In this issue:

• This Week in Neo Tokyo: We Are Driving at 154K Mph (by PhoenixxDown)

• CONVICTION! (by VIPER)

• Meet Your Citizens: Shreddit (by Block Editor)

• It's So Over For Airdrops :( (by Flower83)

A slower, more relaxed week than usual in The Citadel. Citizens must be enjoying their time in the sun on the beach or on vacation outside of the city. If that wasn’t you and you thought staying in the trenches was a good idea, thoughts and prayers. We’ll get through this together.

A shout out to theshroommonger, who’s been on a BYTES gifting rampage in Angies, giving out no less than 221 Bronze Rewards in the past week and a half. However, NT Elite Citizen, DigitalMindRift, currently sits at the top of the table for June when it comes to BYTES gifting generosity, with a total of 1430 BYTES sent to his fellow citizens. With a combined total of 2535 BYTES gifted by these two leaders, that’s a whopping $7.5K sent from their wallets to others.

The top recipient for the month is AMA Lead, Ben Gothard, who’s been gifted 395 BYTES from appreciative donors. This is how we do it in Neo Tokyo! You can keep a tab on the leaderboard positions as June comes to a close here.

Content wise, this is how things shaped up:

Interlinked Episode #35 - Jared and Ben are joined by Leo Hilse, the Founder of Style Protocol. Style Protocol turns NFTs and 3D assets into usable avatars in worlds like GTA and ROBLOX, and is a Neo Tokyo Citizen Partner. You can check out the citizen benefits of that deal here.

NFT Market Monday - Neo Tokyo News’ resident permabear, Flower, was taking victory laps over his bearish thesis playing out, but not without pushback from ButWouldYa and Shamsi. The team welcomed WhiteCoco4U from ExtraOrdinals to get up to speed on what’s been happening over on Bitcoin as of late. Listen back here.

Megafans AMA - Megafans is a software solution platform that addresses the gaming industry’s biggest perpetual problems: user acquisition, retention, and monetization. Listen back here as CEO Jeff Donnelley joins the team for a discussion about their mission.

Myria AMA - Founder Brendan Duhamel sat down with NT to enlighten citizens and meatbags alike on their blockchain studio, which boasts a thriving community of over 1 million users. Listen back here.

Neo Tokyo Community Lead, Chr0nicle, shared a cautionary tale of a recent terrible experience he had working with a high-profile project. Despite Chr0nicle being a wily veteran of the space, it proves that any of us can be caught off guard by bad actors who will try to take advantage of talented builders. Let’s hope this helps others avoid similar instances of their own.

To close out, words of wisdom from our man Shamsi. Inject this into my veins. The UAEC works hard, always up to their tricks trying to make us stray from the light, but nay, “we have a compass.” “We are driving at 154K mph.” to quote Shamsi. They can’t beat us. Their arms are too short to box with God.

Until next week, citizens.

Let’s talk conviction. No, not the one in the news lately, the other one. Defined as “a firmly held belief or opinion.” There is a certain amount of conviction needed when you get into crypto. There is a completely different level of conviction when you’re riding the crypto train.

We’ve all seen the memes where the cartoon character is surrounded by fires everywhere with the “everything is fine” statement. We have these moments all too often in crypto; we are in one right now! When the market is running, it feels awesome! You feel smart, all your friends want to know more, they ask you, which makes you feel even smarter!

But then, there is the other side of the coin. Like right now and the preceding few weeks. You see it everywhere on YouTube in the thumbnails (I mean click-bait) … “Bull Market is Dead!”, “I’m Selling all my Crypto!”, “It’s OVER!”. What follows? The inevitable doubt seeps in. Maybe it is over? Maybe I was wrong? Your friends and family ask you with that smirk on their face, “how’s crypto going?”. You start to question all you’ve thought and worked for. You may even be tempted to sell. This is where your CONVICTION comes in! 

Those who know, know. Those who don’t, well, they’re gonna be exit liquidity, plain and simple. Should you feel bad, hell no! You did the homework. You spent years learning, researching and executing your plan to Valhalla! All while the haters in your life looked at you questioning your intelligence. Don’t be suckered into the temptation of doubt.

Myself personally, patience this cycle has been exhausting. But I also didn’t come this far to wave the white flag of surrender. My conviction is solid! I’ve waited years for this moment, and I WILL reap the rewards of my efforts! 

The question we all should be thinking is how strong is my own conviction?

Lastly, as all crypto Youtubers say, “This is not financial advice (NFA),” do your own research, and come to your own conclusions!

• Discord ID: shreddit

• Background: Video Editing/Graphic Design

• Entered Crypto: 2019

• Joined NT: S1 Mint

• Expertise: Video Editing

• Most Known For: Video Editing for Anniversary Reel, Degen Digest

• One Word: Creator

• Outside Interests: Family, Snowboarding, Music

“Food With Integrity” sums up the foremost years of Sheddit’s career, as he worked for Chipotle helping them open several stores around the US. It was an enjoyable gig, until it wasn’t anymore, and Shreddit started exploring alternatives to making money. He was already a freelance photo and video editor, but around 2019 he discovered crypto, and eventually Alex Becker. Shreddit recalls the video being “intriguing enough for me to do a deeper dive and see.”

When it came time to join the riddles, Shreddit was in deep. He joined one of the larger groups of strategists helping to solve what he could. “To be honest, a lot of it is a little bit of a blur at this point just because it's been so traumatic and you don't want to relive that.” Shreddit recalled. In the end though, Shreddit got in and became a Day 1 Minter.

Shreddit took a backseat position within The Citadel for some time, simply observing and finding his niche. Within the last year, his talents have been showcased more frequently since he reached out to LeBoomington and joined the Video Division.

Shreddit was immediately put to work on the Year 2 Neo Tokyo anniversary trailer alongside LeBoomington and Fractillians. The release was a hit and Shreddit recalled truly enjoying the process of working on a single piece with a remote team. Since then, Shreddit started working with Degen Digest helping them polish their content for publishing and they are starting to crank out some short form content as well.

While he does a lot for The Citadel, Shreddit does have an IRL position where he devotes much of his time. He works as a content production manager for a company that represents several brands in manufacturing and construction. Shreddit is currently building up the content production team. “We're all business to business. It's a very new path in terms of marketing, so there's not a lot of examples to be set. For us, we're kind of pioneering it, breaking shit, fixing shit, and just figuring it out as we go,” Shreddit said.

Shreddit has the talent to create any type of video content from trailers and promos to full fledged documentaries. Project founders or citizens can reach out to him if they are looking for help on video content for their project.

Outside of web3, Shreddit is newly married and enjoys spending time with his wife. He is also a proud dog dad of a 120lb German Shepherd, avid snowboarder, and a huge baseball fan. Shreddit moonlights as a musician and is actually in the Baltimore Ravens marching band, so if anyone attends a game you may see Shreddit in the Drumline!

To keep up to date with Shreddit follow him on X. 

To be frank, we never thought it was going to last forever. Getting a life-changing (sometimes up to 20x or even 50x) ROI on your fees spent or money LP-ed for interacting with different protocols in the crypto space was too good to be true.

We knew that. It’s just that many of us - farmers - thought that it would not end so soon. But it did. Painfully.

So let me say this absolutely clearly so we can all move on and pivot to, I don't know, trading Crude Oil futures or something:

It is ABSOLUTELY OVER for airdrops.

I will now go in depth and on and on about the reasons why. And believe me, there are more than a few. Also, if anyone wants to read a lot on this, I will gladly provide more data and links, hit me up in DMs or come visit the 4 of us that remain in the Airdrop Alpha Neo Tokyo Channels.

Let's start with the main two reasons why it's actually so over. They are very simple: “The Oversaturation” of the airdrop space and “The Vibes” being off. 

We will talk about oversaturation in a while, but first let's address the vibes themselves. And yes, I am talking about that same elusive “The Vibes” concept that a hot girl on MDMA at a psytrance party rants on and on about. Only this time, for anyone who was in the trenches; farming daily, we could tangibly feel the deteriorating sentiment from farmers and the increasing greed from VC’s and teams. You know that feeling when something just feels off?

Yes, I admit that a lot of us felt the decaying state of “The Vibes” for a while, but turned a blind eye. We thought that when zkScam, Blast and LayerZero drop, that this will mark the end of “Golden Era of Airdrops” as some twitter thread00rs have termed it. We thought we would all get another Arbitrum-level cook, netting us all 6 or 7 figs so we could all peacefully F- off into the sunset.

Truth is, that didn't happen. All of these recent airdrops, and especially “the big three” mentioned above executed their airdrops incredibly poorly, causing major FUD and dissatisfaction across the space. With zkScam being the worst, plagued with (arguably justified) allegations that the team sybiled it for themselves and placed insanely niche criteria for qualification, thus putting the airdrop on the edge of “this might be a rug” category.

Truth is that “The Golden Era of Airdrops” ended a long time ago. We just deluded ourselves into thinking we are not late to the party. Admittedly, this is a large part of the game in web3, right? Identifying trends and identifying if you are early or not.

Good vibes ended with Arbitrum, probably. Sure, people cooked on Jito ($JTO), some niche Sol protocol no one knew about. Sure, people got arguably decent ROI with Wormhole(if you didn't spam only EVM tx’s like me and mainly bridged between Sol and EVM). Sure, if you were lucky you got some Ordinals airdrops leading up to Runes that were 5 figure drops.

But there were no “obvious” plays everyone knew about (and farmed) that cooked well. Additionally, there was not a single airdrop that I can recall that went by without a major FUD campaign, people being down bad from risking eth and stables in staking protocols, or team straight up rugging them.

And I can, on the other hand, recall quite A LOT of projects that screwed over their community in a disgusting way. And we - the farmers - are just as guilty in contributing to “The Vibes,” being off, don't get me wrong. We leaned a bit too heavily into that cliche quote of “never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.” And sure enough, by believing this fallacy, we let teams plainly rug us - attributing their failures to stupidity, when in fact, looking back, it is unlikely they didn't know exactly what they were doing and were just “playing stupid.”

It feels like the teams can just do anything they want these days and get away with it. Here are a few of these gems I can recall of the top of my head (wish I didn't regularly purge my bookmarks otherwise there would probably be more):

• The famous Renzo pie charts.

• Blast just “resetting” their gold jackpot. Never explaining it, never addressing this, never even mentioning it.

• Starknet’s many crimes against humanity. Read one of our previous newsletters here to dive deeper. I do not wish to go into all that again.

• All of the Sui and Sei shenanigans. Just lmfao on these two, honestly.

• Manta’s TVL campaign, where you would deposit ETH into their L2 for weeks, and in return they gave you an airdrop the size of breadcrumbs that didn’t even cover the gas fee required to bridge in and out.

• Polyhedra Mainnet claim for 10 tokens. Also not even worth claiming and swapping due to mainnet fees.

• That one time when zkScam decided to gaslighting users instead of actually addressing valid FUD concerns, and then having the audacity to post this (now deleted) meme from the main account, adding insult to injury.

• And probably the whole of Blast’s disappointment. 

But that's enough for now. Lets not even get into SocialFi airdrops like friendtech, or $BLOCK and gaming airdrops. These are just many examples clearly showcasing why “the vibes are off.”

Lets continue with my personal favorite, which was the MarginFi implosion. This one I didn’t farm, thus it was easy for me to objectively observe and appreciate the top tier mega lulz content provided by their founder. Absolute “retardio levels” of cringe all happening on the same week; with core members quitting, other projects on twitter accusing them of rugging and withholding user funds, and CEO having an absolute meltdown, elaborating on his anal sex adventures, sprinkled in with “you are not getting an airdrop from us” announcements.

What it all boils down to, is this dynamic, which @veH0rny has so beautifully, eloquently put:

This pattern repeats itself over and over these days and shall be studied for generations to come.

Another big part of “The Vibes,” being off consists of a team spinning up new, unheard of and niche criteria, making up ways to screw over their community. This is where zkScam and Scamnet both shine, again. They actually also did the exact opposite of eachother, too. Scamnet made you not eligible for their airdrop if you LP-ed too much and didn't leave 0.05 ETH in your wallet, while zkScam excluded you if you didn't LP more (or long enough). Can't make this up.

It's so over.

It truly is SO OVER.

The thing about L2 airdrops is that everyone knows that Arbitrum’s criteria was the best one yet. It is fair and inclusive, because it uses a wide range of data points, spanning from wallet age of the first transaction and the overall consistency of usage (weekly, monthly) all the way to volume for swaps and number of tx's, and even a variety of contracts used.

And Arbitrum neatly clustered it all together, effectively producing one of the most beloved airdrops ever. Projects know this, but will not replicate it for some reason, constantly trying to reinvent the wheel. It is not unusual to assume they are changing the criteria to benefit insiders, while deceiving the community into believing that they will replicate arbitrum.

Study this:

And now with the recent zkScam and Blast disappointments, it is very clear people are So Over it.

Yet another contributor to “The Vibes” being off is the “endless milking of users” by the projects. There are some notorious milkers in the airdrops space and it is well known. Linea begging for TVL, Scroll stringing people along with their Sessions, Orderly extending their “Merits” campaign under the pretense of giving more tokens to the community, and don't get me started on Blast And Blur’s Season2, Season 3, etc…

The biggest milker of them all: Orbiter.

Just go look at any of their comment sections, the FUD is hilariously entertaining.

Orbiter is actually so bad that everytime another project pulls something similar (like Orderly) it is used as a reference for milking. 

Another thing potentially worth mentioning that has to do with “The Vibes” being off is that this bull cycle (if we can even call this sideways mess a bull market) does not favor airdrop tokens.

The whole premise of airdrop farming invites mercenary capital, people that want to make ROI on their money and then, obviously also actually take profits. The discrepancy is that projects want to build communities, but farmers want to cash out and run. It creates an unfavorable PvP dynamic for both.

Thus, it is not surprising to see these brutal drawdowns on farmed tokens.

It is so over.

And this is also a good segue into The Oversaturation. 

The issue is now everything and everyone wants to have its own token. This is one aspect of The Oversaturation; the oversaturation of the cryptocurrency space itself. There are endless tokens. Each protocol, each project, each L2, each web3 game, each bridge… even each celebrity nowadays has to have their own token.

Why?

A question may arise of why do we actually need so many governance tokens. And what is their utility? Projects these days are like. “Hey there, crypto user, we are a cross-chain interoperability swap and bridge aggregator and we would like you to start bridging with us. Then we will launch a governance token to “decentralize” our protocol.” But honestly. WTF? Why on this green earth would we need a token for that?

The other aspect of The Oversaturation is the oversaturation of users. Simply put; it is known that everyone and their grandma is farming something. We all know there are not 6,3 million of “real and active” users on zkScam’s L2 chain. We all know you (real organic users) only need to bridge funds once or twice a month. Okay, maybe once per week, if you are truly “locked in” or some DeFi enthusiast exploring new chains everyday. So why do we - the farmers - bridge back and forth on 17 different wallets everyday?

Like, of course this will heavily dilute the allocations. It's over. 

Go study transaction and volume charts of protocols after TGE. Here is LayerZero:

Besides the two main reasons why it's so over, there are multiple more. I will not go in depth into them, and list them without much elaboration or links.

Some other reasons why it’s over:

• The presence of airdrop Twitter influencers. When a new tokenless protocol appears, you have dozens of accounts writing “farming threads” about it. Usually even before they confirm TGE.

• The low float, high FDV problem.

• The unsolved linear vs nonlinear airdrop dilemma. Do you cap the allocation for whales? Meaning sybils win by botting the lower tiers with many wallets? Or do you introduce a linear distribution based on points accumulated, effectively allowing whales with a lot of funds to dilute allocations for organic users, resulting in breadcrumb allocations for the average user?

• The presence of OTC & Pre-market websites, which usually accurately price-in the value of the future airdrop. This gives VC’s a way out of their vested tokens, and gives farmers instant ROI even if the token is not out yet, by trading IOU’s.

• Industrial sybil farms, Insiders & Lack of transparency when it comes to eligibility criteria. These three are all somewhat interconnected. Industrial sybil farms absolutely are an issue in this industry, and it is becoming harder to stop with sybils not clustering wallet on-chain and with AI bots simulating human-like behavior. But there are also teams who obviously want more tokens for themselves. And since they alone can decide the criteria, they can effectively “steal from their community” by tweaking the criteria to favor them.

These are also the reasons why I, personally, am out. As a result of the circumstances in the airdrop farming landscape currently, farmers are given two options. Participate in points campaigns, where criteria for airdrops is well known, clearly defined, and your progress is tracked daily, but your points get instantly diluted by whales, and farming usually requires lots of funds to LP, trade or stake. Introducing risk of DeFi protocols getting exploited or just basic opportunity cost for locking up your funds. These are, so called passive airdrops.

Your alternate option is to go after “active” airdrops where passive LP-ing isn't rewarded as much as daily grinding. These projects include some L2, SocialFi and crypto gaming. These are the tokenless projects that didn't (yet?) introduce a point system. Here, you can freely stumble in the dark, try and maximize transaction count, volume traded, NFTs collected, etc… like a lamb to the slaughter just waiting to get rekt by the team’s criteria favoring insiders.

So. Can you still make money with airdrops? Well, yes of course. But it's mainly by either being lucky, or grinding your brains out, with a lot of capital at risk or allocated to farming specifically.

Let's end it with this…and going back to “The Vibes” being off. The simple truth of the matter is that airdrop farming used to be fun and rewarding. It is now time consuming, stressful and not at all rewarding. Usually we are locked in a tug of war between hungry farmers complaining about low allocations and fudding on twitter, versus greedy teams trying to farm the farmers themselves with quests, tasks, TVL lock-in campaigns, points systems, daily check-ins and similar strategies.

It used to be like “Here, chad, have unexpected 5 figures for participation in our protocol as early users.” Airdrops used to be actually just simply air dropped into your wallet. Imagine that, huh? We have lost our ways. At some point, teams figured out that it costs gas. So we migrated to “claim you airdrops” where users had to pay for claim transactions.

This, over time devolved even further and now you have to KYC (Holograph), pay high gas, pay forced donations (LayerZero). Is it an ICO or an airdrop claim then?

Also, Blast is notorious for this bad airdrop mechanism. You don't just get your tokens that you farmed. No, you have to watch a cringe video first, then download the app on your phone, then wait 40 minutes in a fake “claim line.”

Furthermore, now it is not unusual for coins to be vested, with 6 month cliffs, too. Also now there are sybil hunts, delayed launches, and TGE’s with no liquidity ($DOP) for VC’s to start counters before the community.

In short.

It is OVER.

Have fun trading Crude Oil futures.

I will not be coming back.

All content from Neo Tokyo News is for entertainment purposes only, and not financial advice.

That’s it for our 52nd edition of the Neo Tokyo Newsletter. Be sure to subscribe and share with your friends so you don’t miss out on future content.

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