Why Do Pre-TGE Communities Often Become Abandoned?
The controversy surrounding Scroll's airdrop fully illustrates that
before generating liquidity related to the main coin, any "community" prior to TGE is essentially meaningless.
This has been confirmed countless times in practice; just look at:
Sui, which did not provide any airdrops during its three rounds of testnet, only giving whitelists to exchanges and Discord activity users, leading to widespread criticism of SuiScam in the early stages. However, after listing, the Cetus IDO and Bullperk user rewards increased usage and TVL, successfully reversing the trend.
APT, which provided low guarantees for minting NFTs on the testnet, faced a wave of mojito rug pulls and subsequent project fatigue after the mainnet launch, becoming a meme coin in Korea for a time. To this day, aside from a few Thala,土狗GUI, and DOODOO, the ecosystem has not improved.
Merlin, which had a strong community consensus at the start with all BTC, generously distributed community airdrops at launch (even when some large TVL holders' airdrops had not been fulfilled), could not maintain its price and was similarly criticized across the network (because many staked assets had gone to zero).
Whether or not to issue airdrops to early users will always attract criticism; the reputation of later projects is not directly related to whether airdrops are given, but rather to expectation management and the clusters bound by token interests later on.
Originally, the purpose of building a community and gathering data in the early stages of a project was to negotiate with exchanges as leverage. The means serve the purpose without a doubt, and this has nothing to do with the arrogance of the project party. Loyalty is not absolute; it is absolutely disloyal. Only communities that generate liquidity binding with the project are truly communities. And this is mostly impossible before TGE.
Secondly, project parties are fundamentally unable to deliver redeemable and transparent rules in advance. They engage users to get listed, but the listing strategies of exchanges vary every quarter and every month. Whether your project is good or not is one thing; what truly determines whether you can get listed is your alignment with the current listing strategy and the costs you are willing to incur for it (part of the strategy). This cost may not be known until a week or even a few days before TGE. Therefore, @jason_chen998's reiteration of @yezhang1998's grievances is completely true.
You think you are working for the project party, but the entire industry, including Polychain and the Ethereum Foundation, is actually working for Binance.
Thirdly, for L2, this issue is even more troublesome, as its gas is primarily BTC and ETH, and the main trading pairs are also quoted in these tokens. This means that after the L2 main coin is launched, it cannot, like APT or SUI, at least have a holding logic for splitting the market; it must be distributed—after the L2 main coin is launched, all secondary retail holdings can be seen as selling pressure.
So why would you think L2 would generously give you airdrops?
Therefore, if you are a user looking to take advantage, and you find the airdrop logic discussed in open-source scissors 13 and 16 too complex, remember:
Do not engage with project coins that cannot be used for market splitting, such as most Layer 2s.
Focus on tasks that generate real money and real transactions, but do not aim for high volume in a single task; instead, aim for a broad scope.
If possible, become a project party, become a KOL, and be the one who can threaten the project party's listing process through public opinion.
Maintain a calm mindset; Scroll is not the first, and it certainly won't be the last. Think about Pinduoduo's "cutting a knife"—you know it's a scam, but did your mom stop sending you links?
As Bingwa said, "Power is only accountable to the source of power." Understanding this early will benefit you.
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