Bancor's Airdrop as First Step to Take Blockchain Out of 1997: Interview

Decentralized exchange project Bancor is currently in the midst of launching a massive airdrop to all its token holders.

In November, Bancor announced an airdrop of ETHBNT to all those who held its BNT token as of Jan. 1.

These tokens are a key feature of the Bancor exchange.

Unlike normal order book-based platforms, Bancor relies on an algorithm that automatically calculates price based on the difference in buying and selling pressure.

Bancor maintains that the airdrop will increase the number of users in DeFi six-fold by adding 60,000 new people into the ecosystem.

Airdrop participants are naturally inclined to take them as "Free money," selling the tokens at the first opportunity and never really joining the community.

In preparation for the airdrop, Bancor developed the Zerion interface as a staking dashboard, allowing users to manage their funds and get a clear view of returns.

"For someone that is holding BNT, it may be kind of scary to take the first step and put this BNT in a relay [] It's a very natural thing that people are concerned about things that they haven't tried before. But using this airdrop, we created a situation where [] as you look at the wallet and all of a sudden you see a token like ETHBNT, maybe you heard about the airdrop, and then you click on that and you see that you have this amount [] it gives you the experience of participating in DeFi and not just being a holder of a token."

The rise of decentralized finance has been one of the key stories of 2019, though Hertzog noted that Bancor was, in a sense, a DeFi project since before the term went mainstream.

Finding uses outside of the crypto trading market is not easy, and Bancor itself is still primarily one of these providers of accessory services for trading.