some quick thoughts on mdrops

people wrongly blame SEND price action on mdrops. it's understandable, since it was first-of-its kind and highly visible.

in reality, SEND's price action is due to *extremely* generous tokenomics. 25% of SEND was airdropped to early users. that's WAY more than most projects do. it was huge, one of the biggest in sui history. we broke away from the low float high FDV meta that people hate.

but the reality is that holders just want number go up, they don't care how. in practice, low float high FDV makes it much easier for good performance due to supply control. it's the same reason many pumpfun tokens did well -- devs snipe up to 90% of the supply, severly limiting the sell pressure.

but suilend is a legitimate, transparent project. we chose to give the tokens to the community, not keep them for ourselves and VCs. the mdrop helped mitigate a lot of selling pressure, and bootstrapped the suilend treasury with 5M SUI. so far, $2.2M has been used for buybacks which are ongoing. (another big criticism btw -- people wrongly believe mdrop proceeds went to the team but in reality they're being used for buybacks. slowly, over time.)

here's my guess to what would've happened if suilend didn't use mdrops

- SEND price wouldn't have gone as high as it did

- current price would be the same

- suilend treasury would not have $2M in dry powder for buybacks

also, people often point to hyperliquid as a shining example of how to launch a token, but fail to recognize that hyperliquid is a generational outlier. not every project can be hyperliquid -- bootstrapped because founders already made it, wildly successful product in both narrative and revenue. any number of projects can recreate HYPE's tokenomics and not see the same level of success. the name way countless projects copied curve's ve tokenomics and still failed. because tokenomics don't make a project, the product does.