Eigen Airdrop & Token Details

Eigen announced their “work token” yesterday which is coming May 10th. The total supply will be ~1.67B with 15% geared towards an airdrop. 5% of this will be claimable May 10 and then the rest a few months later. Defillama released a cool new tool to check allocations without connecting a wallet: https://defillama.com/airdrops

First, on the airdrop: The airdrop has caused a lot of outrage on twitter for what are seemingly two reasons:

1) non-transferability upon launch

2) vpn blocking

Both of these seem like compliance things. Let’s address #1 first. The non-transferability is similar to what we saw with Element Finance i

May I ask you what the compliance reasons are for the first point (non-transferability)? Something related to establishing the legal structure to launch a token?

https://x.com/jchervinsky/status/1785373696862924997 this is a good thread.

"Enter non-transferability. In general, the securities laws only apply to assets that can be bought or sold. That's sort of the point: to protect investors who seek profit from the purchase and sale of assets that go up or down in value. In particular, the Howey test only applies to transactions (not assets), and only where the investor has a reasonable expectation of profit.
Thus, making an asset non-transferable creates a strong argument that the securities laws don't apply. If token holders can’t transact, then they can’t profit (barring some other mechanism like a right to income or dividends, which is rare in crypto), and so they shouldn’t need the protections of the securities laws. In theory, the SEC could still argue that a non-transferable asset is a security, but that would be a particularly silly view as a matter of policy, so even risk-averse lawyers are generally comfortable with non-transferable tokens."