and I feel like a vast majority of Americans are feeling that way which is a big issue that the USA doesn't seem to be correcting at all.
Now back on to the airdrop issues as you can see with how random this airdrop is, who's allowed and the non tradeable aspect of it, it's heated up into a rather large debate. Instead of something which should be good for your company and industry has instead backfired. This is where companies like this are becoming overly scared of what if and it would be better off if they simply didn't launch their own airdrop IMO.
What are you thoughts?