On July 17, 2025, Binance HODLer airdrop project Caldera (ERA) was launched, with a first-day increase of 216 times, setting a new record in the Layer 2 field. Behind this 'wealth code' is Caldera's carefully designed community incentive mechanism—250 million ERA airdropped to cover 85,000 early users, with over 60% of the tokens flowing to the community through airdrops and ecosystem incentives, completely overturning the traditional project token distribution logic.
Retrospective Airdrop: Using Historical Rewards to Forge the Future
Caldera's retrospective airdrop is a textbook example of Web3 community operations:
• Coverage: All users who participated in testnet deployment, cross-chain interactions, or guardian node operations before February 2025 can apply. On-chain records serve as the sole proof. For example, users only need to prove on-chain that they have deployed Rollup to receive 1,000 to 5,000 ERA.
• Fairness Design: Using a 'contribution weight' algorithm, the airdrop amount is dynamically adjusted based on user activity in the ecosystem (such as transaction volume, proposal voting frequency). A DeFi developer optimized Rollup gas consumption and received an additional reward of 5,000 ERA, leading to a subsequent 200% increase in their project's TVL.
• Market Impact: After the airdrop announcement, the number of independent addresses in the Caldera ecosystem surged by 120% within two weeks, and the daily average transaction volume on-chain jumped from 1.5 million to 3.2 million, directly pushing ERA's market capitalization to exceed $1 billion on its first day of listing on Binance.
Community Governance: From Participants to Decision Makers
Caldera stimulates community creativity through multi-dimensional mechanisms:
• ERA Force One: A tiered community platform launched in August 2025, where users can advance from 'Air Force Base' to 'General' based on their token holdings and staking amounts. General-level users can join private Telegram groups to directly participate in Metalayer roadmap formulation. In the first month of launch, the platform attracted over 200,000 users, with staked ERA increasing by 80%.
• Proposal Incubation Fund: The ecosystem fund allocates 50 million ERA annually to support community proposals. By Q3 2025, it has funded 12 projects, including a visualization tool for Rollup deployment designed for developers, reducing new chain launch time from 5 minutes to 2 minutes.
• Developer Rewards: Developers who deploy Rollup and integrate Metalayer can earn a 0.01% ERA share for each transaction. A gaming team earned 230,000 ERA in the first month of their chain game launch through this mechanism, which is three times their development cost.
Application Implementation: From Concept to Scale
The explosive growth of the Caldera ecosystem comes from its diverse application scenarios:
• NFT Field: RARI Chain, through Caldera deployment, achieves royalty enforcement and $0.01 fees, attracting top projects like Yuga Labs, with daily NFT transaction volume exceeding 100,000.
• DeFi Field: Kinto Network, as a modular DEX, utilizes Caldera's multi-virtual machine support to run both EVM and SolanaVM, achieving cross-chain liquidity aggregation, with TVL exceeding $150 million within three months.
• Real Assets: The Clearpool Ozean chain is designed for corporate debt, combining a compliance permission layer, and has connected with institutions like JPMorgan, achieving an on-chain credit scale of $80 million.
• Gaming Field: HYchain, based on the Caldera framework, raised $8 million through node sales in its first month of launch, attracting over 500,000 players with its 'Play-to-Earn' model.
Future Challenges: Maintaining Balance During Expansion
Although Caldera has achieved significant results, it still faces dual pressures of regulatory compliance and ecological competition. For example, the recent scrutiny by the SEC on cross-chain bridges may impact Metalayer's cross-border trading functions; at the same time, Optimism and Arbitrum are also accelerating the launch of similar RaaS services. Caldera's response strategy is to quickly iterate through community governance—a 'Community Charter' vote will be launched in September 2025, proposing to transfer 51% control of the ecological fund to DAO to enhance decentralization. As its CTO Parker Jou said, 'The future of Web3 belongs to the community, and our mission is to allow every participant to truly control their digital destiny.'
