11

I think this take makes no sense. The Zora OP retro rewards stem, from the OP Onchain builders round (round 4) [1]. In this round, OP rewarded those contract deployers who had, among other things, produced the most onchain fees for the OP sequencer. To be clear here, only people who had deployed custom-build Solidity smart contracts on Optimism were eligible. And only those who had done a minimum amount of transactions etc. It was actually difficult to qualify. A side effect of this was that for projects which used Zora contracts but ran their own communities, the transaction volume that these contracts created were credited to Zora. Kiwi News's Kiwi Pass NFT contract, for example, is technically deployed by Zora, but it is maintained and nurtured by us. Yet Zora was credited the OPs in the retro round because the Optimism rules were that the deployer of the contract is eligible to claim the transaction traffic. We couldn't claim it with Kiwi. When we saw this, we complained about it and we asked Zora to airdrop these funds to us. From what I know, other projects had the same concerns and also vocalized them. About the Zora airdrop, the website specifically says that: > What is the eligibility criteria? > Eligibility is based on a weighted scoring system that evaluates your engagement and contributions across key factors tailored to collectors, creators and builders: > For Collectors > Unique editions minted (40%) > Distinct days of activity (40%) > Mint volume (20%) **Measures the number of mints across all editions. > For Creators > Unique editions created (40%) > Days of creation activity (20%) > Referrals (25%) **The number of active creators that you have invited to Zora > Distinct collectors (15%) > For Builders > Number of mints that your Zora client has facilitated Which means the following: - Since Zora builders like Kiwi now have to share their OP Zora allocation with people who minted on Zora and with Zora creators, not only are the "OP Onchain builders" funds now spent on creators and collectors in the Zora ecosystem. - Zora has quite literally taken funds that OP deliberately earmarked for onchain builders. Zora has given these funds to collectors and creators of the Zora platform. I thought it was important to highlight this as this is the factual situation here. > creators are not valued onchain by the wider crypto ecosystem. This is just not true. Zora has given a ton of rewards to creators right here. > I've been vocal for a while that crypto drastically overvalues infrastructure and wildly undervalues the products and teams that can get new users into the mix with added grants and funding. Brother the money has literally been taken from infra projects like us and given to Zora creators. - 1: https://support.zora.co/en/articles/3915073