Ethereum Restaking: Ether.Fi & Mode — Airdrops Within Airdrops

This week it’s time to revisit my Ethereum restaking position. In this article I’m going to take a closer look at Ether.fi and Mode stakings, activities, and of course, the airdrop opportunities.

Ether.Fi

This one actually already had its first airdrop that proved to be a pretty good one too! If you want to know more about the potential rewards of Ether.fi, check my one of previous posts in which I’m still thinking about what to do with the rewards(TL;DR: sold them!😀).

In Season 2, Ether.Fi has added some gamification aspects to the game. One of them is EtherFriends, a short campaign targeting new stakers. Unfortunately, it’s already ending in a couple of days, but the idea was to incentivize new stakers by dropping them $ETHFI and $ZK tokens.

Everyone who staked during the two weeks got these tokens proportioned to their stake amount. I’m only receiving peanuts but that’s fine, the main target is the actual $ETHFI airdrop as 5% of the total supply will be dropped to stakers at the end of June. The Season 1 airdrop was not that much larger(6%), so I think we can expect a pretty decent allocation.

However, the race might still be fierce as every staker is battling for their share of the pie. To help us stay ahead of the game, Ether.Fi has added the StakeRank feature.


This means that our loyalty points multiplier increases after every 100 hours. Stake Rank obviously encourages users to stay loyal to the platform while rewarding long-term stakers. There’s actually a minimum requirement of 0.1 ETH for the StakeRank to even start and being a small fish, I haven’t yet met that requirement.

On the positive side, I didn’t level up to Rank II automatically for being a Season 1 “veteran”.

Plans

My first goal with Ether.Fi is to double my stake from 0.05 ETH to meet the minimum of 0.1 so I can’t get the StakeRank feature going on. After that, I’ll give some serious thought to Liquid, another new addition which is an automated vault that restakes my eETH earning me more yield while also boosting my loyalty points.


As I’ve mentioned earlier, re-staking always adds another layer of risk so that’s a good thing to keep in mind.

That being said since I’ve already claimed an airdrop from Ether.Fi, they’ve now gained my trust, and feel rather confident using these new features and trying to accumulate as many points as I can before the end of June.

Mode

Another Ethereum re-staking opportunity I’m quite heavily involved with is the Mode blockchain. Just recently I wrote a guide-like article about Mode and all that airdrop potential it has.

Even though there aren’t any dates or specs published yet, I have a feeling that the main airdrop might be close so I thought it would be good to dig a little deeper and do some speculation.

Here in the picture below you can see my points gathered so far as well as my leaderboard position.


I have no idea how good or bad this is but I have a feeling I might be at the lower end of the board. However, since the specifications haven’t been published yet, I could jump up a position or two in the end since I’ve been quite active on their Discord, done some Galxe tasks, and own a couple of NFTs.

Still, someone who would have a very active web3 wallet eligible for many pre-points would easily jump ahead of me with a decent amount of ETH bridged to Mode. You see, bridging from the mainnet gives you the most points, and while doing in-Mode swaps earns you points too, the amount isn’t that significant as it’s based on fees which on Mode are something like 0.00000003 ETH.

Mode Dapps

If you are like me, a bit short on stables, and can’t currently add more ETH to Mode, no worries! We can still try to increase our daily points within the blockchain.

New dapps are constantly added to the Mode ecosystem as well as support for third-party staking platforms such as Renzo and Ether.fi. Their staked ETH version usually has higher multipliers compared to just staking Mode ETH.

The activities on different dapps also give different multipliers. For example, providing liquidity on Kim Exchange gives 4x while the same on Ionic gives only 2x. This is something to keep eyeing on as there might be changes happening quite often.

I would probably be jumping from position to position and from dapp to dapp if there wasn’t applications own points system as well. I don’t know whether it’s my laziness or the fact that I want to maximize the dapp points but I probably haven’t changed positions as often as I should have.


For example, here you can see that I’ve positioned myself pretty well for a potential Ionic airdrop although some newer dapps would have counted perhaps a little better for the Mode drop.

Then again, this Ionic deposit which is lending and borrowing, exposes me to some other points systems as well.


Even though I’m earning “only” 2x Mode points, my position earns 2x Renzo points, 2x Ionic points, and EigenLayer points too. This was done by restaking Mode ETH to ezETH on Renzo. While the APR is almost non-existent, I think that compared to the previous cycle, this one is more about points and airdrops.

All in all, playing the Mode and the re-staking game, I think it all comes down to the choices we made. I could perhaps put all the weight on one single dapp, or focus on just Mode points but it’s really tempting to try to get exposed to as many potential airdrops as possible.

I guess we’ll soon find out which strategy was a better one…

Conclusion

It would be really difficult to compare Ether.fi and Mode. While Ether.fi has already delivered, Mode remains a question mark.

My Ether.fi airdrop allocation was worth about $700 which was very generous for a small-time player such as myself. With Mode, I’m obviously crossing my fingers that it would be at least that much OR, the multiple airdrops within Mode would eventually add up and deliver that way.

Are you currently participating in any Ethereum re-staking opportunities? If so, do share your tips and strategies in the comments below!

Thank you for reading!

New Airdrops To Farm:

🔸 deBridge — easily bridge assets across Solana & EVMs for example while farming their airdrop!
🔸 MilkyWay — stake TIA farm MilkyWay airdrop
🔸 DFlow — bridge a minimum of $5 Solana tokens. Invite codes: 4H4WZ6, ZOR86T, 7HBULA
🔸 Elys Network — easy 1 minute/day testnet
🔸 Grass — perhaps the easiest way to gain exposure for a potentially very big airdrop!
🔸 Archway — join the Archway airdrop waitlist
🔸 GRVT ZkSync Mystery Box — just log in and claim your first mystery box
🔸 Ether.fi — stake ETH for Points & EigenLayer points
🔸 Mode airdrop. Invite code: XGNHet

Disclaimers:
The thumbnail background image is made with Canva, pictures are screenshots from Mode and Ether.fi.
This article contains referral links — remember to DYOR, and double-check URLs!