Ether.Fi’s airdrop distribution of its ETHFI governance token went live Monday morning in a move aimed at decentralizing the liquid staking protocol. Trading in the $3 to $3.50 range for much of the day, the token already has a market cap surpassing $362 million. 

Factors that determined eligibility for the airdrop included whether a person is a staker on a Binance Launchpad round, an Ether.Fi solo staker, or a holder of eETH – the protocol’s flagship token that enables holders to accrue rewards from both staking ETH on Ethereum and restaking through EigenLayer.

Crypto users who are eligible for the ETHFI airdrop have until June 18, 2024 to claim their tokens. 

Liquid Staking Craze

Data from CoinGecko shows that ETHFI has a fully diluted valuation of $3.4 billion— below that of the Solana memecoin WIF, but higher than competitors Lido and dYdX. ETHFI’s total supply stands at 1 billion tokens, with 6% of the total dedicated to the first season of Ether.Fi’s airdrop distribution and 2% set aside for those who participated in the Binance Launchpad round. 

One address ending in 0x7a9 identified as belonging to Justin Sun deposited 120,000 ETH worth about $420.72 million into Ether.Fi last week on March 13, 2024.

As a result, of the 60 million tokens allocated to the first season of Ether.Fi’s airdrop distribution, more than 3.45 million ETHFI tokens can be claimed by Sun’s wallet. “Due to the amount of your total ETHFI allocation, a portion of your tokens will be vested to ensure fairness, long term growth and stability for our community,” wrote the Ether.Fi team on the token claims website for Sun’s address.

23.26% of the total supply has been earmarked for core contributors, 27.24% has been allocated to the DAO treasury, and 32.5% of total tokens will be vested over a two year period for investors, per the protocol’s documents. 

EtherFi’s co-founder and Chief Growth Officer Rok Kopp told Unchained that “everything [about the airdrop] went really smoothly,” saying that the airdrop site was “reliable” insofar as “people were able to claim without issues,” Kopp added. 

At press time, users have locked $2.876 billion worth of crypto assets into Ether.Fi’s smart contracts, according to DefiLlama.