Rumors about “LayerZero’s upcoming airdrop” are spreading wildly on major social media and communities.
The reason why there is so much speculation at this point in time is that there have indeed been some potential signs recently, all of which seem to point to LayerZero being about to "do something big."
For example, in the prediction market Polymarket, "yes" has surpassed "no" in the prediction of whether LayerZero will be airdropped soon; for another example, Tapioca, an upper-layer application built on LayerZero, announced that it will carry out a major update on December 12, and the prerequisite for this update is to rely on ZRO for decentralized verification; for another example, Luca Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins, who has a close relationship with the LayerZero team, directly shouted on X that "I can't wait for ZRO."
However, the most intuitive and popular sign is that the "layerzero.foundation" domain, which has not yet been put into use, added an SSL certificate on November 3. Given that the "layerzero.foundation" domain has a high degree of update frequency in the past, the community speculates that the domain is also managed by the LayerZero project, as it is confirmed that the "layerzero.network" domain belongs to the LayerZero project.
An SSL certificate has been added to the “layerzero.foundation” domain.
The "layerzero.foundation" domain name and the "layerzero.network" domain name were updated simultaneously in March this year.
The "layerzero.foundation" domain name and the "layerzero.network" domain name were updated simultaneously in October this year.
Looking through the LayerZero project’s history, we can see that before any major action is taken, the project often performs such operations on related domain names, such as:
On September 7, 2022, the official announcement was made to launch the protocol browser LayerZero Scan. On September 5, an SSL certificate was added to the "layerzeroscan.com" domain name;
On October 19, 2022, the Aptos cross-chain bridge was officially launched. On October 17, an SSL certificate was added to the domain name "theaptosbridge.com";
On November 17, 2022, the Bitcoin cross-chain bridge was officially launched. On November 16, an SSL certificate was added to the "bitcoinbridge.network" domain name;
On February 21, 2023, the Goerli testnet cross-chain bridge was officially launched, and on February 20, an SSL certificate was added to the "testnetbridge.com" domain name;
Therefore, it can be inferred that LayerZero will most likely take some actions related to the "layerzero.foundation" domain name next.
But what actions are generally associated with domain names ending in ".foundation"? Considering that the airdrops of multiple projects such as Aptos, Arbitrum, and Sei were all completed through the foundation website, and Arbitrum happened to have performed exactly the same operation as LayerZero two days before announcing its airdrop in March this year - adding an SSL certificate to the "arbitrum.foundation" domain name, it is hard not to let community users imagine.
So what exactly is an SSL certificate and what does it have to do with a potential airdrop (assuming there is one)?
Specifically, SSL is the abbreviation of Secure Sockets Layer, which is a network communication encryption protocol. The entire transmission process of the traditional http protocol is plain text transmission, so it is easy to cause data hijacking and tampering, while the SSL protocol can encrypt the transmission process, thereby effectively preventing data from being monitored and tampered.
In the simplest terms, adding an SSL certificate ensures that your website is more secure.
From this, it can be deduced that updating the SSL certificate for the "layerzero.foundation" domain name may indicate that LayerZero hopes to improve the security of the website through some measures.
To put it more bluntly, if LayerZero really plans to airdrop ZRO through the "layerzero.foundation" domain name, the team will naturally predict that with the high enthusiasm of the community, the website's visits and interactions will surge, so it is necessary to ensure user safety by improving the security of the website.
However, all of this is still just a hypothetical situation. It should be clear that just an SSL certificate is not enough to prove that LayerZero will definitely airdrop. Objectively speaking, it is just an initiative of the domain name owner to improve the quality of the infrastructure.
How to interpret it depends on one's own opinion.
