A lot of weird things happen when your voting rights can easily be exchanged for cash.
In meatspace politics, this is true and we see signs of it regularly. We see it when powerful lobbying groups buy elected officials to buy more toothpaste or when campaigns spend tons on advertising.
But only in crypto can your vote really be exchanged for money.
Look at the various governance tokens with trading volumes in the hundreds of millions. The equivalent would be telling someone that one of your votes for US President has fallen below its 50-day moving average and is now entering a cup-and-ball formation – in business terms, extremely bearish.
And this week the cryptosphere got another opportunity to dig into this dynamic when Optimism, the Ethereum scaling solutions project, gave 5% of its OP token supply in an airdrop to various users.
Recipients of the OP token can either hold the token and become a member of the DAO, or they can entrust their holdings to someone who may have more knowledge or more time to help develop the project.
The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) did something similar with its airdrop, creating a federal system of sorts.
Nathan van der HaydenA crypto governance guru told at Snapshot Labs decrypt“The values of the Optimism Collective were clearly defined and users were able to choose governance, or delegate it to someone who matches their view. This clear framework allows for quality governance. Well-defined processes are the key to moving a community in the right direction, even more so than good values.”
And the reason for using a top-tier system is based on the assumption that those who use optimism and/or sedentary services (i.e. layer-2 solutions or governance in crypto) are also encouraged to see That the service is constantly improving and flourishing (regardless of token performance).
It is a noble act with good intentions. Still, crypto is a cynical industry.
As soon as AirDrop officially launched, OP collapsed. CoinMarketCap shows that the coin entered the market at 1:30 p.m. EST at around $4.50, and dropped to $0.79 a few hours later.
That is, a decrease of 82 percent. Oh.
What happened? The people who received the OP token immediately threw it away.
Combining data from both Dune Analytics and an optimism-specific block explorer, we can see that approximately 31,800 eligible addresses had abandoned their holdings as of press time.
The massive sell-off has sparked outrage from many in the community, with critics saying users are selling off “responsibility” and ownership of the project.
Bridges is literally running out of liquidity as shameless husband dumps his $op and run back to mainnet
Not so much passion for responsibility tokens and public goods funding during Bera https://t.co/7j6SmvN1hK
— kamikaz TH (@kamikaz_ETH) 1 June 2022
But as van der Heyden said decrypt“People are crazy about AirDrop dumpers because they think AirDrop comes with some sort of digital handshake. ‘I’ll give you this free money, in return you participate in governance and you help our network grow. ‘”
“Indeed,” he said, an airdrop “is without any strings attached.”
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