Founders Fund: A Crypto Airdrop Roadmap
The airdrop of 火星财经 Plasma, where each participant received 9,300 $XPL tokens (worth over $13,400 at its peak), caused quite a stir in the crypto market. This event highlighted Founders Fund as a key investor with a proven track record of identifying promising projects in their early stages, such as Starknet, Avail, and Plasma. So, what investment philosophy does Founders Fund employ? And what other projects align with their criteria and have high airdrop potential?
"The Brain" and "OG": Founders Fund's Decision-Making Core
Founders Fund's strength in the crypto space lies in the integration of two key figures: "The Brain," who provides the philosophy and overall vision, and the "OG" (Original Gangster), who ensures tactical execution.
Peter Thiel: "The Brain" and Investment Vision
As the founder and spiritual leader of Founders Fund, Peter Thiel imprints his philosophical mark on every investment decision. Through his book "Zero to One," Thiel conveys the idea of "contrarian thinking" and the pursuit of "monopoly technology," which are the foundation of Founders Fund's investments. Thiel, the godfather of the "PayPal Mafia," is a strong believer in creating a new generation of financial networks independent of traditional systems. This thinking guides Founders Fund to focus on core protocols and infrastructure that can reshape the industry, rather than focusing on short-term trends. He sets the direction for the fund: seeking out teams that are working on solving the most difficult problems and have the potential to create a completely new future. Founders Fund looks for companies that can deliver innovative solutions that challenge the status quo, and its investments often involve deep technologies or new concepts that can transform industries.
Joey Krug: The Crypto-Savvy "OG"
If Thiel provides the philosophical guidance for "why we invest," partner Joey Krug solves the problem of "who we invest in" and "how we invest." Krug is a prominent figure in the crypto world, as the co-founder of the decentralized prediction market Augur, and has practical experience in building and operating a successful DeFi protocol from scratch. Before joining Founders Fund, he served as Co-CIO at Pantera Capital, where he gained extensive experience in crypto investments. Krug emphasizes the importance of a team's "shipping velocity," i.e., the ability to consistently transform ideas into products. His deep industry background and keen judgment on technical execution ensure that Founders Fund's macro vision is accurately matched with the most capable teams. Krug focuses on teams that can launch products and iterate quickly, regardless of the noise.
The combination of Thiel's high-level design and Krug's practical insights forms the core of Founders Fund's successful decision-making in the crypto space, allowing them to grasp the biggest technological trends and identify the "surfers" most capable of handling them.
Founders Fund's Crypto Investment Doctrine: Portfolio Overview
This table aims to integrate the scattered projects observed by users and the findings of this report into a structured analysis tool, clearly showing Founders Fund's investment model that focuses on infrastructure first, early intervention, and high potential.
Alpha List: Potential Projects Worth Special Attention
Based on the investment doctrine mentioned above, we can clearly filter out the projects in the Founders Fund portfolio that have airdrop potential.
1. Polymarket: King of Prediction Markets
Project Overview: As the leader in the decentralized prediction market, Polymarket allows users to trade on the outcomes of global hot events (such as elections, economic data, and regulatory approvals). It has become an important hub in the crypto world and beyond for obtaining information and assessing trends, with daily trading volume and monthly active users at high levels in the long term.
Airdrop Expectations: Polymarket's issuance of a token is an open secret. First, as a decentralized protocol that requires community governance and value capture, a token is a necessary element of the ecosystem's closed loop. Second, and the most important signal, its filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) explicitly mentions "warrants," which are typically regarded in investment agreements as granting early investors the right to obtain tokens in the future. After recently receiving positive regulatory signals from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the main obstacle to its compliant token issuance has been cleared.
Reasons to Pay Attention: The community widely expects Polymarket's airdrop to refer to the Starknet and Avail models, and to conduct a large-scale retrospective airdrop for early and in-depth users of the platform. This is a project that already has a mature product, a huge user base, and a clear business model, and the launch of its token will be a long-awaited realization of value.
2. Sentient: AI+Crypto Vanguard, Value Carrier of Grand Narratives
Project Overview: Sentient's vision is extremely broad, as it aims to build a decentralized and open general artificial intelligence (AGI) network. In an era when AI computing power and models are increasingly monopolized by tech giants, Sentient is trying to create a permissionless and community-owned AI economy through blockchain technology.
Airdrop Expectations: For a protocol aiming to build a global decentralized network, a token is indispensable. It is not only the core tool for incentivizing AI model contributors, computing power providers, and data validators, but also the only carrier for network governance and value distribution. The $85 million seed funding also provides sufficient "ammunition" to build a huge ecosystem and implement large-scale community incentive plans (including airdrops).
Reasons to Pay Attention: Sentient perfectly aligns with Founders Fund's philosophy of investing in "revolutionary technology." The significance of its airdrop will surpass pure wealth effects, but will also be an initial distribution of ownership for the future decentralized AI network. For users who are optimistic about the AI+Crypto track, participating early in its ecosystem and contributing to its network may yield extremely high returns.
3. N1 (Formerly Layer N): Next-Generation Financial L2, Infrastructure Value Reproduction
Project Overview: N1 is a high-performance Rollup network (L2) designed specifically for financial applications. It does not aim to be a general-purpose "cure-all" chain, but to provide superior performance and efficiency for financial scenarios such as high-frequency trading and derivatives settlement through a customized architecture.
Airdrop Expectations: As a project led by Founders Fund, N1 has received a lot of attention since its inception. Issuing L2 public chains and incentivizing early users, developers, and ecosystem projects through airdrops has become an industry standard. Tokens are not only used for decentralized governance, but also are a core weapon to capture network value and compete with competitors such as Starknet and Arbitrum for liquidity and users.
Reasons to Pay Attention: N1 represents the specialized and refined development direction of the L2 track. Referring to the success path of Starknet, N1's airdrop is very likely to be closely related to the depth of interaction with its testnet and the early use of the future mainnet. For users who are familiar with L2 interactions, this is an opportunity not to be missed.
4. Opensea: Pending Giant Airdrop
Project Overview: As the "OG" and founder of the NFT market, Opensea has defined almost the entire track. Founders Fund participated in the seed round of funding in 2018, demonstrating a very advanced vision for the "digital ownership economy."
Airdrop Expectations: Community calls for Opensea to issue governance tokens have continued for years. The main driver is that in the face of competitors such as LooksRare and Blur who have risen rapidly through "vampire attacks" and token airdrops, Opensea needs a powerful tool to reward a large number of historical users and incentivize future platform loyalty. Issuing tokens to achieve community governance and value sharing is seen as an inevitable choice.
Reasons to Pay Attention: The Opensea airdrop opportunity is different from new projects. It does not rely on testnet interactions, but may become an unprecedented "retrospective" airdrop, and the reward criteria may cover years of trading history, total trading volume, the NFT series held, and the collections created, etc. Although the expectation has existed for a long time, its potential huge size makes it a "sleeping giant" that every NFT player cannot ignore.
5. Infrastructure Matrix: Caldera, Citrea, Helius
In addition to the three star projects mentioned above, the Founders Fund portfolio also hides a group of "water sellers" - the core infrastructure that provides core tools and services for the entire crypto ecosystem, which also have an intrinsic need to issue tokens.
* Caldera: A "Rollup as a Service" (RaaS) platform, which allows developers to deploy their own exclusive Rollup chain with one click. As "application chain" becomes a trend, Caldera is expected to become the "AWS" of the future blockchain world, and the possibilities for its platform token are huge.
* Citrea: A Layer 2 solution focused on the Bitcoin ecosystem. With the recovery of the Bitcoin ecosystem, L2 projects that bring programmability and scalability to the Bitcoin network are becoming the focus of the market. Issuing tokens to incentivize ecosystem building and ensure network security is a prerequisite for its development.
* Helius: The leading infrastructure provider for the Solana ecosystem. Provides APIs and core services such as nodes for developers. Although it is more inclined towards B2B, many core infrastructure providers will eventually issue governance tokens to share the value of the protocol and governance rights with the broader ecosystem.
Conclusion
In a market that is tired of fleeting MEME narratives and has begun to look for sustainable value again, the Founders Fund investment script provides a clear and validated path. It reminds us that through noisy hype cycles, it is those projects that are truly committed to building underlying technology and solving core problems that can ultimately traverse bull and bear markets and precipitate value. Following in the footsteps of smart money is essentially following an effective strategy for discovering long-term value. This list provides a clear direction for research and participation, but in the crypto world where opportunities and risks coexist, DYOR (Do Your Own Research) is always the first principle before participating in any project.
Investing in blockchain technology comes with inherent risks. Market volatility, regulatory uncertainty, and technological challenges can significantly impact the value of digital assets. Before making any investment decisions, carefully consider your risk tolerance and consult with a financial advisor. While analyzing investment strategies of successful firms like Founders Fund can provide valuable insights, it's important to remember that past performance is not indicative of future results.
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