Yeah, as a "smaller"/newbie team, it's definitely difficult - you really need to make some deeper connections within the validator / bigger investor community to stand a chance on some networks (if you're not early to the party).

The best way as a small team is to target testnets, stay active in them / etc, and push hard to become a genesis validator (you usually can pick up some nice incentivization/delegations for doing so). This however, is still an investment of both time + resources, and does not guarantee that the token will even be worth anything. You could also be waiting months for anything to come of it (case in point, NOMIC).

As for the airdrop: this is actually one of the few that I DO support. It's a straight up DAO/community governance token, and isn't meant to be "valuable" to anyone that doesn't actually delegate/participate in the cZERO community.

So in this scenario, I think this is a good move - they're doubling their normal ecological contributions (10% -> 20%) + also giving their community a chance to have a say in WHERE that money is being donated each month. They're even rewarding their delegators for participating by giving them 10% commissions back.

I think it's a pretty unique way to use DAODAO, so I'm hoping that it plays out well for them.

At WhisperNode, we've decided we are going to help Hive account@carbonzerozone as much as we possibly can - we're going to be firing over roughly 9k in $EVMOS delegations within the next 24hrs or so. This should help propel them a LOT closer to the active set, so we really just need to see others become willing to take the leap - no one wants to lose daily yields on this RN, which is totally understandable, but if everyone took even a 10-50 $EVMOS leap on them, they'd easily fly past the floor and stay in a healthy position.

Wishing them all the best of luck!