ShapeShift issues second token airdrop following decentralization pledge

Non-custodial cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift has completed its second airdrop of FOX tokens — dubbed “fairdrop” — as part of a broad decentralization pledge that was first announced in July. 

The airdrop of 6,613,000 FOX tokens was distributed to over 33,000 DAO community members, ShapeShift announced Tuesday. These holders were previously ineligible for the airdrop reward because their tokens were locked in staking or liquidity operations.

A proposal to amend the token distribution process to include DAO community members was submitted on Sept. 16, receiving overwhelming support. 

As Cointelegraph reported, ShapeShift airdropped 340 million FOX tokens to over one million users in July after the company announced it was dissolving its corporate structure — an industry first — as part of a broad commitment to decentralization.

In a follow-up interview with Cointelegraph, CEO Erik Voorhees described decentralization as an “iterative process,” given that some parts of an organization are easier to open source than others. As part of this process, ShapeShift has established a foundation to oversee the shift to decentralization. This foundation, said Voorhees, will become less relevant as the open-sourcing process expands in the coming years. By that time, ShapeShift will be better described as an open-source, multi-chain self-custodied cryptocurrency platform for all users.

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The modern premise of decentralization was made famous by Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s (BTC) pseudonymous creator, who ushered the blockchain revolution in a 2008 whitepaper that explained the merits of a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Many blockchain projects that have since emerged have promised decentralization, though in practice their operations have been closer to “shadow-centralization.”

Recently, Securities and Exchange Commissioner Hester Peirce warned that DeFi projects that have not embraced full decentralization risk running afoul of federal regulations. In an August interview with The Defiant, Peirce said:

“If you want to be decentralized, you really need to be decentralized, and that is going to then put you in a different category from the perspective of regulators because that’s just not something that we’ve dealt with before.”