Users who sold the initial OP airdrop should become ineligible for all future airdrops

[MinimalGravitas]

I’m not really convinced that he addressed the key point from your Twitter thread, notably that:

I think confusion stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what the airdrop is supposed to achieve.

This really is the key issue. Lots of the arguments from those thinking sellers shouldn’t miss out on the next airdrop seem to not be considering it in terms of the primary reason for the drop. It’s not to egalitarianly give people money but rather the purpose is surely to get voting power into the hands of those likely to use it. This should be the main consideration. All of the reasons for selling that he lists are perfectly reasonable (I made the point about tax above), but they are things that the Optimism Collective shouldn’t be caring about in my opinion.

@cobie

• They think the valuation of OP is currently too high and they can wait until it becomes aligned with their expectations in order to participate in governance, and thus have a larger governance share.
• They think the valuation is okay, but they expect a post-airdrop dump. They want to buy lower and they think they can sell quickly before this “airdrop dump” happens and rebuy more OP.
• The airdrop is meaningfully large for their net worth, so selling some tokens makes a big difference to them, but they still believe in the future of Optimism.
• They sold on airdrop addresses and rebought on other addresses to anonymise their on-chain activity.
• They have tax obligations.
• They are selling 90% of their crypto portfolio because they are scared of a bear market, but they will rebuy in a couple of years.
• They are fucking rekt and this $ income helps them a lot, maybe one day if they are no longer rekt they can afford to participate in governance of the projects they believe in again.

The only part of his reply that seems to address the choice from Optimism’s perspective, rather than from the airdrop recipient’s is the following, which does make a reasonable point:

@cobie

Imagine two users:

• User A is a regular, legitimate user of Optimism. They get all their friends to use Optimism. They have a lot of daily on-chain activity. They have no interest in participating in governance, so they sold their initial airdrop.
• User B delegated their initial airdrop and didn’t participate at all in governance either. They still hold their tokens and their delegate votes every now and then. They have used Optimism once per month.

Which user is most valuable to Optimism? Which user should be rewarded in future airdrops?

There are clearly other ways than governance for users to benefit Optimism.

I’m definitely against the idea of blacklisting addresses based on whether they sell or hold the token, but I do think there is value in making this one of the criteria in determining future airdrops, such as using it as a multiplier as suggested above (Users who sold the initial OP airdrop should become ineligible for all future airdrops - #34 by polynya) or as a binary criteria as per the 6 factors in airdrop 1. In Cobie’s example the User A should probably get some OP from using Optimism which should be another of the criteria. An additional User C who both used the rollup regularly and holds/delegates their tokens to someone who represents their values/opinions should get a larger 2nd airdrop than either of the first two.