Author: Alex Liu, Foresight News
On the evening of March 5, RedStone launched its airdrop query. Since its listing on Binance's pre-market on February 28, RED has hit Binance's newly introduced price limit mechanism for three consecutive days. After the price limit was lifted, it briefly reached above $1.4, currently reported at $0.87, with a market cap of $34 million and a fully diluted market cap of $860 million.
As the latest Launchpad project from Binance, RedStone has attracted considerable attention in the community, especially with many participants in the airdrop activity. Known for its low-cost price oracle services, the project has not experienced any significant pricing errors since its launch and has received support from well-known investment institutions such as Coinbase Ventures and Blockchain Capital. However, after the airdrop query page went live last night, the community's sentiment took a sharp turn, with some netizens even calling it a "scam project." Why is that?
Looking at its tokenomics, a 10% community airdrop ratio is not insignificant, but it does not explain the issue. On social media, community users reported that they had participated in tasks for years (such as mining activities in S1-S3 seasons, hundreds of tasks on Zealy, Spring Festival activities, etc.), yet still did not receive an airdrop. In RedStone's official statement, I found the answer.
Without specific roles in the RedStone Discord, one cannot receive tokens! Eligible roles include Vein Master, Deep Miner, Professor, IRL (those who have participated in offline activities), etc., while among nearly 230,000 community members in RedStone Discord, the proportion of those holding any of the above roles is less than 2%!
The limited number of tokens alone might not have caused such outrage among community users (currently, RedStone DC has enabled "slow mode" due to excessive criticism), but the actual reward mechanism being inconsistent with the project's promotion has left many users feeling their efforts were "in vain," which is likely the crux of the problem.
In past promotions, the project team stated, "Your points will be the key basis for future airdrops!" However, in reality, the top 10 holders in the RSG points ranking, including the 5th and 7th places, were disqualified from receiving RED tokens due to not having Discord roles. The leaderboard has over 170,000 people, but only 2,296 addresses are eligible. Among the approximately 200,000 members in the entire community, only about 4,000 ultimately meet the conditions for receiving the airdrop, with many users receiving only a few hundred tokens, making the distribution logic appear extremely "selective" compared to other mainstream projects in the market.
Data from: @OshinoAJ_eth
Thus, what truly incited the community's anger is — RedStone's event design is filled with high-intensity "PUA" style marketing: by continuously releasing tasks to attract user participation, it creates the illusion that "as long as you are diligent, you can earn rewards," while in reality, it sets invisible barriers in the threshold, excluding a large number of ordinary users who invested time and resources at the last moment.
This goes against industry norms. Other airdrop projects in the industry typically place greater emphasis on the inclusiveness of user participation in their distribution mechanisms. In dYdX's airdrop activity, tens of thousands of participating users who meet the conditions generally receive a certain amount of governance tokens; while projects like Optimism have clear, fair, and transparent airdrop rules, aiming to cover more ecosystem users.
In contrast, RedStone's "special role" threshold seems overly narrow, making it difficult to incentivize the long-term activity and trust of the entire community.
Conclusion
The project team may have attempted to implement a more refined incentive mechanism in the airdrop distribution to ensure that core users receive a higher proportion of rewards, but this approach undoubtedly overlooks the contributions and expectations of the broader participants.
In the long run, airdrops are not only a promotional tool to attract users but also an important indicator of a project's governance transparency and ecosystem health. The current controversy undoubtedly serves as a wake-up call for the entire industry: only by establishing a fair, open, and reasonable incentive distribution mechanism can users truly feel the value of participation, thereby promoting the sustained prosperity of the entire ecosystem.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
