Players Furious Over Catizen Token Airdrop Changes

YEREVAN (CoinChapter.com) — Pluto Studio is under heavy criticism for unexpectedly changing the Catizen token airdrop. Players of the Telegram-based game were excited to receive their CATI tokens, which will launch on The Open Network on Sept. 20. However, on Saturday, Pluto Studio revealed the final airdrop allocation. Many players quickly voiced their frustration as they received fewer tokens than expected.

The changes to the CATI airdrop criteria led to a surge of disappointment. Players who had invested hours in the game were surprised that their rewards were much smaller than anticipated. One player ranked 6,054 out of 36 million stated that they received only 39 CATI tokens, raising concerns about fairness in the token distribution.

Smaller CATI Coin Allocations Anger Players

On Friday, Pluto Studio revealed that 305 million CATI tokens would circulate at launch from 1 billion. However, players quickly learned that only 15% of the total supply, or 150 million tokens, would be airdropped to the community. This caused a backlash, as many had expected more. Pluto Studio promised to distribute 43% of the supply to the community earlier, leading to disappointment.

Players quickly learned that Pluto Studio reserved 90 million tokens for Binance customers in a Launchpool rewards campaign. Pluto Studio had announced this just one day before. Feeling misled, many players voiced their frustrations on X. They used the hashtag #catizenscam to demand transparency about the CATI airdrop and its criteria.

Catizen Airdrop Criteria Changes After Bot Exploit

Along with the smaller Catizen coin allocations, Pluto Studio changed the distribution criteria for the CATI token airdrop without informing players beforehand. Initially, they planned to base token allocation on the amount of vKitty each player earned by participating in the game. However, Pluto Studio later uncovered that some players had used bots and scripts to artificially boost their vKitty earnings. Consequently, they adjusted the criteria to address the issue.

According to Pluto Studio,

“During the data review for this CATI airdrop, we discovered that numerous bot accounts exploited this public rule by using scripts to boost their vKitty profit speed.”

Pluto Studio adjusted the airdrop criteria to prevent this from undermining genuine players’ rewards.

As a result, the final allocation of CATI coins focused on different metrics, such as on-chain interactions, task completions, and fish coin purchases and consumption. These changes were aimed at ensuring a fairer distribution among active players of Catizen. While Pluto Studio explained that the adjustments were necessary to maintain the integrity of the airdrop, the community’s reaction was still overwhelmingly negative.