Catizen Airdrop Is Finally Here but Last-minute Shuffle Leaves Community in a Tailspin
The Catizen (CATI) airdrop has landed, but players feel cheated. (Source: Getty Images)
- The Catizen airdrop allocation was dropped from 43% to 34% and is now split across two seasons.
- Catizen’s developers blame botting accounts as the reason behind the airdrop allocation reduction.
- The Catizen token has a supply of 1 billion CATI.
The long-awaited Catizen (CATI) airdrop has finally landed, bringing a mix of celebration, concern, and confusion as the Catizen team makes last-minute changes to the airdrop distribution.
Catizen (CATI) Airdrop
On Sept. 14, 2024, the Catizen team announced that the airdrop had officially begun, but it appears that they made some last-minute changes to the token allocations, and many feel shortchanged.
The token distribution, which was also supposed to be based on player performance, in-game interactions, and several other factors, has appeared to be incredibly unfair for some. One user points out that despite ranking 6,054 out of 36 million players, they only received 39 CATI tokens.
There are bizarre differences in how much people received in the airdrop, regardless of whether or not they invested a single dollar into the game. There are claims that players in the “Master” level who didn’t invest in the game received around 30 to 40 tokens, whilst players who spent $10 and were in lower levels received 40 to 60 tokens.
Now, there’s mounting pressure for the developers to publish the airdrop allocation data and weighting. The debacle has left many worried about the longevity of the game, raising concerns that the play-to-airdrop push on Telegram is nothing more than a greedy cash grab by the developers.
With the Hamster Kombat (HMSTR) airdrop and Binance listing set for Sept. 26, many are looking to see if the token allocation for another of Telegram’s viral Web3 games will roll out in a similarly disastrous fashion.
Airdrop Allocation Changes
In addition, the team initially promised to allocate 43% of the total 1 billion CATI tokens to the Catizen airdrop. This was quietly changed behind the scenes and was reduced to 34%, which came after the team allocated 9% of the supply to the Binance Launchpool. Players aren’t happy that the Binance listing saw their allocations reduced.
Catizen then split this 34% into two seasons. The first—and current—received just 15%. This angered players further who, rightly so, pointed out that there was no mention of a season 1 and season 2 divisions in the whitepaper. The team and treasury supply remains unchanged at 35%.
It’s believed that Catizen chose to direct airdrop claims toward CEXs in a bid to take the strain off of The Open Network (TON), the network CATI will be launched on. This means that players without KYC-verified accounts on one of several CEXs will need to wait until Sept. 20 to withdraw their tokens to a wallet.
Pluto Studio Explains
The developers behind Catizen, Pluto Studio, took to Telegram to explain the reasoning behind this decision, writing:
“During the data review for this CATI airdrop, we discovered that numerous bot accounts exploited this public rule by using scripts to boost their vKitty profit speed, attempting to gain a disproportionate amount of CATI tokens. In this situation, following the original airdrop criterion would significantly undermine the benefits of genuine players and community supporters!”
However, looking at the figures, some would argue this has been an act of greed. At any point, the devs could have changed the team and treasury allocation, instead of slashing percentages from allocations so they can split it across more exchanges, or even more “seasons” of the game. One observer writes :
“Instead of giving fair allocations to community members, they diluted 10% of the supply by only raising $2.8M, while giving 35% to the team and 9% to the Launchpool (LMAO).“
The Catizen team goes on to explain that the decision may cause “some controversy and dissatisfaction,” but remains steadfast in believing it was the right decision for “upholding the fairness” of Catizens, as well as the interests of players.
