The Eigen Foundation will award an additional $1,000 in EIGEN tokens to over 280,000 users

The $280 million move comes three days after EigenLayer announced its initial plans for its token genesis event, which attracted a slew of criticism, including how the airdrop allocation followed a pattern of linear distribution which favored whales.

According to CoinGecko, EigenLayer’s fully diluted valuation stands at $16 billion.

(Photography)

Published May 2, 2024 at 6:01 pm EST.

The Eigen Foundation announced Thursday that it will award an additional 100 EIGEN tokens, currently worth about $1,000, to more than 280,000 users in an effort to increase the accessibility of its token to early adopters and address community criticism over specific details of the EigenLayer token airdrop.

According to the announcement, the Foundation had initially “earmarked a significant portion of a future season specifically to achieve broader distribution,” but the Foundation has since decided to accelerate its broader distribution of EIGEN by assigning additional tokens to wallet addresses of EigenLayer depositors.

Although still in the pre-launch phase, EIGEN currently is trade to $10.11 on the decentralized exchange Aevo, bringing the total additional allocation to its users to approximately $280 million. EIGEN’s current price on Aevo makes EigenLayer’s fully diluted valuation $16 billion, which is lower than Dogecoin at $18.9 billion but more than layer 1 blockchain network Avalanche at $14.6 billion, data by CoinGecko Shows.

To know more: 5 reasons why e-beggars aren’t happy with EigenLayer’s airdrop

The move comes three days after EigenLayer revealed its initial plans for its token genesis event, plans that have attracted a litany of criticism, ranging from how the airdrop followed a linear distribution model that has favored whales, to confusing documentation that raised more questions than answers for some.

Also, a recent relationship from Blockworks showed that the top 2% of total EigenLayer depositors will receive approximately 90% of the EIGEN airdrop allocation, which shocked many who were not whales, crypto jargon for those who hold large sums of digital assets.

“We got a lot of really positive feedback from people that gas costs were much higher at various times, and because of that, we wanted to make sure that everyone was properly accounted for,” said Robert Drost, executive director of the Eigen Foundation , in an episode of the Unchained podcast.

The latest announcement also states that investors and team members will lock in their EIGEN allocations for one year after EIGEN becomes transferable, which is expected to happen by September 30, when certain features such as carve-out will be implemented.

To know more: What is EigenLayer? A guide to the decentralized ETH restake protocol

The initial lack of details on when EIGEN would become portable was another point of contention. However, “it is so strange that this [transfer restrictions] has been misinterpreted in the opposite direction, EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan said on Friday’s Unchained podcast.

The EIGEN “is untransferable precisely because we are going through so many seasons [where] every season, we allow more tokens to be released and only then does this happen [EIGEN] unlock or transfer for anyone, after the community has a say in participation…. Transfer restrictions are meant to empower users rather than any other phenomenon,” Kannan noted.

The Eigen Foundation also said it was aware that testnet operators were initially excluded from requests and that operators would be added to Phase 2 of the season with additional assignments.

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