April 2, 2024: $SQUID-Drop ๐ธ๐ฆ
Leviathan Celebrates One Year Anniversary with Worthless Airdrop
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GM Fam!
Today is April 2, 2024, the first day of the rest of our lives, and we sincerely hope you make it your best day yet.
The big news from yesterdayโฆ no April Fooling, Leviathan News launched the much discussed Leviathan Points, aka $SQUID, released onto the Fraxtal chain.
How do you know if your or any of your frens received the airdrop? Just look for hints in subtle behavioral lifestyle changes.
Seriously though, donโt go maxxing out your Gnosis cards. The Leviathan Points are, and always shall be, worthless. We donโt know how many people read through the accompanying release notes, so we wanted to boost it by amplifying it here:
Today we completed the first phase of our ongoing Leviathan Points airdrop!
Each month Leviathan intends to distribute points tracked onchain for contributors to our news bot, our videos and other tasks that benefit our ecosystem.
What are Leviathan Points? Leviathan Points have historically been a meme. A joke. Mere figments of the imagination.
In formalizing our points system, our goal is to adhere to these traditional values.
Leviathan News has been live for a year. We've survived and grown as the result of the collective and decentralized effort of hundreds of motivated community members. We want to honor and acknowledge the role the community has played in our growth.
Even before "points" became a bad joke in crypto, we had internally suggested an internal points system to track members' contributions. As crypto moved into SQL databases, Leviathan decided to move from a database onchain. Giving crypto natives an onchain way to honor their work makes the concept more tangible and fun.
How Do Leviathan Points Work?
Each month, Leviathan News plans to airdrop 1MM points. The calculus for how this is determined each month is a combination of:
45% Contributions to sourcing and curating news through our bot
45% Contributions to our video and media tentacles
10% Miscellaneous contributions that don't fit in the other two categories
The initial distribution covers a retroactive airdrop for the past year worth of points for the first category (contributions to the news bot) and a partial distribution for category 3 (misc). When tallied properly, a future airdrop will cover the remainder, at which point the plan is to return to the 1MM per month schedule.
If you feel your distribution was too high, the team has no ability to revoke points, though you may burn them. If you feel your distribution was too low, you may ping the team and we may or may not choose to send you more.
Our breakdown and distribution criteria, however, is completely arbitrary. This formula is at the sole discretion of the multisig controlling Leviathan Points. Sometimes gas may spike, or we may be too busy with other things to airdrop points promptly. We retain the right to revise this whenever we like.
Even worse, none of our smart contracts are audited, so use at your own risk.
What Do Leviathan Points Do?
Nothing. Leviathan Points are purely symbolic and carry no monetary value.
Leviathan News has no revenue. Further, with traditional journalistic institutions being shuttered left and right, the prospects of a decentralized media organization ever earning significant revenue are bleak.
We issue points merely to acknowledge and document contributions to Leviathan simply because we believe the future is onchain. We have no plans to ever monetize these points.
Here's the short list of what you CAN do with Leviathan Points:
Look at them
Talk to them
Cry about them
If you don't like it, launch your own decentralized news service and report back to us!
See you next tide...
Reiterating this, and adding some personal commentary, itโs a truly unfortunate consequence of residing in the USA is that we canโt go crazy with this and go full degen. If we lived in a different country, maybe weโd be able to have more fun onchain with $SQUID. For the time being, we really do consider this just a fun momento of our past year, and a way of recording and thanking all the many people who helped!
Leviathan News has been amazingly successful at capturing a lot of participation from crypto fans, even though thereโs as of yet no real business model. If we couldnโt splice together any viable revenue stream as Bitcoin prices soared towards all time highs, it suggests the short term for Leviathan is a fun project powered by the community with no chance of โnumber go up [from zero]โ
Learnings and Stats
That said, we had a lot of fun putting together the airdrop. For users who are not too familiar, we power our news operation through a Telegram bot, which Iโve had a blast programming over the past year (and weโre looking for help on this front if you are interested in coding Telegram bots!) A key driver of growth in the future is likely to be making the bot so intrinsically useful that users voluntarily add it to Telegram channels, much as how several users install price bots in their channels.
Iโve been closely attending to the bot and the Telegram channel, mostly because they keeps growing and thus merits more attention.
Eyeballs per post are also trending up nicely. Each typical news item we post gets around 1K views, where we struggled to get a few dozen at the outset.
All of this is organically driven. We have an audience of true degens, per an early survey:
We kept all these data points in mind as we put together organizing principles in mind with our first airdrop. April 1st was a critical time to release it, and not simply for the fun of dropping it on โApril Fools Day.โ
The principle with the airdrop was that each month we give out 1MM points, half reserved for people who help gather news, half to people who help with the video. The bot is relatively less involved with the video operations, hence this part of the operation is a bit slower to calculate the airdrop. But thanks to the bot, we have a lot of data on the news side of our business.
For the first 11 months, most of this was powered by a handful of insiders who essentially did all the work of sourcing news, QA-ing it, and choosing to post it. Over time, this dwindled from about a dozen people who were interested to just a handful of interested people at the nadir.
Given that we released 500K news points per month and just a handful of users were active, it led to the first distribution:
Note, this articleโs author and the project lead dev is not even that healthy almost-majority blue slice! That said, in planning the second half of the airdrop for show contributors and other contributions, we project it gets a bit more spread out soon..
We wanted to act fast because in March rumors of an airdrop began to circulate and the community roared to life. No matter how much we reassured people the token was worthless, we suddenly saw a flood of users posting.
The big question we want to test is whether these submissions are a flash in the pan driven by short term airdrop speculation, or if the community will continue to crowdsource high quality news headlines after they realize the airdrop is worthless. We expect the airdrop hunting was a big motivator, as 94% of users who submitted a headline also took the effort to register their address. April and May will tell us more.
In total, this airdrop went out to 122 people, of whom only 32 took the effort to submit a headline (26%). Others were helpful in several other respects, so we came up with a formula of at least 2500 tokens just for registering the airdrop, and each approved news submission in March was worth an additional 1700 tokens or so.
Another big reason for speed-running the airdrop is the mechanics of the QA process. Designing a proper QA process is actually the bigger challenge in getting this news service off the ground.
Consider a site like Reddit. Itโs a sewer. Anybody can submit a post to Reddit, thereโs essentially zero value in new posts. The real value is in properly limiting the flow, such that an appropriate volume of high quality posts hit the front page.
Giving an airdrop for encouraging submissions to Leviathan is maybe useful in our early days, but certainly not once we hit scale. At scale we have a tougher task than a site like Reddit, in that we not only need to curate for quality but also tougher factors like accuracy and adherence to style guidelines, while also considering speed to publication.
From a prior survey, we see people care about both aspects of a duality thatโs tough to balance, users crave both speed AND accuracy!
It will ultimately require something like a decentralized QA process that resembles Ethereum staking. The mechanics look something like a single person having to propose a headline is suitable for publication by taking a risk, essentially placing a โwagerโ that the headline is suitable. If the headline is unchallenged, they earn a big bonus for taking this chance. If users complain after the fact, such that the a majority of reviewers agrees the headline is inaccurate and needs modification or deletion, then the user who approved it gets their wager slashed.
Itโs an interesting thought experiment, but still very much a hypothetical. It requires a sufficiently active community that you have enough participants to stage votes on these matters. It recalls the early problem of Web3 platforms building complicated mechanics for prediction markets but having insufficient users to make them operate.
So the first of several intermediate steps is simply can we get and maintain an active community. Weโll see!
The airdrop is live, so the next existential question is whether community activity abates, maintains, or increases. If we can maintain or grow community involvement, then we may well have a good enough sized community that cares about Leviathan as to help build a QA mechanics as a token game. If participation dies down, then weโll know that tokenomics are not viable and search for other breakthroughs.
Finally, one fun thing about issuing an airdropโฆ now that the tokens are dropped, we can see everybodyโs wallet address. Surely some chose to use a fresh wallet, but weโve got a power lawโฆ 80% of users are low net worth, swimming amidst some whales.
In total, the Leviathan airdrop recipients have a total confirmed net worth of almost ten million dollars! And Mich didnโt even register for the airdrop, which would have skewed this significantly.
Mean Wallet Value: $72,998.96
Median Wallet Value: $21,643.09
Standard Deviation of Wallet Value: $137,883.70
Highest Wallet Value: $928,124.65
Total Wallet Value: $9,124,869.41
We see itโs not so much the whales doing the heavy lifting at Leviathan, which is a very much shrimp-powered phenomenon.
Either way, a sincere thank you for all your help growing us to this point! If youโre interested, check out our Github for the token https://github.com/leviathan-news/squid-points/ as well as all our other links:
Headline Links
Telegram:
Main Channel: https://t.me/leviathan_news
Squid Cave: https://t.me/+KWxvHCpN6ANhYWVi
Twitter: https://twitter.com/leviathan_news
Discord: https://discord.gg/X5vhdeYRY4
Website: https://leviathannews.xyz
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