X2Y2 Up 235% After Airdrop to OpenSea NFT Collectors

A new challenger to OpenSea called X2Y2 has launched with a token airdrop. Its native token is up 235% since it went live.

X2Y2 Jumps After Vampire Airdrop 

X2Y2 wants to eat OpenSea’s lunch—and its native token is off to a flying start.

The new Ethereum-based NFT trading platform launched the X2Y2 token Wednesday and it’s already rallied around 235%. Similar to LookRare, another NFT marketplace that launched last month, the team conducted what’s known as a “vampire attack” airdrop to attract OpenSea users. In crypto, a vampire attack refers to a tactical move projects employ to distribute free tokens to incentivize users of a competing dApp to start using their offering. In this case, the competitor is OpenSea.

X2Y2 airdropped 120 million tokens representing 12% of its 1 billion token supply to 861,417 wallets that traded on OpenSea between mid-June and mid-December 2021.

The amount of tokens distributed to each user was proportional to their amount of trading activity on OpenSea. There was also a precondition on airdrop claimers to list their OpenSea-listed NFTs on X2Y2 at the same price.

Since the airdrop, the token has soared from around $1.14 on 16 Feb to $3.83 today, per data from CoinGecko. It’s up around 74% in the last 24 hours.

While OpenSea is currently the hub of NFT trading, issues surrounding the platform’s user experience and business model have prompted users to seek out alternatives (OpenSea doesn’t have a token and incited a backlash when its new Chief Financial Officer hinted that the company was looking at going public). As a result, competitors have emerged to attract OpenSea users with airdrops. LooksRare dropped tokens to OpenSea users who had traded over 3 ETH in volume and is also issuing token rewards to its most active users. The token model has led to suspected cases of wash trading on the platform.

According to an X2Y2 Mirror post, it designed its tokenomics to redress issues associated with LooksRare’s LOOKS token. Notably, rather than rewarding users for trading, X2Y2 will pay token stakers, with an additional cut of the platform fees paid in WETH.

The current annual percentage yield for staking X2Y2 tokens is over 8,000%. Additionally, the platform is also rewarding NFT staking. Per X2Y2 documents, listing an NFT on X2YX counts as “NFT Staking,” making the user eligible for free rewards. These factors have helped generate hype surrounding the marketplace and no doubt fueled X2Y2’s rally. Whether it can sustain and overtake LookRare or the market leader of the NFT space—OpenSea—remains to be seen.

Disclosure: The author of this piece owned ETH and other cryptocurrencies.