How Exactly Used Sablier for its Airdrop

Exactly is a variable and fixed-rate lending protocol on Optimism and Ethereum. It provides both variable and fixed rates for lending and borrowing tokens.

Users can deposit funds in pools that return yields based on their usage by borrowers. The allocation is optimized using the Dynamic Utilization Rate, which allocates assets between pools based on the supply and demand of credit. They also offer many other key features like a brand new interest rate model, a more efficient liquidation process, etc.

The Challenge

The Exactly team wanted to launch a token to hand over control of the protocol to the Exactly DAO.

The problem was: how to organize the token launch in such a way as to distribute it to the community, while preventing dumping and creating long-term incentives for recipients to align their interests with the DAO’s interests?

Traditional lump-sum airdrops are not a solution for that problem, simply because they enable dumping, as a lot of recipients dump on day 1 as soon as they receive their token allocation. They do not create long-term incentives and alignment around the DAO’s priorities.

They also prevent the project from creating a long-term marketing strategy, as most recipients lose interest as soon as they receive their lump-sum airdrop.

Exactly was looking for an open source, verified and audited contract with the flexibility to set up different types of vesting. Because the team planned for the airdrop to last four months, while investors would receive their tokens over three years, while for team members the situation was a bit different: they needed a custom vesting curve as it depended on their token vesting schedule.

Needless to say that this would have been very difficult to set up without a dedicated solution.

The Solution

But lump-sum airdrops aren’t the only option anymore. Thanks to Sablier, it is now possible to stream the airdrop allocation over time to each recipient.

In Exactly’s case, they used Sablier V2 to create a Lockup Linear stream that has a duration of four months. This means that during those four months, every second, each airdrop recipient receives a fraction of their allocation.

Now, a noteworthy point here is the fact that airdrop recipients had to manually claim the airdrop, meaning they had to head over to Exactly’s user interface, and then trigger the airdrop claiming process there. Only then was the stream created.

This prevents inactive wallets from receiving an airdrop allocation, which ensures that the tokens airdropped to your community are only streamed over to active participants.

Thanks to Sablier’s native Snapshot integration that uses their “voting strategies”, projects can set up their governance portal to allow community members to vote using the tokens being streamed.

Benefits/Results

Over 24,000 addresses are eligible for the airdrop, but as of Monday July 31st, only 1328 of those actually claimed the Exactly airdrop.

This highlights the importance of the manual claiming process, as many wallets which have used a protocol in the past may no longer be active at the time of the airdrop, especially in a bear market.

Thanks to the Snapshot integration, Exactly airdrop recipients can already start voting on governance proposals, even if they haven’t yet received the entirety of their airdrop allocation.

By streaming their airdrop, the Exactly team ensured that the incentives for the community matched the incentives of the projects, and offered a platform for a long-term marketing strategy, all while still enabling airdrop recipients to participate in governance using the tokens being streamed.