Airdrop Lockup/Vesting is a Game Theory Mechanism Opened DeBank today and suddenly saw a reward of W worth 192. Unexpected windfall, but I can't really feel happy about it. Because back then, in order to gamble on the so-called Monad "tit-for-tat" airdrop, I staked 10,000 W. Calculated at the peak value, it has already lost 90% of its value. In other words: I took a loss of over 9,000 to get today's "staking reward" of 192. What a brilliant staking operation! By the way, it reminded me of something—today Soju tweeted complaining about the issue of airdrop lockups. I don’t know the full story, but I guess someone suggested that the team’s token allocation should be locked, while the airdrop allocation doesn’t need to be locked. Of course, the team wouldn’t be happy about that. If there’s locking, everyone locks together—you can’t have a situation where “the commoners are allowed to burn fires, but the officials can’t light lamps.” From a game theory perspective, if airdrops don’t require lockups (most don’t), the best strategy is to “sell immediately after launch.” This leads to token prices spiraling downward—a tragedy of the commons. But even if airdrop allocations are locked, what difference does it make? Haven’t we all seen SAFE’s price trajectory? And the token staking mechanism, at its core, is just “voluntary lockup.” The result? From what I’ve seen, most outcomes aren’t particularly great. Take VIRTUAL, for example, which had a 2-year lockup. I’ve basically already decided to write off a -90% loss on it. However, staking tokens like ETH and SOL to earn staking rewards doesn’t entirely fall into this category. Recognizing promises and lies is a basic skill for navigating the crypto world.