LayerZero airdrop confirmed? What is the "SSL certificate" that the community is discussing?
Before the Arbitrum airdrop, there was a similar operation.Written by: Azum, Odaily Planet Daily
Rumors about "LayerZero's upcoming airdrop" are spreading wildly across major social media and communities.
The reason for such speculation at this time is that there have indeed been some potential signs recently, all seemingly pointing to LayerZero about to "do something big."
For example, on the prediction market Polymarket, the prediction for whether LayerZero will airdrop has seen "yes" surpass "no"; furthermore, the upper-layer application Tapioca built on LayerZero announced a significant update on December 12, which is contingent on ZRO for decentralized verification; additionally, Luca Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins, who has a close relationship with the LayerZero team, directly stated on X, "Can't wait for ZRO."
However, looking at the overall picture, the most direct and hottest sign is that the unused domain "layerzero.foundation" added an SSL certificate on November 3. Given that the update frequency of the "layerzero.foundation" domain is highly consistent with the already confirmed LayerZero project domain "layerzero.network," the community speculates that this domain is also managed by the LayerZero project.
The "layerzero.foundation" domain has added an SSL certificate.
The "layerzero.foundation" domain and the "layerzero.network" domain were updated simultaneously in March this year.
The "layerzero.foundation" domain and the "layerzero.network" domain were updated simultaneously in October this year.
Looking back at the historical actions of the LayerZero project, the project often performs such operations on related domains before making significant moves, such as:
On September 7, 2022, the official announcement of the protocol browser LayerZero Scan, with the SSL certificate for "layerzeroscan.com" added on September 5;
On October 19, 2022, the official announcement of the Aptos cross-chain bridge, with the SSL certificate for "theaptosbridge.com" added on October 17;
On November 17, 2022, the official announcement of the Bitcoin cross-chain bridge, with the SSL certificate for "bitcoinbridge.network" added on November 16;
On February 21, 2023, the official announcement of the Goerli testnet cross-chain bridge, with the SSL certificate for "testnetbridge.com" added on February 20;
Therefore, it can be inferred that LayerZero is likely to take some actions related to the "layerzero.foundation" domain next.
But what kind of actions are generally associated with a ".foundation" suffix domain? Considering that airdrops for several projects like Aptos, Arbitrum, and Sei are completed through foundation websites, and that Arbitrum performed exactly the same operation—adding an SSL certificate to the "arbitrum.foundation" domain—just two days before announcing its airdrop in March this year, it is hard not to let community users speculate.
So, what exactly is the so-called SSL certificate? What is its relationship with the potential airdrop (assuming there really is one)?
Specifically, SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, which is a network communication encryption protocol. The traditional HTTP protocol transmits data in plaintext, making it easy for data interception and tampering, while the SSL protocol can encrypt the transmission process, effectively preventing data from being eavesdropped on or tampered with.
In simple terms, updating the SSL certificate ensures that the website is more secure.
From this, it can be deduced that updating the SSL certificate for the "layerzero.foundation" domain may indicate that LayerZero wants to take measures to enhance the security of the website.
To put it more bluntly, if LayerZero really plans to conduct a ZRO airdrop through the "layerzero.foundation" domain, the team would naturally anticipate that, given the heightened emotions in the community, the website's traffic and interactions would surge, thus making it necessary to improve the website's security to ensure user safety.
However, all of this remains hypothetical. It is important to clarify that merely having an SSL certificate is not sufficient to prove that LayerZero will definitely airdrop; objectively speaking, this is just a measure taken by the domain owner to improve the quality of basic settings.
How to interpret this is open to individual perspectives.
