Lighter, a decentralized trade (DEX) that gives perpetual futures buying and selling, carried out one of many greatest token giveaways in crypto historical past, at the same time as critics continued to query how the venture break up its token provide.
Lighter airdropped a complete of $675 million value of Lighter Infrastructure Tokens (LIT) to early members on Tuesday, accordingly the blockchain knowledge visualization platform Bubblemaps. “$675M airdropped to early members. $30M withdrawn from Lighter (solely),” wrote Bubblemaps in a Tuesday X submit.
The $675 million whole makes the Lighter airdrop the tenth largest airdrop by US greenback worth in cryptocurrency historical past, accordingly to crypto knowledge aggregator CoinGecko.
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The Lighter airdrop surpassed 1inch Community’s $671 million airdrop for the tenth place, however remained behind LooksRare’s $712 million airdrop from 2022.
Nevertheless, the $675 million pales compared to the $6.43 billion of worth distributed by way of the Uniswap airdrop in 2020, the most important within the trade up to now.
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Holders keep put after token era occasion
A few of Lighter’s earliest adopters, reminiscent of pseudonymous crypto investor Didi, reported receiving an over six-figure airdrop from the DEX.
As of Wednesday, about 75% of the airdrop recipients had been holding the tokens, whereas 7% of recipients had purchased extra LIT tokens on the open market, signaling confidence within the long-awaited DEX token, in line with knowledge shared by blockchain sleuth Arndxt in an X post.
Nonetheless, buyers have voiced issues over Lighter’s tokenomics, as 50% of LIT’s provide is reserved for the ecosystem, whereas the remaining 50% was allocated to the group and buyers, with a one-year cliff and a multi-year vesting schedule.
Some group members pointed out that the 50% group allocation was excessively excessive for a DeFi venture, whereas others criticized the tokenomics for resembling the mannequin introduced by one among its most important rivals, Hyperliquid.
The LIT token stood at a $678 million market capitalization as of 11:20 am UTC, buying and selling above $2.71, in line with crypto intelligence platform Nansen.
Nevertheless, merchants shopping for on the present worth ranges could solely profit from a “short-term commerce,” as a long-term market alternative would require considerably extra buying and selling quantity and “person retention,” wrote crypto investor Casa, in a Tuesday X post.
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