Examining 8 Projects That Could Potentially Offer Airdrops for Node Operators

The competitive landscape of public blockchains has become more unpredictable with the deepening of modularization, and a large number of Layer1 and Layer2 solutions are set to launch and distribute tokens in 2024.

For airdrop hunters, running nodes on public blockchains often serves as a reliable means of acquiring airdrops. Typically, if there is a portion allocated to node operators in the airdrop distribution of the token economy, node operators tend to receive a larger quantity of airdrops. Previously, SOL nodes earned over $500,000, and TIA nodes earned over $80,000.

The following are currently the node projects that users can operate:

Monad

Monad is an EVM Layer 1 designed to significantly enhance blockchain scalability and transaction speed through its unique technological features. One of Monad's key advantages is its ability to process up to 10,000 transactions per second. This is made possible by its MonadBFT consensus mechanism and compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), enabling efficient and rapid transaction processing.

One of the most notable features of Monad is its parallel execution capability, allowing it to handle multiple transactions simultaneously. This greatly improves network efficiency and throughput compared to the sequential processing approach used in traditional blockchain systems.

Monad's development is led by Monad Labs, co-founded by Keone Hon, Eunice Giarta, and James Hunsaker. The project has successfully raised $19 million in seed funding and plans to launch a testnet in the mid-first quarter of 2024, followed by the mainnet launch.

Berachain

Berachain originated from the Bong Bears NFT project and was jointly launched by several OHM OGs (Olympus DAO original gang members), later attracting numerous OHM OG investors to join. “Bera” intentionally misspells “Bear” as a nod to the crypto meme “Hodl.”

Berachain has evolved into a high-performance EVM-compatible blockchain, built on the Proof-of-Liquidity (PoL) consensus mechanism. The goal is to adjust the network's incentive mechanisms by strengthening the synergies between Berachain validators and the project ecosystem. Additionally, Berachain's technology is based on Polaris, a high-performance modular framework used to build EVM-compatible chains on the CometBFT consensus engine.

In April 2023, Berachain completed a $42 million Series A funding round with a valuation of $420.69 million. Polychain Capital led the investment, with participation from OKX Ventures, Hack VC, former Dragonfly Capital partner, Celestia founder Mustafa Al-Bassam, and Tendermint co-founder Zaki Manian, among others.

Babylon

Babylon is a new project within the Cosmos ecosystem with the vision of enhancing the security of the Cosmos network and other Proof-of-Stake (PoS) chains by leveraging the security of Bitcoin.

Babylon achieves this by utilizing three aspects of Bitcoin—its timestamp service, block space, and asset value—to transfer Bitcoin's security to various Proof-of-Stake (PoS) chains, creating a more robust and unified ecosystem.

The Bitcoin staking protocol of Babylon employs a remote staking approach, overcoming the absence of smart contracts through cryptographic, consensus protocol innovations, and optimized usage of the Bitcoin scripting language. This staking protocol allows Bitcoin holders to securely stake Bitcoin without the need to bridge to a PoS chain and provides complete slashable security guarantees for that chain. Babylon's innovative protocol eliminates the necessity for bridging, wrapping, or custody of staked Bitcoin.

Taiko

Taiko is a highly promising project in the zkEVM (zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine) space, offering complete decentralization and equivalence to Ethereum. It is one of the five highlighted contenders for ZK-EVM by Vitalik Buterin on Twitter. Shortly after announcing the launch of its testnet, Taiko Labs secured $22 million in two seed funding rounds. The first round, concluded in the third quarter of 2022, was led by Sequoia Capital China, raising $10 million. The second round, led by Generative Ventures, raised $12 million. Other investors in these rounds include IOSG Ventures, OKX Ventures, GSR, and GGV Capital. With significant participation from reputable institutions and no token issuance yet, there is speculation in the market about the possibility of substantial airdrops from Taiko.

Penumbra

Penumbra is a privacy-first layer-one network in the Cosmos ecosystem, providing users with the ability to engage in transactions, staking, token swaps, and liquidity provision without exposing personal information, account activities, or trading strategies.

In November 2021, Penumbra successfully raised $4.75 million in a seed funding round. The funding was led by Dragonfly Capital, and other participants included Interchain Foundation, Lemniscap, Robot Ventures, Volt Capital, Figment, Strangelove Ventures, Informal Systems, and ZKValidator.

Zora

Zora, founded in 2020 by three senior Coinbase professionals, aims to provide digital token sales services related to physical products such as tapes for musicians and other artists. Since then, the company has been focused on building an open-source protocol that allows anyone to create their own NFT marketplace. Zora previously secured a $50 million seed funding round led by Haun Ventures, a venture capital firm led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) former partner Katie Haun.

Following the bedrock upgrade by OP, the release of the modular blockchain solution OP Stack, and the proposal of the vision for a superchain, Zora has embarked on building its own Layer2 for data.

Elixir

Elixir Protocol is a decentralized market-making protocol that interacts with centralized exchanges using market-making algorithms through API calls. It brings liquidity to long-tail crypto assets. Elixir Protocol disrupts traditional market-making models, allowing projects to obtain liquidity for centralized and decentralized trading pairs, saving costs by up to 99%. This not only enhances project democratization and decentralization but also improves community consensus and transparency.

Quai

Quai Network is a dynamic set of EVM-compatible blockchains capable of achieving 50,000+ TPS without compromising security or decentralization. Quai is a blockchain-merging mining network. The network can coordinate an infinite number of blockchains (executing shards) by utilizing the Entropy Minimization Proof (PoEM) consensus mechanism, eliminating all consensus-based contention. The ability of PoEM to coordinate the growing blockchains allows the network to process over 50,000 transactions per second. The architecture is a composable multi-threaded execution environment, generating blocks approximately every 1.1 seconds. All blockchains in the network can transfer and receive state through the process of merged mining, asynchronously creating hash-linked references between chains. Quai extends traditional proof-of-work block production to facilitate communication between blockchains without introducing new trusted validation mechanisms.

According to the statistics from wacy_time1, the service fees for establishing nodes for the above 8 projects using the corresponding VPS configurations are as follows: