Saga Reveals First ‘Power-Level Over 9,000’ Airdrop With $10 Million in Tokens

Saga, a layer-1 blockchain with a focus on gaming, recently built up a ton of hype for its mainnet and token launch by running a play-to-airdrop campaign and rewarding DeFi stakers across various networks. But the incentives don't stop there. Saga is now rolling out its next wave with a colorfully-titled campaign.

The “Power-Level Over 9,000” airdrop campaign—named after a “Dragon Ball Z” reference that became an internet meme—was first revealed in April and leans on partnerships with more than 100 projects across various chains, Saga says, including games and other decentralized apps.

The campaign will dole out bundles of crypto tokens and NFTs from those partners to SAGA holders who stake their tokens within the network. On Thursday, Saga revealed that it has already taken the first snapshot of SAGA token stakers for the initial wave of reward “vaults” that will be sent to eligible users.

The snapshot was taken on April 26 at block 262,311 for the Saga network, and the network will ultimately award 3 million SAGA—some $10.2 million worth at the current price of $3.40—to wallets that meet the criteria.

Any SAGA user who staked more than 101 SAGA (over $340 worth at current price), or anyone who staked at least 95% of their SAGA genesis airdrop from the April 9 mainnet launch, will earn a share of the rewards. Genesis airdrop recipients who staked at least 95% of the initial drop will also get a 4x “loyalty bonus” for holding and staking their tokens.

It’s not yet clear when Saga will distribute these initial “vaults” of token rewards, though the network’s team added that a claims page will be opened roughly one week ahead of the distribution. Furthermore, the “first few vaults will be used to refine eligibility criteria” ahead of the broader planned slate of partner airdrops.

According to SAGA, more than 30 million tokens went unclaimed from the genesis airdrop, so this first vault drop represents approximately 10% of the remaining stash that will now be used for incentives. Another 110 million network tokens have been allocated for airdrops and rewards, the blog post reads.

Furthermore, Saga previously said that it has lined up more than 100 partner projects across chains to contribute tokens and NFTs for future drops. Announced partners include the Avalanche-based first-person shooter Shrapnel, as well as Ethereum games The Sandbox and Wilder World.

Saga is billed as a “layer-1 to launch layer-1s,” which means that the network is designed to let projects deploy their own dedicated chains rather than having everything built on a single mainnet. It’s also designed complement other chains, letting projects build across networks and tap into Saga’s “chainlets” structure as needed to support their apps.

While not exclusively focused on gaming, some 80% of testnet projects were focused on gaming, and Saga used gaming competitions as a way to hand out airdrop allocations.

Furthermore, the team has launched its own in-house game publishing division called Saga Origins, which plans to release games that are “provocative, expansive, [and] uncompromising,” as CEO and co-founder Rebecca Liao told Decrypt’s GG in April.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.