Congratulations.
The Penumbra airdrop has been unlocked at penumbra.claims.
Penumbra is the key.
With this unlocking, the community of followers, cryptographers, builders, and enthusiasts who have been following Penumbra’s creation for almost 3 years worked to decipher a set of 12 void codes on sunshadow.codes. When the community collectively solved all 12 codes, the airdrop site was released to the world.
Why an airdrop?
Penumbra is a decentralized blockchain protocol. At all levels, the protocol has been meticulously constructed to be operated by a network of individuals who have chosen to bring the protocol into being.
The purpose of this airdrop is to urge two outcomes into being:
1. To give back to the creators of codebases that helped bring Penumbra into being
2. To decentralize ownership of the protocol's token into the hands of those who would most benefit from its use.
The results of the claims from this drop and the associated penumbra addresses and actions will be proposed to a foundation deemed responsible for suggesting the genesis block for Penumbra once a set of validators takes up the mainnet-ready code for the network.
Eligibility Criteria
As mentioned, the Penumbra airdrop aims to award those who contributed to its creation, as well as those who will benefit the most from its existence. With this in mind, the eligibility requirements for the airdrop (notwithstanding geographic restrictions required by law) encompass two categories:
1. Top contributions by code volume to a set of Github repositories critical to crypto, the Rust language, and Penumbra itself.
2. BECH 32 Cosmos account holders who meet the requirements listed below on the basis of a snapshot taken on April 1, 2024 and will measure the 1 year preceding this date.
The airdrop will run until June 28th at UTC 23:30, and may be adjusted based on the claiming rate. The amount airdrop claimants will receive will be revealed upon network launch. The airdrop will record claims per account so that the final amounts can be calculated on the basis of the percentage of claimants.
Github Repositories
The repositories chosen from Github to be eligible for the airdrop were selected primarily for their contribution to Rust or Cosmos-SDK code that precedes the instantiation of Penumbra, in addition to meaningful significant contributions to either the field of open-source Zero-Knowledge proving or to other innovations in the creation of blockchain technology.
The github repositories selected for the airdrop can be found in the following CSV of repositories
Cosmos Address Holders
It is typical within the Interchain to drop to stakers of major protocols in IBC-connected chainspace. This airdrop was designed with a different message in mind.
For Cosmos, accounts were chosen based on what was learned about them. If you are eligible for the drop, it is because your activity is visible. The world knows where your crypto came from, where it went to, how it's being used, and how you are using it now. This is the information that was used to gauge your eligibility; use of Cosmos DeFi protocols, certain NFT purchases, onboarding from an exchange into a self-custodied address and back, and so on - all information that was readily pulled from the actions you took across the Interchain. Cosmos addresses, in this case, are all accounts with a BECH32 prefix for an IBC-compatible network that can be converted to a cosmos1 address.
The specific eligibility criteria for the airdrop included a best effort analysis of 160,000 eligible addresses in the cosmos for one year preceding April 1, 2024 at 00:00UTC:
— addresses that received funds from centralized exchanges
— Cosmos hub users who deposited/withdrew from a centralized exchange
— Noble users who deposited/withdrew from a centralized exchange
— Osmosis users who deposited/withdrew from a centralized exchange
— Noble circle mint users
— Osmosis LPs
— Osmosis Membrane CDP (Collateralized Debt Token) Users
— DyDx users
— BadKids NFT holders
— Celestine Sloth holders
If you're eligible, it's because everything you are doing is something that someone else can see, and you left a breadcrumb trail while doing it that anyone can follow. In short, if you are eligible for the Cosmos portion of the airdrop, it's because you might need more privacy, and Penumbra can offer it to you.
You can check your eligibility in the following [csv].
How to check for eligibility
Eligibility process:
There is only one airdrop site, and it is this one: penumbra.claims. Any other site which claims to be offering a Penumbra airdrop is a scam, and you should not interact with it.
If you are eligible, you will need any one of the following:
— An eligible github account
— An eligible Cosmos address connected either through Keplr or Leap.
Claiming
You will then need a Penumbra address in order to claim, if you are eligible.
You can do this through either one of two methods:
— Using the PRAX wallet browser extension (this is the most efficient method)
— creating an account using the Penumbra Command Line (pcli), which requires the installation of pcli on a computer (instructions can be found here).
Any Penumbra address that you control can be used for your claim. Be careful not to share your seed phrase with anyone, as always. If your claim is successful, you will see the success screen: congratulations, you will be joining others in the future from which Penumbra has arrived, with your UM tokens in hand.
Staking (optional)
Finally, the Penumbra airdrop offers an additional option to help further decentralize the launch of the network: claimants may pre-select a validator to whom they want to stake at genesis. The effect of this will be that at launch, a set of validators above a proposed threshold will display sufficient balances to qualify as mainnet validators, meaning that there was no pre-selection of validators who will start the network. This step is optional, and it is possible for you to take this step later after your initial claim by returning to the site, (re)connecting your eligibility criteria, and staking your claim.
To stake your claim, you must have a validator's permanent identity key ahead of mainnet. It is this identity key should be pasted into the staking field of the claims flow. This action does not transfer your tokens to their account; instead it will mean that upon launch of the network, you as a claimant will hold liquid delegation tokens (delUM) staked to that validator, rather than $UM tokens.
As of this announcement there are a number of validators who have already chosen their permanent addresses and have elected to display them publicly, but there will be more in the coming days and weeks.
Remember, choosing to stake your $UM at launch is making an elective choice to decentralize the network at launch.
For Validators:
It’s recommended that if you’d like to try for being in Penumbra’s genesis set, a validator should use this website’s link: https://penumbra.claims, and append a suffix that will cache their validator’s address to be used in the staking part of the claims flow.
It is crucially important that a validator use the validator address that will be used on mainnet (penumbravalidABC….XYZ) - otherwise the claims flow will point to a validator that will not exist on genesis.
The resulting link should look like this:
https://penumbra.claims/?validator=penumbravalidABX….XYZ
It’s encouraged that validators who would aim to be in the genesis set share this link widely on socials so that the airdrop has as much reach as possible, and so that as many claimants as possible are using their link to access to site, maximizing their chances of being a genesis validator - in turn decentralizing the launch of the network.
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What happens next?
Once the claims period is over, the list of claimants will be offered to a foundation that will construct the first genesis block and will propose that these claimants and the balances be included in the block. This means that stakers will be automatically delegated to validators who start up the network, provided they meet the needful staking threshold for the network’s active set.
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FAQ
Why download a Penumbra wallet like PRAX?
It’s reasonable for there to be an initial resistance to downloading yet another wallet extension - the market is full of them at this point and no one wallet seems to be the best for what is offered. Penumbra offers an alternative. The reason is simple, but the implications are massive - in order to use Penumbra, all users must be able to encrypt their own data, and users do so by running their own local node, accomplishing the cypherpunk dream of having all encryption start and end on end-user devices.
By using the Penumbra Command Line Interface or the PRAX wallet, a user is choosing to utilize locally-run Zero-Knowledge proving architecture to generate the proofs used by Penumbra, meaning that the activity of any individual account is fully private, even to the network. The only way for a user to reveal any of their account information and use the asset that the account has control over is to connect a compatible wallet loaded with a seed phrase to the network in order to locally decrypt the notes held on the network that represent the user’s account state. Transactions themselves do not reveal anything about a user’s local state, but do have a segmented ‘public view’ that demonstrates that a transaction did indeed occur.
If it’s a user’s first time doing so, it will take a while to sync to the most recent block on the network, but from there, the wallet will stay up to date with use, ensuring that users continue to have free local access to end-to-end blockchain network encryption for all trades, transactions, and asset custody on Penumbra.
Why did you use a .claims website?
Don’t you think it’s a little silly that the most useful TLD for an airdrop is associated with scams? Call it an act of reclamation.
I can’t see my balance!
Yes, you won’t see how much $UM you get until mainnet. The claims flow only indicates whether or not you are eligible, not for how much.
Additional Information
Again, penumbra.claims is the only website on which you can claim your Penumbra airdrop of UM tokens. If there are any questions
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Thank you for your continued support in summoning a glorious future from a dismal present. Penumbra will bring us onward.
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“Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it. “