The $280 million move comes three days after EigenLayer announced its initial plans for its token genesis event, which attracted a range of criticisms, including how the airdrop allocation followed a linear distribution model that favored whales.

The Eigen Foundation announced Thursday that it will allocate an additional 100 EIGEN tokens, currently worth about $1,000, to more than 280,000 users in an effort to increase the accessibility of its token for early adopters and respond to community criticism of specific details of EigenLayer’s token airdrop. 

According to the announcement, the Foundation had initially “earmarked a significant portion of a future season specifically to achieve broader distribution,” but the Foundation has since decided to accelerate its broader distribution of EIGEN by allocating additional tokens to the wallet addresses of EigenLayer depositors.

Updates on the EIGEN Stakedrop pic.twitter.com/1cwSForJnx

— Eigen Foundation (@eigenfoundation) May 2, 2024

While still in its pre-launch stage, EIGEN is currently trading at $10.11 on decentralized exchange Aevo, making the additional total allocation to its users stand at about $280 million. The current price for EIGEN on Aevo makes the fully diluted valuation of EigenLayer to be $16 billion, which is less than Dogecoin at $18.9 billion but more than layer 1 blockchain network Avalanche at $14.6 billion, date from CoinGecko shows.

Read more: 5 Reasons E-Beggars Are Not Happy With EigenLayer’s Airdrop

The move comes three days after EigenLayer disclosed its initial plans for its token genesis event, plans which attracted a litany of criticism, ranging from how the airdrop followed a linear distribution model that favored whales, to the confusing documentation that raised more questions than answers for some. 

Additionally, a recent report from Blockworks showed that the top 2% of total EigenLayer depositors will be receiving roughly 90% of the EIGEN airdrop allocation, which upset many who weren’t whales, crypto parlance for those who hold large sums of digital assets. 

“We heard a lot of really good feedback from people that gas costs were a lot higher at various times, and because of that, we wanted to make sure that everybody was properly accounted for,” said Robert Drost, the executive director of the Eigen Foundation, in a forthcoming episode of the Unchained podcast, to be released on Friday, May 3. 

The latest announcement also said investors and team members will have their EIGEN allocations locked up for one year after EIGEN becomes transferable, which is expected to occur by Sept. 30 when certain features like slashing get deployed. 

Read More: What Is EigenLayer? A Guide to the Decentralized ETH Restaking Protocol

The initial lack of details about when EIGEN would become transferable was another point of contention. However, “it’s so weird that it [transfer restrictions] got misinterpreted so wildly in the opposite direction, said EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan in Friday’s Unchained podcast. 

EIGEN “is non-transferable precisely because we’re going through many seasons [where] each season, we allow more tokens to come out and only after that does [EIGEN] unlock or transfer for anybody, after the community has a say in participation…. Transfer restrictions are intended to empower users rather than any other phenomenon,” Kannan noted. 

The Eigen Foundation also said that it was aware that testnet operators were initially omitted from claims, and said operators would be added to Phase 2 of Season with added allocations.