$ZRO token was deployed on Aptos network. This means only one thing: the time you have left before the snapshot is really short.

Time is running out, yet you still don't know how to turn out to be eligible? Don’t worry.

Here you won't find a thousand cross-references to different guides, which go on and on and on, but you will find just what you need to know to optimize $ZRO airdrop farming (and a few alphas that no one else will tell you!).

Let's get started!

Stargate Finance: one bridge to rule them all!

Over the past few months, I have read everything there was to know about LayerZero, starting with the bridges labeled Powered by LayerZero. PancakeSwap, AptosBridge, BTC Bridge, LiquidSwap di Pontem, Stargate Finance…

Therefore, I asked myself two questions:

• Are all these bridges really necessary to be eligible for $ZRO airdrop or are there better ways to do it?

• What is convenient for the retail user who wants to avoid being flagged as sybil wallet?

I therefore went to read more about the requirements of Arbitrum airdrop, to compare it to the potential airdrop of LayerZero.

There were 3 basic requirements that had to be met to be eligible:

• transactions over time: it was required to conduct transactions in 2, 6 and 9 separate months;

• transaction frequency and interaction: it was required to interact with more than 4, 10, 25, 100 smart contracts or conduct 4, 10, 25, 100 transactions;

• transaction value: it was required to have an aggregate volume of more than $10,000, $50,000 or $250,000.

It becomes clear that creating dozens, if not hundreds of wallets, capable of performing these tasks becomes easy, and this was evident to everyone during the $ARB airdrop. The LayerZero team must be preparing to fight back against sybil attacks.

So if you want to be eligible for this airdrop, you have to look like a real user or adopt complex strategies that take advantage of anti-sybil detection loopholes. Plus you have to do it while spending as little as possible, maximizing your airdrop farming strategy.

And answering the first question: no, it is not necessary to interact with all the Powered by LayerZero bridges available on the market to carve out your own slice for airdrop. The reason is simple: by now, almost all protocols labeled Powered by LayerZero do not use their own self-developed systems, but rely on Stargate Finance, and below is a demonstration of what I am saying.

Among the first to implement this system are PancakeSwap and Li.Fi. This means that it only takes 1 BRIDGE to rule all of them.

Therefore, let us now see the protocols with which to interact to win a slice of $ZRO airdrop!

Stargate Finance: one bridge to rule them all!

The first LayerZero-related product, the best known and most widely used: we are talking about Stargate Finance, the bridge par excellence after the Nomad Bridge and Multichain hacks left a void in the bridge world.

Stargate Finance has now been integrated into most of the major DeFi protocols, as explained above.

$ZRO Airdrop will be given to users of this famous bridge, but beware! Probably this alone will not be enough as a criterion to receive a good airdrop (and perhaps not even enough to receive even a single $ZRO token!).

But let's see how to use it!

Use Stargate in all its forms. Bridge, Liquidity Providing, $STG lock, voting on Snapshot...

• Bridge at least 1000-2000$ per transaction to as many networks as possible (Optimism, Arbitrum, BNB Chain, Avalanche...).

• Lend liquidity to Stargate on as many networks as possible (at least 1000$) and for as long as you can. The longer you leave the funds on Stargate, the better.

• Lock part of your $STG and vote the proposals on Snapshot.

To optimize your activity on Stargate, follow these small steps, but ones that could move you up Tier and ensure greater airdrop even with little funding:

• Number of transactions matters: an organic but consistent high number will help you a lot. Consider these Tiers as reference: 10, 50, 100, 250 txs.

• Size matters: consider not only a high number of transactions, but also their size. Users usually move less than $900 per transaction, so try to move at least $1’000 to $2’000 per transaction. Size > number txs.

• Aggregate volume. By multiplying the number of txs by the size we get the aggregate volume, the metric most looked at in all the threads regarding LayerZero airdrop. Here are the Tiers I could expect regarding aggregate volume: $5’000, $10’000, $50’000, $100’000.

If you want to monitor the status of your address, below is a very comprehensive dashboard, complete with score and ranking:

Stargate currently supports the following networks:

• Ethereum Mainnet;

• BNB Chain;

• Avalanche;

• Polygon PoS;

• Polygon zkEVM;

• Arbitrum One;

• Optimism;

• Fantom;

• Metis;

• zkSync Era;

• Base.

In case you want exposure to more exotic networks (task highly recommended!), use Powered by LayerZero bridges compatible with networks not listed above (e.g., Pontem's LiquidSwap or AptosBridge in the case of Aptos network).

Bridges, however, are not enough.

Don't Focus on Bridges: OFT Standard

For Arbitrum airdrop, the official bridge of the Arbitrum Foundation was not considered solely and exclusively. All inbound and outbound transacted volume was taken into account, as well as the volume on the protocols built on Arbitrum itself.

Remember: there are not only bridges, there is not only Stargate. The most innovative technology of LayerZero and on which all protocols are based is the OFT standard, i.e., the Omnichain Fungible Token.

An in-depth discussion of the importance of this standard will come in a future post.

The only way we can be eligible for LayerZero airdrop is therefore to expose ourselves to the OFT standard, using protocols that adopt it and interacting with tokens that adopt this standard.

Be careful, however, not to expose yourself to protocols you are not familiar with! Beware of smart contract risk, always DYOR!

Money Market - Radiant Capital

Probably the most popular protocol since Stargate. The transition from v1 to v2 has made this money market much less appealing to mercenary liquidity than in the past, but it has stickier liquidity because of the dLP mechanism.

How can using Radiant make us eligible for LayerZero airdrop?

• Radiant Capital uses the OFT standard for its $RDNT token due to the v2 update. A great way to be eligible is to hold $RDNT, either in liquid or locked form in Balancer's dLP (then staking it on Radiant Capital).

• Having used Radiant v1. It is now too late to use v1, but v1 users will probably be accounted for. Again: consider the aggregate volume on the platform, time of use, and how much $RDNT you kept locked up and then converted to $RDNT with OFT standard during the v2 upgrade.

Other protocols using OFT & ONFT standards.

The point made for Radiant Capital also applies to other protocols that use the OFT standard. Below is a list of protocols to interact with:

• Trader Joe: DEX born on Avalanche recently switched to the OFT standard for its $JOE token.

• Sushi: DEX and historical opponent of Uniswap that uses the OFT standard for its $SUSHI token.

• Pendle: permissionless yield-trading protocol, which allows governance, accrual, and boosting of cross-chain rewards to those holding locked $PENDLE in the form of vote-escrowed $PENDLE (vePENDLE).

• Bitcoin Bridge (known for BTC.b): this wrapped form of Bitcoin via LayerZero's OFT standard can be moved cross-chain, even on non-EVM networks such as Aptos.

• Gravita Protocol: issuer of the $GRAI stablecoin, based on OFT standard, with 0% borrow interest rate and with collateral based on ETH's Liquid Staking Derivatives. It presents the possibility to liquidate users by buying their collateral at a discount, using $GRAI (copying Kujira's protocol in the Cosmos ecosystem).

• Poison Finance: RWA protocol (real world assets) which allows to mint synthetic real-world tokens, such as commodities and stocks, using different types of collateral (stablecoins, WETH, ETH, WBTC, ARB and wstETH). It uses LayerZero’s OFT standard for the $POISON token and the current 14 synthetic assets.

• Merkly Minter: OFT & ONFT Bridge.

• L2Marathon: omnichain protocol that allows to send gas to new networks via the technology of ONFTs (Omnichain Non-Fungible Tokens). This is the most interesting integration of ONFTs, but beware of smart contract risk! This is a new and little-used protocol.

• TapiocaDAO: omnichain money market, uses the OFT standard for its $USDO stablecoin. Platform still in beta and has raised $6M in seed.

• Rage Trade: omnichain perpetual DEX. Phase v1 has ended; v2 of the protocol is in development. This was a yield optimizer on Curve Finance's tricrypto LP (Arbitrum One network) and on GLP in delta-neutral.

• Dexalot: Avalanche's subnet focused on trading through its on-chain order book DEX, with low fees and high transactional throughput.

So many names and so much information, but how do I become eligible for $ZRO airdrop?

I don't know. No one does.

And here is the truth that no airdrop hunter or yield farmer will tell you: no one knows the eligibility criteria for the $ZRO token. Actually, we don't even know if this phantom airdrop will be there.

Search on Twitter, Medium or YouTube for "LayerZero Airdrop Guide" and you will find thousands of results that by now all look alike, probably all the same guides built by copying each other.

The truth is that no one knows the selection criteria, we can only speculate about it. I have, however, been eligible for Arbitrum airdrop, and I will tell you what I think I have learned in my years in the DeFi world: there are no free meals.

LayerZero raised $263M and was valued on April 04 2023 at $3B. To give a yardstick for comparison, Arbitrum Foundation raised $143.7M and has a current market cap of $1.46B.

If there have been many sybil attacks for $ARB's airdrop, the same will not happen for $ZRO's. Be wary of those who propose automated airdrop farming systems or complex strategies to camouflage multi-wallet sybil activity!

If you want a bigger slice of $ZRO tokens, operate better than others.

How can I do that? How can I do better than others?

If history repeats itself, in all likelihood a great many wallets will be blacklisted for sybil activity, others will manage to be eligible, and we will unfortunately see some individuals receive airdrops multiple times.

I expect LayerZero to protect users and investors from airdrop farmers using automated farming systems. However, this could also translate into limitations to retail users: it is possible that some activity will be counted as "sybil activity" or "airdrop farming" and thus the final reward may be scaled back even for real users.

This is why you need to optimize your activity, operating smarter than the average crypto user. How? By monitoring what others are doing and improving the data regarding your own on-chain activity. Here is another excellent dashboard on Dune Analytics:

I therefore recommend farming this airdrop by looking at the actual activity you do every day in DeFi:

• Use LayerZero-based protocols only if you have real strategies to implement in DeFi.

• Do not move funds unless you have to. Moving $10,000 in aggregate volume each week from network X to network Y back and forth will probably increase your aggregate volume, but it could potentially turn into an expense if such behavior is punished.

• Do not use protocols you don't know for the sole purpose of farm the $ZRO airdrop. Smart contract risk is always around the corner at best. At worst, you risk having your funds taken away by people more capable than you.

• Do not use testnets. By now every guide reiterates the use of TestnetBridge and USDC Demo Bridge. Using a protocol in testnet makes sense as long as it does not go mainnet, but here we are talking about LayerZero, which is one of the most established in the crypto world. Use only real funds, otherwise you will not be counted for the airdrop.

How am I farming?

Using the underlying protocols that rely on the OFT standard.

Lending liquidity to a bridge like Stargate, acting as an LP in a DEX, trading a token with OFT standard on Trader Joe, building long or short positions on money markets like Radiant, sending gas on new chains through L2Marathon, minting $GRAI or $USDO, opening vaults on Rage Trade etc...

DeFi exists to be used. Use it!

The protocols given are for educational purposes. I take no responsibility for your use of the contents of this article. If you like what I do, please subscribe.