I recently recalled the ENS airdrop feast, and honestly, it’s quite surreal to think about. I remember at the time, news was everywhere, saying a college student received a $2.78 million airdrop through community building, and the market’s FOMO sentiment was at an all-time high.

This actually reflects an interesting phenomenon in the blockchain space. In the Web2 era, we were already used to the domain name system; just typing in a URL could get you online. But in the decentralized world, the situation is completely different. Try memorizing a 42-character Ethereum address? A single digit mistake during transfer can directly result in asset loss. The emergence of ENS was actually to solve this pain point, allowing users to replace that long string of numbers with a simple .eth address.

Back then, the scale of the ENS airdrop was truly astonishing. Just the qualifying addresses exceeded 137k, much more than the 36k from the dYdX airdrop two months earlier. Official data showed that each address could claim an average of 180 ENS tokens, and lucky ones could get over a thousand. The 46k tokens claimed by that college student was indeed astronomical at the time’s price.

Interestingly, the rules of this airdrop were quite fair. It wasn’t based on how many domain names you held, but on the number of unique addresses. This directly blocked domain traders. Some whales held tens of thousands of ENS domains, all stored in a single address. As a result, they could only claim one airdrop, but if those domains had been spread across different addresses, they could have claimed tens of millions of dollars worth of tokens.

I checked the data, and the address ending with “28e2” held over 40k ENS domains, accounting for 29.1% of all. According to the official airdrop rules, this address only received about 180 tokens, but if they had distributed holdings across multiple addresses, a simple estimate suggests they could have claimed 137k tokens—that’s a difference of billions of dollars. These domain traders were indeed sabotaged by their own hoarding strategies.

Now looking at ENS’s price, it has dropped to around $7.41, less than half of the $60 high it once reached. The market’s test is still ongoing. After all, ENS isn’t a new concept; its core value is providing a more user-friendly address system. After short-term speculation, where this track ultimately stabilizes depends on the real demand from the market.

Speaking of which, the most interesting part of this ENS story isn’t who made how much money, but those missed opportunities. Some achieved financial freedom through community participation, while others lost millions due to hoarding strategies. In this market, strategy and luck are often equally important.