Plasma Airdrop: Minimum deposit of $0.1 to exchange for $13,000

Author: Frank, PANews

The token XPL of the Plasma project sparked widespread market attention after its launch on the night of September 25. Unlike previous airdrops in the crypto world that often cover hundreds of thousands of addresses with a “scattergun” approach, Plasma adopted a completely opposite “elitist” strategy. It created an astonishing wealth effect for a small number of early participants through a high-threshold public presale and high-value targeted airdrops.

This model not only allowed the project to achieve strong price performance and positive community reputation in the early stage of its launch, but also triggered a deep reflection on the future airdrop mechanism in the industry: will it become a new paradigm to say goodbye to the “hairy party” and witch attacks, and turn to rewarding real capital and deep contributors? PANews provides an in-depth look at how XPL is acquired, how it performs on-chain data, and the industry implications behind it.

According to a PANews investigation, there are three ways for users to obtain tokens on-chain during this Plasma TGE event. First, by participating in the public presale in July, with a total allocation of 1 billion XPL tokens at a cost of $0.05 per user. Second, there is an airdrop reward similar to a sunny day, where the conditions for obtaining this portion of tokens are small depositors who completed verification with Sonar ( by Echo) and participated in this sale. The third type is an unknown airdrop, which distributed tokens to a total of 178 addresses, with allocation amounts varying from 1,250 to 45,000 tokens, totaling approximately 3.3 million XPL distributed.

Public Offering Frenzy: A Wealth Feast Customized for Whales

According to the data from the public offering, a total of 3021 public addresses received tokens, with a total token amount of approximately 987 million, and the amount received accounts for 98.7%. From the distribution of the public offering's allocation, a significant characteristic of this XPL public offering is that it is dominated by large holders, with very few retail investors.

The average number of tokens claimed per public offering address is 670,000, calculated at the highest price of $1.45 after issuance. The average amount that these public offering addresses can receive has reached $970,000, which is close to the per capita level of one million dollars.

Among them, 166 addresses applied for more than 1 million tokens, and a total of 796 million tokens were received, accounting for 8% of the total public offering size. There are 18 addresses that claim more than 10 million tokens. These 18 addresses received more than 377 million tokens, accounting for more than 37% of the public sale. The highest single address received 54.08 million coins, worth about $78.41 million at the highest price.

There are about 883 addresses with less than 1,000 claims, and only about 246,000 tokens have been claimed in total.

Based on the previous on-chain investment amount, the cost price of this public sale is $0.05 per token, and the high price is $1.45, with a maximum increase of about 29 times. This has also made a lot of money for many KOLs, taking KOL CBB as an example, he is the third address in this round of applications, with an initial investment of about $1.71 million. In the end, more than 34 million tokens were claimed, with a maximum value of $49.63 million and a profit of $47.92 million. As of September 26, CBB has transferred about 74.6% of the tokens.

Another case is HongKongDoll, whose initial investment was $50,000, and the highest return this time was $1.35 million. As of September 26, all XPL tokens have been transferred from her on-chain address.

For these large holders, this public offering of XPL seems to have become airdrop with a threshold. Therefore, when KOLs showcase the number of tokens on social media, they almost all receive unanimous praise and envious looks from the community.

Precise Airdrop: “Targeted Gifts” under “Sunshine”

In addition to public fundraising, Plasma has also arranged two types of airdrops, one of which is a collaboration with Binance to distribute 100 million tokens through the subscription of Plasma USDT regular products.

Another way is to directly airdrop to early users who participated in on-chain deposits. According to the data, the airdrop amount of XPL is not considered large. The total amount of airdrops allocated to users this time is 25 million tokens, which is valued at approximately 36.25 million USD.

However, with 9,304 per user, the maximum value is more than $13,000. Therefore, as long as the users who get the airdrop will feel that it is a lot of income. In the on-chain airdrop, a total of 2,687 addresses received this airdrop. Among them, 2,603 addresses also participated in XPL's public presale. In other words, the actual XPL airdrop is basically another additional gift to the early public offering users.

In addition, many people on social media are discussing whether the airdrop of 9304 tokens for a pre-deposit of 1 dollar in Plasma is the highest cost-performance airdrop in history. So, does this situation really exist? According to the data, there are indeed users who deposited as low as 0.1 dollars and eventually received 9304 tokens in the airdrop. This return rate is as high as 134,000 times, which may be even higher than the price surge of the most hyped MEME coins.

After the public offering and airdrop claims, the price of XPL did not experience a concentrated sell-off that led to a decline. Instead, it rose against the trend, leaving a deep impression on the market. Many users believe that the reason for this increase is that the main beneficiaries of this public offering or airdrop are mainly large holders, who have more investment patience compared to retail investors.

However, by the afternoon of September 26, 71.9% of the claimed tokens on the chain had been transferred, and these tokens may have been transferred to exchanges, and some have been sorted into new wallets. There are 37 wallet addresses that not only did not reduce their positions, but also chose to increase their positions, with a total increase of more than 2.2 million tokens. There are 618 addresses (accounting for about 18.8%) that have chosen not to move so far, and have not made any token transfer activities.

Mystery Distribution and Market Enlightenment: KOL's “Red Envelope” and New Airdrop Paradigm

Compared to the mainstream interactive airdrops before, Plasma's alternative airdrop scheme has indeed received good results.

Although the number of airdrop slots has significantly decreased from millions to just a few thousand compared to previous projects, the airdrop amount per address has reached a higher level. Without testing the interaction process, there is no longer an unfair perception among users who engage more but have less funding. Furthermore, since users receiving the airdrop generally obtain public offering shares, their profit margin far exceeds the airdrop amount. For them, the airdrop amount feels more like a commemorative prize, and whether it's more or less is not the core interest.

Therefore, the comments seen on social media are mostly about sharing experiences and regretting not participating in the interactions. There are almost no complaints. Among the various airdrop interaction projects previously counted by PANews, perhaps only the case of Hyperliquid is similar to this.

Looking back at the share of this airdrop, Plasma officially contributed about 128 million tokens, with airdrop scale of approximately 185.6 million dollars, which is much less than Magic Eden, Berachain, and Hyperliquid. However, it has gained more in terms of reputation and token performance.

This also seems to provide a new way of thinking for subsequent TGE projects, that is, free interaction is no longer used as the airdrop condition, but a certain investment threshold is set as the airdrop standard. This not only solves the problem of a large number of witches who rely on interactive hair, but also achieves higher returns for a single address. Although the airdrop scale or interaction data is no longer conspicuous, it can get more positive feedback on the community's reputation and market performance. Perhaps this generous airdrop and strategy formulation is the result of the reflection of the Plasma team from Blast on the pain of airdrops, after all, Blast relied on complex airdrop strategies to stir up the market, but quickly failed after the airdrop.

In summary, the token issuance of Plasma is a well-planned and successful experiment that goes against the mainstream airdrop model. By concentrating chips in the hands of a few capital whales and core contributors, it not only effectively avoided witch attacks and centralized selling pressure after going online, but also gained excellent community reputation and market attention through an astonishing wealth effect.

Although there is controversy over the fairness of this model of “disliking the poor and loving the rich”, its strong effectiveness in the early stage of the project has undoubtedly provided a new idea worth pondering for the entire industry - the future airdrop may no longer be a free lunch, but a value crowning real capital and deep participation.