Can Seamless airdrops become a key factor for Base's victory in Layer 2?

23-12-12 15:30

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Original Title: "Can Seamless Airdrops Drive Wealth Creation in the Base Ecosystem?"

Source: Azuma, Odaily Star Daily

On December 12th, Beijing time, Base's native lending protocol, Seamless Protocol, announced the launch of an airdrop program. This airdrop will distribute 400,000 SEAM tokens to over 5,000 eligible addresses. Seamless Protocol also stated that the airdrop snapshot was taken on December 8th and that eligible addresses can claim their SEAM tokens anytime within the next 3 months.

Meanwhile, Coinbase has also announced the launch of SEAM, and trading is now available, with a current price of $14.61 as of the time of writing.

As the first native project token to land on Coinbase in the Base ecosystem, and also the first native project in the mainstream ecosystem to conduct a "large-scale" airdrop to the community, Seamless Protocol's TGE today has attracted considerable attention.

From a positioning perspective, Seamless Protocol is a native lending protocol that operates solely on the Base network. Currently, it supports borrowing and lending services for ETH (including cbETH and other LST tokens), as well as stablecoins such as USDT, USDC, and DAI.

Official materials show that the product code of Seamless Protocol is forked from Aave v3, and the liquidity mining code is forked from Ampleforth Geyser v2. Both of these two projects that were referenced have been running stably for several years and have relatively good security conditions.

Aside from basic services similar to Aave, Seamless Protocol has also created a unique form of lending called the "Integrated Liquidity Market (ILM)", which allows specific liquidity providers to offer controlled liquidity to authorized borrowing strategies. These borrowing strategies are securely embedded in smart contract code to ensure that liquidity is not abused. The biggest feature of ILM is that it allows borrowers to provide collateral that is less than the full amount, thereby increasing the efficiency of capital utilization in the entire DeFi ecosystem.

Defillama data shows that the total value locked (TVL) of Seamless Protocol is currently around $20 million, ranking fifth within the ecosystem and second in the lending track, second only to Compound, the veteran leader that has expanded to the Base ecosystem.

Regarding the token economic model, the main utility of SEAM is protocol governance. Its total supply is 100 million, and the specific allocation plan is as follows:

· Core contributors 8%: allocated to core contributors responsible for developing the protocol;

·Community contributors 3%: allocated to community contributors, part-time contributors, and advisors who have made contributions to protocol development;

·Ecosystem support and foundation 20%: used for developer funding, ecosystem/partner funding, community management/operations, etc.;

·Community Reward 13.5%: Used for various community targeted rewards, such as third-party-led marketing, education, community incentive activities, airdrops, grants, and other community reward programs;

·DAO 55.5% : Used for protocol liquidity mining and other community rewards.

According to the airdrop requirements disclosed by the Seamless Protocol, SEAM's airdrop will be distributed to two types of users: first, old users who have used the Seamless Protocol and received OG points; second, users who have completed various tasks on platforms such as Galxe or participated in community growth activities such as AMA. You can check whether you are eligible for the airdrop on the official website.

As can be seen from the previous information, the distribution of this Genesis airdrop accounts for only 0.4% of the total supply of SEAM. The total amount of tokens allocated for the "community reward" category, to which the airdrop belongs, is 13.5%. Therefore, it is not ruled out that Seamless Protocol will continue to carry out a follow-up airdrop plan (which seems to be a common practice for OP projects).

Just for now, another good way to get SEAM is to participate in the liquidity mining program launched in sync with the Seamless Protocol early this morning. With the incentives provided by SEAM, both borrowing and lending currently have considerable yields, such as USDbC (bridged version of USDC) with a supply yield of up to 79%.

The most noteworthy aspect of the Seamless Protocol TGE is that Coinbase announced immediate support for SEAM at its inception.

Although Base has emphasized that it will not issue coins and has even entrusted the governance of the network to Optimism, the major projects within the ecosystem have complete freedom to issue coins, and Coinbase has sufficient motivation to support these projects rooted in its own soil.

In this way, Coinbase's reputation and liquidity advantage will become a major boost for the early development of Seamless Protocol and other Base native projects. Whether this can open up the wealth effect of the Base ecosystem or be a key factor in Base's future competition with other Layer 2 solutions remains to be seen.