just went through the Glacier Drop mechanics again this morning and honestly this one line stopped me cold 😂
users whose tokens are under the custody of a third party cannot participate in Glacier Drop directly. full stop. if your qualifying assets - ADA, BTC, ETH, SOL, any of the eight eligible tokens - are sitting on an exchange at snapshot time, you cannot sign the message proving ownership
the exchange holds the private keys
but
you dont
what this gets right: the eligibility requirement is principled. Glacier Drop verifies custody through cryptographic proof of private key ownership. if you dont control the keys, you dont control the claim. the design enforces genuine self-custody participation rather than allowing custodians to claim on behalf of users they may never actually distribute to.
what keeps nagging me: exchanges may choose to participate at their sole discretion and distribute claimed NIGHT to affected users. the whitepaper says this explicitly. but sole discretion means no obligation. an exchange that held qualifying assets at snapshot time has no protocol-level requirement to do anything for its users. whether those users see their allocation depends entirely on a voluntary decision by a third party who may not have been paying attention, may not prioritise the effort, or may simply choose not to.
the people most likely to hold qualifying assets on exchanges are also the people least likely to be running self-custody wallets. the design rewards self-custody participants and leaves custodied participants entirely dependent on their custodian's goodwill.
honestly dont know if excluding custodied assets is the right boundary that enforces genuine participation or a design that quietly excludes a large segment of eligible participants whose access to their own allocation sits entirely outside their control?? 🤔
#night @MidnightNetwork $NIGHT
