The Pyth Network Retrospective Airdrop was announced on November 1, 2023. This airdrop program will deliver PYTH Tokens to a number of stakeholders throughout the Pyth Network ecosystem.
This airdrop program is, to our knowledge, the largest of its kind. More than 75,000 wallets will be eligible to receive PYTH Tokens based on their on-chain activity on 27 blockchains and more than 200 decentralized applications. We remain committed to fostering a vibrant oracle ecosystem.
The categories of eligible recipients for an airdrop allocation:
The allocation amounts for DeFi participants are calculated according to their on-chain activity with dApps using Pyth data.
The allocation amounts for community members are based on specific social criteria: holding special roles in the official Discord server, holding Pyth NFTs, and becoming an outperforming member of one of the official Pyth Network Ambassador Programs.
Airdrop allocations for decentralized applications that use Pyth Network’s data are based on the number of oracle calls made to the Pyth Network.
This technical blog post will delve into the criteria for DeFi participants and community members. Details about allocations for the decentralized applications will be discussed in due course.
DeFi Participants—The snapshot for individuals’ on-chain activity with decentralized applications that use Pyth Network’s data was on Sep 1, 2023. At the time of snapshot, Pyth Price Feeds were active on 27 blockchains. Frequent users of decentralized apps on these blockchains became eligible for an airdrop allocation based on their amount of on-chain activity. On-chain interactions with dApps were analyzed and assigned allocation amounts as follows:
On-chain interactions with the Pyth contracts and consumer contracts on each chain were analyzed. This set of wallets was then significantly reduced by applying anti-Sybil analysis techniques. The exact techniques used are not described.
Removing wallets based on existing blacklists resulted in a set of 73,815 unique address-chain combinations. Within each blockchain ecosystem, wallets were ranked by the number of interactions with the Pyth Network and were divided into three buckets, each consisting of approximately 33% of the total. Similarly indexed buckets were combined across chains to yield three overall buckets of users.
The total allocation of 200 million tokens to DeFi users was split across these buckets as follows: 55% to the top third, 30% to the middle third, and 15% to the final third.
The splitting process resulted in buckets of wallet addresses with [27163, 27581, 20333] addresses across the three buckets. Based on the allocation split across the buckets of eligible addresses, a per-address allocation of [4049, 2175, 1475] PYTH tokens was arrived at for the three buckets.
To become eligible for one of the buckets, an individual would have to have surpassed a specific number of transactions depending on the blockchain. Each blockchain has a different threshold for transaction count, with less active chains generally having a lower threshold count of transactions needed. For example, the cutoff for the top and middle buckets for Solana is 26 and 8 respectively, compared to 5 and 2 for BNB Chain.