Author: Alex Liu, Foresight News
On the evening of March 5th, RedStone opened the airdrop query. Since its listing on the Binance pre-market on February 28th, RED has hit the new price limit mechanism launched by Binance for three consecutive days. After the price limit was lifted, it once reached above $1.4, and is currently reported at $0.87, with a market capitalization of $34 million and a fully diluted market capitalization of $860 million.
As the latest Launchpad project of Binance, RedStone has also attracted a lot of participation in the airdrop activity, which has attracted much attention in the community. As a provider of price oracles known for its low cost, the project has not had any major pricing errors since its launch, and has also received support from well-known investment institutions such as Coinbase Ventures and Blockchain Capital. However, this shining star has seen its community reputation plummet sharply after the launch of the airdrop query page last night, with some netizens even calling it a "scam project". Why is this?
Looking at its token economics, the 10% community airdrop ratio is not low, which is not enough to explain the problem. On social platforms, some community users have feedback that they have participated in multi-year tasks (such as the mining activities of S1-S3 seasons, hundreds of tasks on Zealy, Spring Festival activities, etc.), but still have not received the airdrop. The answer was found in RedStone's official statement.
Only those with specific roles in the RedStone Discord can receive the tokens! Eligible roles include Vein Master, Deep Miner, Professor, and IRL (participated in offline activities), but the proportion of RedStone Discord's nearly 230,000 community members with any of the above roles is less than 2%!
It may not be the small amount of tokens given that makes the community users so angry (the RedStone DC has currently entered "slow mode" due to too many criticism voices), but the actual reward mechanism is inconsistent with the project's promotion, which has made many users "wasted their efforts", which is probably the key to the problem.
In the past promotion, the project team directly stated that "your points will be the key basis for future airdrops!" But in reality, the top 10 RSG point holders, including the 5th and 7th, are ineligible to receive RED tokens because they don't have Discord roles. The leaderboard has a total of over 170,000 people, but only 2,296 addresses are eligible. Among the entire community of about 200,000 members, only about four thousand people meet the airdrop eligibility criteria, and many of them only receive a few hundred tokens, which seems extremely "selective" compared to the distribution logic of other mainstream projects in the market.
Data from: @OshinoAJ_eth
So what really angered the community members is - RedStone's activity design is full of high-intensity "PUA" style marketing: by constantly releasing tasks to attract users to participate, creating the illusion that "as long as you are diligent enough, you can get the reward", but in fact, there are invisible barriers set in the threshold, excluding a large number of ordinary users who have invested a lot of time and resources at the last moment.
This goes against industry practice. Other airdrop projects in the industry usually focus more on the breadth of user participation in their distribution mechanisms. In the dYdX airdrop, tens of thousands of participating and eligible users generally received a certain amount of governance tokens; while in projects like Optimism, their airdrop rules are clear, fair and transparent, aiming to cover more ecosystem users.
In comparison, RedStone's "special role" threshold seems too narrow, and is difficult to motivate the long-term activity and trust of the entire community.
Conclusion
The project team may have tried to achieve a more refined incentive mechanism in the airdrop distribution to ensure that core users can receive a higher proportion of rewards, but this approach undoubtedly ignores the efforts and expectations of the vast majority of participants.
In the long run, airdrops are not only a means of attracting users, but also an important indicator for measuring the transparency of project governance and the health of the ecosystem. The current controversy has undoubtedly sounded the alarm for the entire industry: only by establishing a fair, open and reasonable incentive distribution mechanism can users truly feel the value of participation, and thus drive the sustained prosperity of the entire ecosystem.
