Key Points:
US-based employees of Eigen Labs received substantial airdrops from crypto projects Renzo and Ether.Fi, despite these projects’ stated efforts to exclude U.S. residents due to legal concerns.
Several Eigen Labs employees living in major U.S. cities openly claimed these tokens.
CoinDesk found out in an investigation that wallets associated with at least 10 US-based Eigen Labs employees—the company behind the Ethereum-based project EigenLayer—received large airdrops from crypto projects Renzo and Ether.Fi.
Read more: Eigen Labs Acquires Rio Network to Enhance EigenLayer Ecosystem
Eigen Labs Employees Linked to Major Airdrops from Renzo, Ether.Fi
While the projects indicated that they had to exclude U.S. residents from airdrops due to legal constraints, these Eigen Labs employees—engineers, directors, executives, and chief lawyers alike—were beneficiaries of hundreds of thousands of dollars in tokens.
Of the most promising projects of Ethereum, EigenLayer uses U.S. developers through a domestic entity. However, the EIGEN token is issued through another legal entity domiciled in an offshore jurisdiction that has less stringent U.S. securities and tax laws.
Eigen Foundation, which oversees the issuance of the token, is setting up operations in the Cayman Islands, a well-known haven for cryptocurrency firms.
Selective Compliance Raises Questions in EIGEN Token Distribution
While Renzo and Ether.Fi announced that their airdrops would not be available to U.S. residents, a number of Eigen Labs employees—many of whom reside in cities such as Austin, San Francisco, and Seattle—claimed tokens from these projects with no problem. The activity signals a pattern of selective compliance in the industry, insiders say.
CoinDesk previously reported that Eigen Labs was said to have sought airdrop tokens from projects within its ecosystem as a way of thanking them for the successful launches of some protocols on the platform. While Eigen Labs admitted to such allocations, the company clarified that there was no special treatment accorded to its workers.
The event brings into question the legal and ethical standards within the industry, especially at a time when regulators in the United States are putting pressure on the cryptocurrency space.
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