How Much An EOS Airdrop Costs | HORUS Airdrop Update
On the night of June 29, 2018 I airdropped the HORUS token onto the EOS mainnet at a 1 : 1 ratio with the existing EOS token balance captured in the genesis block. HORUS is a utility token that I created for the future web portal HorusPay.io. A lot of questions arose from the community regarding airdrops as we were one of the first teams to attempt it on the mainnet. One mystery we as a community had to discover was the allocation and cost of RAM. If you'd like to read about this in more depth please check-out @leordev articles one and two.
As for the HORUS airdrop, we did end up removing a few accounts in the genesis block (for example b1) leaving us with 163,921 accounts out of the 163,930 accounts in the genesis block. We also included the historic memo 'This is not an airdrop, this is a takeoff! HorusPay'.
After everything was issued out we were left with the following resource statistics:
| Resource Type | Total Resources We Used |
|---|---|
| RAM | 37.68 MiB |
| CPU Bandwidth | 3.323 minutes |
| Net Bandwidth | 17.15 MiB |
CPU and Net Bandwidth are delegated resources which we eventually fully got back. However, with the traditional eosio.token contract that we used for our token, RAM is slowly reclaimed as users send their balances from their genesis account to a new eosio account. Since there are only a handful of wallets that currently support HORUS (right now this includes greymass & simpleos) and users are claiming them slowly, the process of getting our RAM back has been very sluggish.
If you are considering doing an airdrop and anticipate on getting your RAM back, then you better have a good idea to get the majority of users to claim their tokens in a timely manor or else you will be sitting on a lot of RAM for quite some time. Now this might not be a big deal depending on your situation, but the "expensive" RAM we are currently seeing could be a deciding factor. Since the chain is so new and has a small number of active users I don't foresee RAM being reclaimed anytime soon.
We started out with a full 37.68 MiB of RAM on June 30, 2018. Now on July 11, 2018 (only about a week and a half later) we now have 37.67 MiB, only about 10 KiB have been reclaimed. When I claimied my on own tokens, I noticed that my account balance was taking up about 125 Bytes. We have a long way to go!
If you want to stay updated you can see all the information for our account 'horustokenio' and smart contract at eostracker but watch out because sometimes I don't trust their refresh rate. You can also use the command line tool cleos.
And, If you would like to claim your tokens, HORUS is currently supported by the SimplEOS wallet.
Thanks for reading!
-Jack D.