Detailed Explanation of Sonic Airdrop Mechanism: Can the first season make up for missed assignments? How to improve efficiency in the second season?

Original | Odaily Odaily Daily ( @OdailyChina )

Author | Azuma (@azuma_eth)

It has been nearly six months since the official launch of the Sonic mainnet (which was launched on December 18 last year). Recently, the Sonic team has released multiple pieces of information regarding the upcoming end of the first season airdrop and the upcoming second season airdrop. However, due to the fragmented nature of the information and somewhat complex rules, some users still do not fully understand the detailed operation mechanism of the Sonic airdrop.

In the following, Odaily will detail the airdrop rules for Sonic, hoping to help you deploy corresponding strategies more efficiently.

Season 1 Airdrop

First of all, let's talk about the overall airdrop plan of Sonic. Sonic plans to distribute 190.5 million S tokens through airdrops, which will span multiple seasons, and the total amount of airdrops allocated for each season is still to be determined.

According to the disclosure by Sonic team member assistant.sonic, the first season airdrop snapshot will be taken on June 18 (exactly six months after the mainnet launch), and the airdrop distribution will begin in the following weeks.

As for airdrop claims, there are different unlocking rules for ordinary user shares and Dapps shares.

• Odaily Note: The Sonic airdrop has three different channels for earning points. The first two channels are aimed at regular users: one can earn passive points by holding whitelist assets statically, and the second can earn active points by deploying whitelist assets to designated ecological DApps. The last channel is aimed at DApps, where various DApps will compete for airdrop shares known as "Gems," which can be exchanged for S tokens through the final airdrop. DApps can then redistribute these S tokens to users through a customized points program.

User Airdrop Claim Rules

For ordinary users, 25% of the first season airdrop will be available for immediate claiming in the form of S tokens with no circulation restrictions, while the remaining 75% will be linearly released in the form of tradable NFTs over 270 days. The NFT can be traded on the secondary order book market that Paintswap is about to launch.

Users holding locked NFTs can choose to claim the remaining allocation at any time, but this will trigger a burn penalty based on the remaining balance.

For example, if a user has received a total of 100 S airdrops, they can claim 25 S on the first day, and the remaining 75 S will be released linearly over 270 days. Early claims will trigger a burn penalty. If the user forcibly "claims" their NFT portion of the airdrop midway through the release period (approximately 4.5 months, 135 days), they will receive 37.5 S while burning 37.5 S. This means the total amount of S tokens the user ultimately receives from the airdrop is: 25 (first day liquidity airdrop) + 37.5 (linearly released portion) = 62.5 (excluding the burned portion).

The specific mandatory claim and penalty functions are shown in the table below, where the horizontal axis represents time and the vertical axis represents the intensity of the penalty.

It is worth noting that users will have 6 months to claim their NFTs, and any NFTs not claimed by the deadline, along with the corresponding unclaimed S, will be destroyed.

Dapps airdrop claiming rules

For Dapps, those that earn S airdrops through "gems" can immediately claim 50% of the unrestricted S tokens, and the remaining 50% of S tokens will be linearly released through the smart contract frontend within 90 days.

It is worth mentioning that some Dapps have previously tokenized their "gem" shares in order to incentivize users to deposit funds in a more liquid form. These tokenized "gems" have circulated in the secondary market and are scattered among many users.

For these Dapps that have tokenized the "gems", Sonic will provide an additional front-end for users holding tokenized "gems" to claim S tokens. Users will have 3 months to use the tokenized "gems" to claim airdrops, and any unclaimed S after the deadline will be destroyed.

Season 2 Airdrop

Last night, Sonic's official account has published a detailed plan for the second season airdrop.

The second season will launch on June 18, seamlessly connecting with the first season. Based on the experience from the first season's airdrop event, the airdrop details for both the user segment and the Dapps segment have been modified to some extent for the second season.

user airdrop

First, let's look at the user aspect. Compared to the first season's airdrop, the biggest change in the second season's airdrop is the cancellation of passive points. This means that users will no longer earn points merely by holding whitelist assets statically in their wallets; instead, they must actively deploy assets on designated applications within the Sonic ecosystem to earn active points. This includes providing liquidity in DEX, participating in lending, or conducting many other qualifying DeFi operations. Clearly, this move is aimed at further incentivizing ecosystem activity and encouraging users to actively explore Sonic ecosystem applications.

In addition, to incentivize loyal users, Sonic will also launch a loyalty incentive program. The performance of users in the first season airdrop will determine the initial multiplier (1 - 2 times), and the level of continued activity in the second season can also increase or decrease this value, with a maximum of 3 times and a minimum of returning to 1 time.

In addition, Sonic officials emphasized that the airdrop distribution method for the second season may differ from the structure of the first season, but the details are currently unclear. Sonic will announce the specific plan three months after the start of the second season to monitor the effects of the first season's distribution model and make corresponding optimizations.

Dapps airdrop

Compared to the first season airdrop, the biggest change in the second season airdrop regarding Dapps airdrops is the clear statement that Dapps are not allowed to tokenize "gems"; otherwise, the entire season's qualification for Dapps will be immediately canceled — this is not difficult to understand, as it is to prevent Dapps from circumventing the original unlocking restrictions of S tokens corresponding to "gems" through tokenization operations.

In order to prevent Dapps from hiding benefits and to ensure that more airdrop shares are further distributed to users, Sonic will measure how many tokens each major Dapp actually distributed to users in the first season. For example, if a certain Dapp claims to distribute 100% of the S tokens to users in the first season, it will receive a multiplier of 1 for "gems" in the second season. If it only distributed 80%, the multiplier will be 0.8, and so on.

In addition, Sonic emphasized that the "gem" distribution mechanism in the second season will place greater emphasis on protocol revenue rather than TVL, to reward those who drive truly sustainable use of Dapps.

For different types of Dapps, Sonic has also established different weight multipliers to better reflect the sustainability impact of various protocols on the ecosystem, with specific weights as follows.

Corresponding Strategy

With the rule changes in the second season, the core strategy is quite clear — try to use addresses that participated in the first season to continue participating in the second season to achieve a higher loyalty multiplier; actively engage in ecological projects to earn active points and internal points within Dapps (corresponding to the airdrop share of "gems").

The current Sonic ecosystem is quite complete. Previously, we introduced some Sonic ecosystem scoring methods in several episodes of the "Lazy Finance Guide" column. Although the rules have changed somewhat, the overall strategy remains the same.

Considering the different risk preferences, it is recommended that users with higher requirements for fund safety only participate in mainstream DeFi protocols such as Aave and Pendle. For users with higher efficiency requirements, they can explore native protocols like Shadow or those with internal reward programs like Silo and Rings.

In addition, considering the special unlocking rules of the S airdrop, there may be certain arbitrage opportunities between the prices of the unlocked NFTs in secondary markets like Paintswap and the future unlocking shares after the airdrop is distributed. We will also keep an eye on this and will release related strategies if necessary.