In this issue:

• This Week in Neo Tokyo: Friendships Will Be Tested (by PhoenixxDown)

• Scroll's Disastrous Airdrop (by Flower83)

Countdown to Phase 2 Begins

The Whisperer 5th Hand competition is well underway, with only hours left until Phase 1 wraps up. If you're stuck on the answers, check out this quick walkthrough by Council member BlockChainMeta, who’ll guide you stragglers through everything in just 10 minutes. I thought I’d completed it—until I read Meta’s post. So, thanks for helping this straggler out, Citizen!

Phase 2 kicks off tomorrow at 1 PM EST in the Collision Domain. Set a reminder for the event here.

And if you haven’t watched the Whisperer kickoff video yet, do it now. IT GOES HARD. There’s just something about Music Mainnet’s music overlaying the story and visuals that makes me want to run through walls.

On that note, flowers must be given to everyone making this event happen—the lore writers, riddle makers, devs, content creators, and all others who are working behind the scenes. We appreciate you, and I think many will agree: this is the slickest production yet, and we’re only getting started. Crazy.

Share the Neo Tokyo Vision

To segue from giving props to those making The Whisperer event happen, it's worth highlighting why Neo Tokyo is truly the place to be.

As Firestorm aptly put it, “You won’t meet a more impressive group of community members who met in PTSD riddle trauma and went on to help form an industry than NT Citizens.”

Encourage the newcomers who are enjoying their stay in The Citadel to explore our Division Intro Channels to get a real feel for what NT is all about. Those with the right grit will seize this opportunity to ascend to Citizen status, ultimately making The Citadel even stronger.

This is how things shaped up with the NT content:

Interlinked #54 - This week’s guest with Ben and Nick is NT’s Video Lead, LeBoomington. Topics include how to stay healthy while working in Web3—an oxymoron, you say? Listen for some helpful tips, including one recommendation from LeBoom that might just help. Other discussions include memes and handling failure.

Eclipse Gaming AMA - The co-founder of the L1 dedicated to Web3 gaming joined the AMA team. Eclipse Deck, their version of the Steam Store, allows even Web2 games to transition seamlessly into Web3—potentially big for gaming’s move from traditional to crypto. Listen back here.

Market Monday - Seedworld joined us as special guests after casually airdropping Citizens a cool half million. Topics this week included whether we’re still bullish, if AI memes are the future, yet another round of Tether FUD (Round 420,587—yawn), and updates on The Whisperer. Listen back here.

And starting just about now at time of publish, join the NT x Unfingible weekly Gaming Space, where today’s topic is “Is Off-META the Real META?!” Set your reminders, listen back, or join live as the case may be, here.

Short Scoops

The Whisperer Collection opens today at Shibuya Mall! Keep notifications on to catch the drop time. The Mall has been doing giveaways all week, and there may be more, so keep an eye out just in case there too.

Thread king, Ktrap, has released an absolute gem with his “A Compendium of Neo Tokyo Lore, Part 1: Origins.”

It’s a solid look at that time in the fall of 2021 and how Becker and Ellio took a revolutionary approach to building NT’s foundation. Ktrap captures the magic of it nicely.

A few days earlier, Max Drago posted his own thread on Neo Tokyo’s origins, analyzing strategies that led to its success.

And here’s a nice analysis on what makes these riddle solving games so powerful by DamonNeedsToCreate. 

One of the superb things about The Whisperer event is it has generated so many insightful posts, and while we can’t include all of them, feel free to tag us if you’re making one, or drop them in the comments of our newsletter post on X.

Let’s wrap up the week with this one from our grift-slayer supermod, Atomik Sushi, on why NT is the best Web3 community for founders, members, and gaming enthusiasts alike.

Support all our thread creators with likes, retweets, bookmarks, and comments so they feel encouraged to keep up the good work.

Until next week, citizens, when friendships will be tested.

You thought Grass, ZkScam, ScamNet, Debridge, Blast and EigenLayer were bad? Well, Scroll just set out to show them all how it's done.

They practically solidified themselves as top 3 worst airdrops of all time!

But okay, lets face it, a lot of people got the message when Scroll’s founder, Sandy, a few weeks before the airdrop, tweeted out this gem:

Sounds like a good, cliche quote or a piece of life advice, and would be totally appropriate to say in spiritual circles or tweeting it out if your online brand is being a personal life coach.

When you are the head of a tokenless L2 chain, however, not so much.

My personal hopes were annihilated in an instant, yet some people in the airdrop farming niche on crypto twitter persisted (read; coped) that “Scroll can still be a cook.”

Spoiler alert: IT DEFINITELY WAS NOT.

But why? What exactly went wrong? Let me break it down for you.

Some of the many flaws to highlight:

• Insanely High Binance Pool Allocation. Like, we are talking about one of, if not the most, expensive listing in history which reportedly cost them $110 million.

What's even more concerning is that Binance whales could lock up their BNB tokens for just two days and receive a roughly same allocation size of SCR token than people who have been using their chain for almost 2 years, effectively betraying all the trench warriors, or community members.

• Insanely Low Supply Allocated To On-chain Users & “Farmers.” Usually projects airdrop 5-20% of their supply to their community. Scroll definitely lowballed it with a 7% issued to their community, which isn't that different to 5.5% that Binance users got.

• No Upward Supply Cap. To make matters worse, the token distribution was entirely linear. This resulted in top 100 wallets receiving 30% of the entire supply, leaving many salty and wondering: “Is this what so-called “decentralization” looks like?” For more precise calculation and breakdown on how the distribution impacts users, check this thread here.

• Completely Disregarding Every Metric Other Than Just “Marks.” The only criteria they used for the airdrop were Marks. A completely arbitrary parameter they used to reward people with based on the gas fees spent and Total Value Locked. Those with over 200 "marks" were the ones that were eligible.

As a result of all these mistakes, the $SCR chart looks absolutely abysmal, despite BTC making new highs and other altcoins performing relatively well. It is seriously down-only, losing almost 50% of its value since TGE. This serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when you disappoint your loyal community:

The overall FUD is being compounded as many people are expressing their anger and withdrawing funds, leaving the chain as well as their endorsement of Scroll. Due to high on-chain costs and the need to bridge back to cash out, it’s likely users will struggle to make back their initial fees they spent to farm the airdrop in the first place.

The team did not make any efforts to remedy any of this, or they simply got the message too late, or perhaps this was all intentional? Who's to say. No amount of “constructive criticism” can make things right after the tokens were already distributed, and people are still very angry:

For some final thoughts; this isn't even an isolated incident. Similar mistakes have been made by many other airdrop projects lately. The trend of greedy teams and VC’s, insider-skewed criteria for distribution of tokens and oversaturation of the entire space by bots, are all discouraging signs for the airdrop community. To me, the recent developments just showcase that it’s becoming increasingly -EV to farm any airdrops.

Maybe it's time to go hunt some memecoins and be early on those instead?

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

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