Lighter, a decentralized exchange (DEX) that gives perpetual futures trading, held one in all the biggest token giveaways in cryptocurrency history, whilst critics questioned how the project divided its token supply.
Lighter airdropped a complete of $675 million value of Lighter Infrastructure Tokens (LIT) to early participants on Tuesday, in keeping with blockchain data visualization platform Bubblemaps. “$675 million was dropped to early participants. $30 million was pulled from (just) Lighter,” Bubblemaps wrote in a Tuesday X post.
According to crypto data aggregator CoinGecko, the Lighter airdrop is the tenth largest airdrop by dollar value in cryptocurrency history, with a complete value of $675 million.
Source: Bubblemaps
The Lighter airdrop surpassed 1inch Network's $671 million airdrop for tenth place, but fell in need of LooksRare's $712 million airdrop from 2022.
However, the $675 million pales compared to the $6.43 billion in value distributed via the Uniswap airdrop in 2020, the biggest within the industry up to now.
Top 10 Airdrops in Crypto History. Source: Coingecko.com
Holders remain in place after the token generation event
Some of Lighter's early adopters, like pseudonymous crypto investor Didi, reported receiving an airdrop value over six figures from the DEX.
As of Wednesday, about 75% of airdrop recipients held the tokens, while 7% of recipients had purchased additional LIT tokens on the open market, signaling confidence within the long-awaited DEX token, in keeping with data shared by blockchain expert Arndxt in an X post.
Source: Arndxt
Still, investors have raised concerns about Lighter's tokenomics, as 50% of LIT's supply is reserved for the ecosystem, while the remaining 50% has been allocated to the team and investors, with a one-year cliff and a multi-year vesting plan.
Some community members identified that the 50% team allocation was too high for a DeFi project, while others criticized that the tokenomics resembled the model presented by one in all its fundamental competitors, Hyperliquid.
Lower market cap, all-time chart. Source: Nansen.ai
According to crypto intelligence platform Nansen, as of 11:20 a.m. UTC, the LIT token had a market cap of $678 million and was trading above $2.71.
However, traders who buy at current price levels could only profit from “short-term trading,” as a long-term market opportunity would require significantly more trading volume and “user retention,” crypto investor Casa wrote in a Tuesday X post.
