The Espresso Foundation is launching the ESP token, which will be used to secure the Espresso Network through proof-of-stake. As part of the launch, the Espresso Foundation is distributing ESP tokens to a wide and diverse set of real users, with over 1 million addresses eligible for the airdrop across more than 30 qualifying activities. This airdrop recognizes the users, builders, and partners who have contributed to Espresso's growth as the first base layer purpose-built for rollups.
Espresso is solving crypto’s fragmentation problem with a user base that includes Celo, ApeChain, Katana, Rari Chain, and other industry leaders. As rollups proliferated, they broke the composability that made Ethereum powerful. But solving that problem revealed something bigger: rollups aren't just a scaling solution for Ethereum, they are a glimpse of a future where every application is its own chain, where even web2 apps can become web3-composable by posting their data to a base layer like Espresso.
But that future only works if those chains can communicate safely and seamlessly in real time. Existing infrastructure, designed as monolithic L1s, can’t provide that functionality out of the box, which means our multi-chain future requires purpose-built infrastructure with composability at its core. Espresso is designed to do what Ethereum is not: support thousands of interoperable rollups with fast finality, scalable data availability, and (optionally) decentralized sequencing.
When app-specific chains exist in separate execution environments, slow base layer finality becomes a major bottleneck. Espresso gives these chains the speed they need without sacrificing security or sovereignty, enabling the frictionless finance that lets users move their money across systems at the speed of information.
The official token launch date is yet to be announced, but is coming very soon.
Registration for the airdrop claim ran from December 21 until February 6. Note that your allocation amount won't be revealed until claims open.
Eligible addresses will be able to claim tokens the day the token launches. Specific distribution details and claiming instructions will be provided through official Espresso channels. Stay vigilant!
The Espresso Foundation designed the airdrop, including eligibility and allocation amounts, to reflect active engagement, meaningful contributions to partner ecosystems and the Espresso community, and demonstrated long-term conviction rather than rewarding users based on the size of their wallet balances.
Over the past few months, the foundation has announced almost 40 separate paths to eligibility. These criteria span early and active members of the Espresso community and select users in partner ecosystems.
As detailed in the ESP token economics, 10.00% of the initial total token supply is being allocated towards this first airdrop. Meanwhile, a further 24.81% is reserved for future airdrops, grants, and incentives. Unclaimed tokens in this initial airdrop will be reallocated towards the future as well.
Members of the Espresso community qualify through various activities:
Participants in the 2024 Mainnet Inscriptions campaign
Holders of Espresso’s genesis NFT collection, The Composables, rewarded based on specific snapshot dates and long-term holders
Builders who participated in Espresso’s Build & Brew hackathon and Brew House accelerator
Members of Espresso’s Caffeinated Creators program
Participants who bid for allocations in Espresso’s community sale on Kaito Launchpad
Holders of POAPs from various Espresso events (online and in-person) over the past two years
Those who participated in
Espresso has worked closely with partners, integrated chains and applications to identify active users who will receive allocations. Eligible partner communities include:
Across
AltLayer
ApeChain
Arbitrum
Automata
Caldera
Cartesi
Celo
Eco
Gate Layer
Huddle01
Hyperlane
Katana
LayerZero
LitVM
LogX
Molten
Morph
NodeOps
Polygon
Plume
Rarible
RARI Chain
Rufus
Superposition
Syndicate
T3rn
Users from these ecosystems were selected based on sustained engagement and specific activities rather than wallet size, wealth, or holdings.
Traditional airdrops are broken. They reward simple metrics like transaction counts or snapshot holdings, making them trivially easy to game, but not metrics that matter, like long-term conviction.
In the past, someone who completes every task, meets every criteria, could be highly rewarded in an airdrop only to dump their tokens the moment they're claimable. Those are not the participants any project should welcome or incentivize.
In an effort to reward those with long-term conviction rather than opportunistic farmers, Espresso is pioneering a new approach with its introduction of Holder Score, a methodology that evaluates a wallet’s past behavior to predict future commitment. Combined with comprehensive anti-Sybil defenses, this represents a new standard for token distribution.
Most airdrops can't distinguish between genuine long-term believers and opportunistic participants who dump immediately. Activity metrics show what users did before a snapshot, but say nothing about conviction.
We wanted to address this. As far as we know, Espresso is the first major project to calculate a Holder Score for each wallet address.
Holder Score measures long-term conviction by analyzing how addresses behaved after receiving previous airdrops. The methodology examines whether users held, staked, or sold tokens from major ecosystem airdrops including Caldera, Arbitrum, ApeChain, Hyperlane, Succinct, LayerZero, Uniswap, EigenLayer, and more.
To start our analysis, we created a chart across the airdrops we analyzed showing “retention ratio,” which is the ratio of how much of an airdrop an individual still holds after a few months. If a recipient sold everything, their score is 0.0, whereas 1.0 means they kept exactly what they received, and anything above 1.0 means they bought more. The chart illuminates what everyone has been talking about: almost 90% of airdrop recipients quickly transfer away their entire airdrop. While this is an indicator of a majority of participants selling their tokens, we’re not arguing that 90% of airdrop recipients immediately sell their airdrop, as some may be transferring to other wallets or custody providers for long-term holding.
Our methodology combines retention ratios across each airdrop an individual participated in, with Holder Scores roughly matching retention ratios (with amplification if there is data across multiple airdrops). Overall, we decided to give boosts to those scoring above 0.5, with exponentially increasing bonuses for higher Holder Scores.
An address’ Holder Score is calculated with the following formula:
where n is the sum of retention ratios (each capped at 2.0 to prevent gaming) across all airdrops, and d is the number of airdrops the address participated in. The threshold is configurable; we use 0.2.
The formula accounts for both the percentage of tokens retained and the number of airdrops an address participated in. Addresses that consistently held or staked tokens across multiple airdrops receive higher scores. Those who immediately sold receive lower scores. The more airdrops an address participated in, the stronger the signal in either direction.
This creates meta-incentives. Users who know future projects will evaluate their track record are more likely to support the ecosystems they participate in. Your reputation becomes portable across the crypto ecosystem.
An address that received Arbitrum's airdrop in 2023 and still holds those tokens today demonstrates genuine conviction in rollup infrastructure. That's the kind of participant Espresso wants securing its network, which is why we’ve given recipients with high Holder Scores a massive boost to their allocations: an individual participating in the ESP airdrop could have received up to a 170x boost to their base allocation by having a high Holder Score.
That's also the type of person we want to see in crypto, which is why we plan to open source our methodology for calculating Holder Score, including a codebase with example code for 10+ past airdrops so projects can incorporate this metric into their airdrop plans and better reward true community members, rather than shy away from airdrops altogether. Together we can make reputation matter and disincentivize the farmers.
We’ve prepared a chart showing the distribution of Holder Score boosts to base allocation amounts to each eligible address:
Holder Score is not perfect, however. It has known limitations, including the fact it can't detect tokens moved to hardware wallets or custody providers, held in LP positions, deposited in lending protocols, bridged to other chains, or staked through third-party services. The score reliably identifies strong holders but cannot definitively classify low-scoring addresses as sellers.
For this reason, we’re using Holder Score as a bonus mechanism rather than a penalty. A high Holder Score increases a wallet’s allocation, but a low score doesn't disqualify addresses that meet other eligibility criteria. Fair signal, not punishment.
Holder Score addresses conviction among real users. But first, Espresso needs to ensure participants are real humans, not Sybil farms running thousands of wallets to extract value.
For the Composables NFT eligibility criteria, the Espresso Foundation conducted Sybil analysis on both the mint and ongoing ownership patterns. This analysis identified clusters of wallets exhibiting coordinated behavior, helping filter out addresses created solely to farm airdrops.
Additionally, all participants who go through Espresso’s registration process must complete Authena's proof-of-humanity verification. This zero-knowledge proof-based system verifies users are real humans without exposing sensitive personal data. Authena's multi-layered approach combines biometrics, social graphs, and onchain behavior analysis to detect Sybil activity.
Together, Holder Score and anti-Sybil verification represent Espresso's approach to evolving airdrops beyond simple snapshot mechanics. By rewarding long-term conviction and filtering out bots, the Espresso Foundation ensures more value reaches participants who will contribute to the network's long-term success.
The ESP token serves two primary functions:
Staking & Security: ESP secures Espresso's HotShot proof-of-stake consensus. Any holder can delegate tokens to validators, whose voting power is determined by total stake.
Fee Payment: A future network upgrade will enable ESP for transaction fees, with a portion burned.
The initial total supply is 3,590,000,000 ESP (3.59 billion), with approximately 14.5% unlocked at network launch. ESP has no fixed maximum supply due to inflationary staking rewards.
The staking reward schedule is Ethereum-inspired, where the reward rate on staked tokens is inversely proportional to the square root of the proportion currently staked. This creates balanced incentives for network security while maintaining a slightly higher reward rate than Ethereum and similar chains like Hyperliquid.
As outlined in the ESP token economics, the Espresso Foundation has further created a special staking incentives pool to encourage network decentralization. This pool offers up to 420% in bonus staking rewards, depending on the length of time they stake, exclusively to airdrop recipients.
The Espresso airdrop represents a new approach to token distribution: one that attempts to filter out bots and Sybils, reward those with long-term conviction, and ensure tokens reach participants who will contribute to the network's success. We’re thrilled to involve our community in building the base layer for the future.
For the latest updates on when claims open and how to stake your ESP tokens to earn even more rewards, follow the Espresso Foundation on X.
The Espresso Foundation is launching the ESP token, which will be used to secure the Espresso Network through proof-of-stake. As part of the launch, the Espresso Foundation is distributing ESP tokens to a wide and diverse set of real users, with over 1 million addresses eligible for the airdrop across more than 30 qualifying activities. This airdrop recognizes the users, builders, and partners who have contributed to Espresso's growth as the first base layer purpose-built for rollups.
Espresso is solving crypto’s fragmentation problem with a user base that includes Celo, ApeChain, Katana, Rari Chain, and other industry leaders. As rollups proliferated, they broke the composability that made Ethereum powerful. But solving that problem revealed something bigger: rollups aren't just a scaling solution for Ethereum, they are a glimpse of a future where every application is its own chain, where even web2 apps can become web3-composable by posting their data to a base layer like Espresso.
But that future only works if those chains can communicate safely and seamlessly in real time. Existing infrastructure, designed as monolithic L1s, can’t provide that functionality out of the box, which means our multi-chain future requires purpose-built infrastructure with composability at its core. Espresso is designed to do what Ethereum is not: support thousands of interoperable rollups with fast finality, scalable data availability, and (optionally) decentralized sequencing.
When app-specific chains exist in separate execution environments, slow base layer finality becomes a major bottleneck. Espresso gives these chains the speed they need without sacrificing security or sovereignty, enabling the frictionless finance that lets users move their money across systems at the speed of information.
The official token launch date is yet to be announced, but is coming very soon.
Registration for the airdrop claim ran from December 21 until February 6. Note that your allocation amount won't be revealed until claims open.
Eligible addresses will be able to claim tokens the day the token launches. Specific distribution details and claiming instructions will be provided through official Espresso channels. Stay vigilant!
The Espresso Foundation designed the airdrop, including eligibility and allocation amounts, to reflect active engagement, meaningful contributions to partner ecosystems and the Espresso community, and demonstrated long-term conviction rather than rewarding users based on the size of their wallet balances.
Over the past few months, the foundation has announced almost 40 separate paths to eligibility. These criteria span early and active members of the Espresso community and select users in partner ecosystems.
As detailed in the ESP token economics, 10.00% of the initial total token supply is being allocated towards this first airdrop. Meanwhile, a further 24.81% is reserved for future airdrops, grants, and incentives. Unclaimed tokens in this initial airdrop will be reallocated towards the future as well.
Members of the Espresso community qualify through various activities:
Participants in the 2024 Mainnet Inscriptions campaign
Holders of Espresso’s genesis NFT collection, The Composables, rewarded based on specific snapshot dates and long-term holders
Builders who participated in Espresso’s Build & Brew hackathon and Brew House accelerator
Members of Espresso’s Caffeinated Creators program
Participants who bid for allocations in Espresso’s community sale on Kaito Launchpad
Holders of POAPs from various Espresso events (online and in-person) over the past two years
Those who participated in
Espresso has worked closely with partners, integrated chains and applications to identify active users who will receive allocations. Eligible partner communities include:
Across
AltLayer
ApeChain
Arbitrum
Automata
Caldera
Cartesi
Celo
Eco
Gate Layer
Huddle01
Hyperlane
Katana
LayerZero
LitVM
LogX
Molten
Morph
NodeOps
Polygon
Plume
Rarible
RARI Chain
Rufus
Superposition
Syndicate
T3rn
Users from these ecosystems were selected based on sustained engagement and specific activities rather than wallet size, wealth, or holdings.
Traditional airdrops are broken. They reward simple metrics like transaction counts or snapshot holdings, making them trivially easy to game, but not metrics that matter, like long-term conviction.
In the past, someone who completes every task, meets every criteria, could be highly rewarded in an airdrop only to dump their tokens the moment they're claimable. Those are not the participants any project should welcome or incentivize.
In an effort to reward those with long-term conviction rather than opportunistic farmers, Espresso is pioneering a new approach with its introduction of Holder Score, a methodology that evaluates a wallet’s past behavior to predict future commitment. Combined with comprehensive anti-Sybil defenses, this represents a new standard for token distribution.
Most airdrops can't distinguish between genuine long-term believers and opportunistic participants who dump immediately. Activity metrics show what users did before a snapshot, but say nothing about conviction.
We wanted to address this. As far as we know, Espresso is the first major project to calculate a Holder Score for each wallet address.
Holder Score measures long-term conviction by analyzing how addresses behaved after receiving previous airdrops. The methodology examines whether users held, staked, or sold tokens from major ecosystem airdrops including Caldera, Arbitrum, ApeChain, Hyperlane, Succinct, LayerZero, Uniswap, EigenLayer, and more.
To start our analysis, we created a chart across the airdrops we analyzed showing “retention ratio,” which is the ratio of how much of an airdrop an individual still holds after a few months. If a recipient sold everything, their score is 0.0, whereas 1.0 means they kept exactly what they received, and anything above 1.0 means they bought more. The chart illuminates what everyone has been talking about: almost 90% of airdrop recipients quickly transfer away their entire airdrop. While this is an indicator of a majority of participants selling their tokens, we’re not arguing that 90% of airdrop recipients immediately sell their airdrop, as some may be transferring to other wallets or custody providers for long-term holding.
Our methodology combines retention ratios across each airdrop an individual participated in, with Holder Scores roughly matching retention ratios (with amplification if there is data across multiple airdrops). Overall, we decided to give boosts to those scoring above 0.5, with exponentially increasing bonuses for higher Holder Scores.
An address’ Holder Score is calculated with the following formula:
where n is the sum of retention ratios (each capped at 2.0 to prevent gaming) across all airdrops, and d is the number of airdrops the address participated in. The threshold is configurable; we use 0.2.
The formula accounts for both the percentage of tokens retained and the number of airdrops an address participated in. Addresses that consistently held or staked tokens across multiple airdrops receive higher scores. Those who immediately sold receive lower scores. The more airdrops an address participated in, the stronger the signal in either direction.
This creates meta-incentives. Users who know future projects will evaluate their track record are more likely to support the ecosystems they participate in. Your reputation becomes portable across the crypto ecosystem.
An address that received Arbitrum's airdrop in 2023 and still holds those tokens today demonstrates genuine conviction in rollup infrastructure. That's the kind of participant Espresso wants securing its network, which is why we’ve given recipients with high Holder Scores a massive boost to their allocations: an individual participating in the ESP airdrop could have received up to a 170x boost to their base allocation by having a high Holder Score.
That's also the type of person we want to see in crypto, which is why we plan to open source our methodology for calculating Holder Score, including a codebase with example code for 10+ past airdrops so projects can incorporate this metric into their airdrop plans and better reward true community members, rather than shy away from airdrops altogether. Together we can make reputation matter and disincentivize the farmers.
We’ve prepared a chart showing the distribution of Holder Score boosts to base allocation amounts to each eligible address:
Holder Score is not perfect, however. It has known limitations, including the fact it can't detect tokens moved to hardware wallets or custody providers, held in LP positions, deposited in lending protocols, bridged to other chains, or staked through third-party services. The score reliably identifies strong holders but cannot definitively classify low-scoring addresses as sellers.
For this reason, we’re using Holder Score as a bonus mechanism rather than a penalty. A high Holder Score increases a wallet’s allocation, but a low score doesn't disqualify addresses that meet other eligibility criteria. Fair signal, not punishment.
Holder Score addresses conviction among real users. But first, Espresso needs to ensure participants are real humans, not Sybil farms running thousands of wallets to extract value.
For the Composables NFT eligibility criteria, the Espresso Foundation conducted Sybil analysis on both the mint and ongoing ownership patterns. This analysis identified clusters of wallets exhibiting coordinated behavior, helping filter out addresses created solely to farm airdrops.
Additionally, all participants who go through Espresso’s registration process must complete Authena's proof-of-humanity verification. This zero-knowledge proof-based system verifies users are real humans without exposing sensitive personal data. Authena's multi-layered approach combines biometrics, social graphs, and onchain behavior analysis to detect Sybil activity.
Together, Holder Score and anti-Sybil verification represent Espresso's approach to evolving airdrops beyond simple snapshot mechanics. By rewarding long-term conviction and filtering out bots, the Espresso Foundation ensures more value reaches participants who will contribute to the network's long-term success.
The ESP token serves two primary functions:
Staking & Security: ESP secures Espresso's HotShot proof-of-stake consensus. Any holder can delegate tokens to validators, whose voting power is determined by total stake.
Fee Payment: A future network upgrade will enable ESP for transaction fees, with a portion burned.
The initial total supply is 3,590,000,000 ESP (3.59 billion), with approximately 14.5% unlocked at network launch. ESP has no fixed maximum supply due to inflationary staking rewards.
The staking reward schedule is Ethereum-inspired, where the reward rate on staked tokens is inversely proportional to the square root of the proportion currently staked. This creates balanced incentives for network security while maintaining a slightly higher reward rate than Ethereum and similar chains like Hyperliquid.
As outlined in the ESP token economics, the Espresso Foundation has further created a special staking incentives pool to encourage network decentralization. This pool offers up to 420% in bonus staking rewards, depending on the length of time they stake, exclusively to airdrop recipients.
The Espresso airdrop represents a new approach to token distribution: one that attempts to filter out bots and Sybils, reward those with long-term conviction, and ensure tokens reach participants who will contribute to the network's success. We’re thrilled to involve our community in building the base layer for the future.
For the latest updates on when claims open and how to stake your ESP tokens to earn even more rewards, follow the Espresso Foundation on X.
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