Exposing LayerZero, why are you being deceived? Rethinking drops.

The story of a knight who declared a fight against a great evil. We tear off the masks and figure out who is right and who is to blame.
The article was written in two hours on a warm summer evening on June 4 and at the same time went to gather dust on the shelf of history, but after six months everything changed and interesting events are planned. It's time to climb on the top shelf of the closet and finish what you started.

It is for this reason that you will find two parts and two different opinions on airdrops from one person. Everything said here is an emotional outburst of the author, who initially came to the crypt for technology (yes, there are such things), but at the moment he realized that everything that was corrupt had already been sold. Or not? In my comments, I ask you to make an amendment to all of the above.

[Part 1 - June 4, 2023. Only the money hunters survived.]

You found a superhide/strategy/thoughts on the LayerZero airdrop. No! I learned about LZ in the winter of 2021 and have been closely monitoring the development of their product since then. In addition, I was among the first in the CIS to begin distributing detailed information about this project. This material will contain all the observations and conclusions made during this time. Sit back, have fun reading!
NFT has died down, and Luna has not collapsed yet
December 2021. In one of the millions of chats, there is a mention of a new startup from Canada. Technology? What? What for? To hell with them, it's much more interesting to live on Discord servers with every second gm-gn in the hope of getting the coveted WL. And there you also need to spend your hard-earned money, it's definitely past.

Summer 2022, depression, revision of values. Bull children who are used to earning an average monthly salary per day cannot stand this state of affairs. To earn the previous amounts, it is necessary to increase your efforts at times, the number of projects with minimal risk-reversal tends to zero. Only revolutionary builders and those who managed to collect money from funds survive. For these two, the situation is more than ideal, now they are in the spotlight. This means that you can set the rules of the game yourself.

Let's imagine ourselves in the place of a successful CEO with millions of attracted funds that you need to return and multiply in some form, taking into account the current situation. To conduct a sale in a rapidly falling market is a so-so idea, I don't want to give away part of the profit from the product either. In addition, the situation is complicated by the outflow of funds from the sphere. What if we go back to our Indian origins and do an airdrop, sir? A great idea - we will stay with our own, earn on the hopes of unhappy cryptans, build an ecosystem with their help, show the whole world that we have millions of users and our project is really in demand and relevant! Unfortunately, the latter is a false thesis.

Not here and not now

At this stage, we are identifying the greatest danger of retrodrops. They create the illusion that everything is really good, their product has a daily necessity, it is a revolutionary solution, and so on. Here I want you to come to a conclusion yourself. How long have you been using the Aptos network for its intended purpose? Maybe GoldFinch solved your problem yesterday? Or have you recently wanted to sell your NFT through Blur?

The market is not ready, the market does not need technology and something new. Already proven protocols are forced to disable validators due to a lack of activity on the network. There are simply not enough end users. Over time, in addition to money, we lose users. Look around and remember how many people worked with you then and now. Using my own example, I can say that I lost 80% of the environment, which in 2021-2022 were engaged in the crypt daily. Now transfer the remaining 20% to new and unexplored networks, where the ecosystem development coefficient and possible successful application cases are about 0. Most likely, a user who is worn out by a bear and counting every penny will not want to take risks and experiment.
Why should I use LZ if I can do the same thing several times cheaper and faster using conventional bridges? I am an end user and I only care about the result, not the method.

"Planes first, and then the girls."

But we're playing the lottery

We closely monitor the movement of the hands. Every message is a transaction, your presence on the server is every visit to the product's website, an art feedback about an error. Does it remind you of anything? Both share one meaning - it's a lottery. Only in the whitelist's grind there was a fundamental difference, this is a tangible goal. Here we just believe in a miracle, each time convincing ourselves that it's not too late to make a life-change.

Now, my dear drophunters, you draw beautiful numbers on dashboards and no more. Would you also be actively doing this in the summer-autumn of 2021? No! Because it is boring, uninteresting, requires investments and carries a huge uncertainty. Although in fact you were doing the same thing, only in a different wrapper and for free.
In fact, with each of our contributions, we buy tickets that can potentially bring us profit, right? Here is a web3 lotto :)
But, there is one big and very important difference. The organizer of traditional lotteries is obliged to draw a pre-agreed amount by a certain date. In the zero layer, the guys will earn as much as they want. They are not bound by any framework of agreements, laws.

In the crypto world, everything is turned upside down, there are no conditions, no prize pool. People themselves bear the protocol their money for its services, although they do not need the services themselves! The paradox built on human psychology works great!

Imagine a situation where you come to a store and they say to you, "Maybe the 1000th customer will get a million, but it is forbidden to eat products and take them out of the store." That is, using the services of a department store, you get absolutely no benefit. You didn't even have a goal to go to the store, but a stunning promotion lured you and robbed your wallet. As a result, the store may close / change the rules of the promotion / give out a million only to its own, or maybe a million will go to you! When the scale has a similar appearance, money, as a rule, overshadows all common sense.
In LZ and similar projects, it is absolutely the same, only there is much more easy money that is not difficult to part with, a small average age of visitors, a very beautiful signboard, good investors and a small number of other stores with similar promotions around.

Build it yourself!
Previously, the builders brought us money, now we bring them. Now is the best time to build. Thousands of units of free manpower ready to work for you, the lack of proper competition and most importantly - evergreen, invested funds on euphoria with faith in a bright future. I sincerely want to use advanced developments every day in the new cycle.

In addition, I encourage you to build as well! Do not think that you are not capable of this. The founder of one famous project was also a simple cryptan and played Dota 2, and now millions are watching his every word! Ignore the fud and build!
Globally, technology is still needed

But all of the above does not mean that we do not need progress.

We are on the threshold of a new stage in the development of the crypto industry. It feels like it should be much more interesting and challenging than the previous ones. All existing AAA projects should become either a starting point or unambiguous leaders who will pull the whole market by the ears.

Cryptocurrencies have been, are and are a revolutionary solution in the world at the moment. They, like any other technology, need reformation over time. These changes are happening right before our eyes at the moment. Let's be patient and wait until the next stage of this technological race is over, and then we will enjoy its fruits with pleasure.

Happiness is not in money

I am sure that most of those reading this material are engaged in crypto by inertia from the bull market. In 80% of cases, this is due to the rapid approach of your wallet balance to zero. Like no one else, I understand you, but over time I realized one very important thing: time is much more valuable than money. Now is the best time to relax and get high. You can sit in a curtained apartment for days on end and twist your accounts, but what next? You completely drop out of society, gain weight, worsen your health, burn not only gas, but also the best years of your life. Addressing young readers, I want to say that there will be no better period in your existence. Yes, now they will write to me - "I must be patient and in a few years I will live a better life for a million dollars," and are you sure that your values will not change, there will be a million or the proper state of the body?

There are only two ways out of the situation: either you completely leave the market for a while, or you balance and do only interesting and entertaining things in the crypt. I chose the second one for myself and have never regretted it. Some of you have already felt the results of my work for yourself, but you will probably never know about it.

For those who choose the first one, everything is simple: hug your mom, go to a concert of your favorite band, have a beer with friends. Completely forget about what you were doing before.

Live in the present, not the future.

Conclusion.

I'm not chasing a huge profit. I don't have a huge farm of accounts that can qualify for airdrop. I chose my path, which seems to me more interesting than sleepless nights waiting for an acceptable gas and I am completely satisfied with this decision.
I don't have any transactions related to LZ. I just didn't need their services. How you can characterize this decision is up to you. Have a nice day, thanks for reading!

[Part 2 - November 12, 2023. You can't shave.]

I was really interested in the topic of drops and I decided to thoroughly study the sphere. And, oh Gods, how interesting it is. It is a pity that 90% of the participants of this circus have only one goal. If you are interested, I recommend starting with this article and video. But I'm not the only one who started delving into these parachutes...
projects are getting smarter

Airdrop - the market is simply huge, everyone wants to take a bite of the pie and earn all the drops in the world, missing at least one hand will turn into a disaster. And if you look at it from the other side of the game? The Sybil market is also huge and all projects, without exception, are thinking about maximizing their profits with product commissions.

There are three options for how to fight for the blood of their users. One for the poor, one for the rich and the third in the middle.

The first way is that you are a small company that makes a narrow-profile product / little financing / money laundering / and so on, but you want to make noise like big uncles. We look into the Indian history textbook, find the year 2017 and copy the manual from there. The stratum of people who are chasing literally every opportunity is simply huge, this is our target audience. Their morning begins with registration on the Chinese stock exchange, lunch is spent reading tweets with the hashtag # airdrop, and they end the day studying the new tier 3 P2E game. Everyone wins, users are sure that one out of a thousand coins will shoot, and firms get the necessary statistics for investors.

By the way, I do not critically approve of this approach to working out projects.
At the moment, many people have no money left and the niche of this method is now empty, people have become a little smarter and there are much more big projects. It is very interesting to observe how and when this warm activity will return from our green youth.

More doesn't always mean better.
Have I changed my mind here compared to the summer of 2023? No, I still think it's a waste of time.

If you have $60m - $120m of fees, but you lose to the giants or you want to raise even more money in the future and at the same time you don't want to deal with a difficult dropout of sibyl, but you need to give people hope, then the second way is for you. Campaigns on Galxe, OAT's, mines of very valuable NFT and other social activities come to the rescue. We give people a ghostly hope and turn the ticket from the lottery of the first part of the article into something more tangible. The project has already given something, so it is capable of a real drop.

But here things are going very interestingly, almost the entire sector is holding up because of part of one big drop - Aptos. If not, would you earn virtual points or take away memorable NFT? I think not. A great example of how one of hundreds of projects can set the trend of the entire industry for several years to come.
Presence is always better than absence.

Here I became a bull. He invested most of his funds in official events. I am sure that we are following the path of flexible and interesting drops. This is a separate conversation, in the following articles we will talk about it.

And the elite of the crypto world completes this block. They are purple on ordinary mortals, investors and uncles with big bags are important to them. They can lead reptiles by the nose, and then make the same number of announcements and play on the nerves of the planted by the ears. You yourself will check the interest in them only because you are excited by the amount of their financing. It is here that most of them lose their heads and squander their deposits by herd instinct, and projects only get richer and report record results. There is only one side in the plus, at least until that very announcement.

Have a seat, the king of the party, though between you and me, I'm not sure he deserves this title.

He remained almost at his own. After viewing the school, a16z found many advantages of airdrops for the market and the crypt in general. But here the human factor and luck play a significant role. Unfortunately, my risk management does not allow me to rely on such volatile factors.

At the last moment, I remembered about another category, to which the CEO himself recently asked me to attribute his project. Those who do not want an association with money, and until the end they drown for technology. Infinite respect for such guys, only on your shoulders we can do something cool.

Drop dependency

The catalyst for writing the first part was the complete dominance of drops on the agenda. I thought it couldn't get any worse, how wrong I was.....
In the summer, everyone stuffed activity for $ 1 100 networks, in early autumn they began to build theories and study pixels from Brian's posts, later they rested (worked in the mac), in November they returned to believe again. What could be worse? The only thing worse is that on the other side of the coin, they began to add fuel to the fire. The announcement of the announcement, warming up in the discord of the name of Dzhovar, ambiguous tweets from respected CEOs. Where are we going? In front of us is a huge world of a new generation of the Internet, and in the end we stand still with wet dreams

In fact, having made a mousetrap for ourselves, we wait until someone puts cheese in it, and so on in a circle. Here I suggest you reread the first part and think again about priorities with a cool head.

All the corpses on Everest were once very motivated people.

Conclusion.

In 2021, I dug up the revolution and fell in love with it. Few people know, but I communicated with the previous Head Of Community LZ, DevRel LZ back in 2021. All of them were burning with their work then and I was getting high with them. Then evil came and won, and we will find out very soon whether it will receive a reward.
I advise everyone to go from LayerZero Technology Maxi to LayerZero PLEASENOAIRDROP Maxi.