You have a pending reward of SOL and RFND tokens Token refund or project transformation as a way out

Original Article:
Author: Wenser


ZK airdrop gradually came to an end amidst dissatisfaction. LayerZero, Blast, and other airdrops are on the way, but perhaps they are no match for the “refund token” that can be claimed with just a few clicks.
Previously, the Solana ecosystem’s Claim Your SOL project allowed users to claim the rent from their accounts that had been “detained” by the Solana network. Now, a similar project has emerged in the Ethereum L2 network – RefundOnBase, which also focuses on the concept of “token refunds”. However, this project refunds a certain amount of RFND project tokens based on the gas consumed by users on the Ethereum network.
Odaily Planet Daily will briefly introduce and compare these two projects in this article for readers’ reference.
(Note: Odaily Planet Daily is for information sharing only and does not constitute investment advice. Users should pay attention to asset security and carefully select investment targets.)
Claim Your SOL: You have a SPL account closure rent, please check
According to the official website of the Claim Your SOL project, every time a user receives an NFT/token in their wallet, the Solana network creates a specific SPL token account for it. When the user sends or sells that NFT/token to someone else, the token account will have 0 NFT/token units. In other words, this SPL account remains in your wallet but serves no purpose. To create an account, users must pay the rent detained by the Solana network, which is approximately 0.002 SOL (about 0.3 USD). If users take no action, this rent remains idle.
Claim Your SOL: “Your account is closed for service”
The Claim Your SOL project helps users close selected SPL token accounts, and the released rent deposit will be sent to the user’s wallet balance. To put it simply, it’s like transferring money to someone at the Solana bank, where each transfer (interaction with a token contract) incurs a “account opening fee”. This project acts as an intermediary to help you “close the account” and receive an “account closure rent”. Of course, being an intermediary, it also needs to “profit” – 20% of the account closure rent will be used as donation funds to support the project’s website maintenance and development.


Official website interface
Natural fission brought by the commission model
It is worth noting that when users claim the account closure rent in SOL, they need to go through the project’s “full disclosure” and sign a transaction before they can receive the locked SOL rent. Specific operating instructions can be found on the website.
In addition, the project also has a commission mechanism. By sharing the corresponding invitation link, the invitee can receive 20% of the donation amount refunded in SOL. (Note: If users do not want to share this part of SOL with the referrer, they can also directly visit the official project’s official Twitter or website link.)
Impressive achievements: Nearly 20,000 locked SOL released
As of the time of writing, the Claim Your SOL official website interface shows that 11.75 million accounts have participated, and 19,207 SPL token account rents in SOL have been released. This is a remarkable achievement. After all, this is $2.785 million in “idle funds”, a significant liquidity in this volatile market.


Official website interface
RefundOnBase: Gas consumption for tokens, please accept this RFND
Similarly, the project team of Base ecology may have been inspired by the Claim Your SOL project unique to the Solana ecosystem, leading to the emergence of RefundOnBase. After all, “the world has been suffering from high gas fees on Ethereum for a long time.” As one of the representative ecosystems with low gas cost on the L2 network, the Base ecology also has inherent advantages and soil environment for “token refunds based on gas fees”.
RefundOnBase: As long as you have used Ethereum, you are our user
According to the project’s official website, users can receive RFND token rewards if they spend more than 0.3 ETH in gas on the Ethereum mainnet. There are currently 10,873 linked wallet addresses; more than 18,000 users have logged in to participate; 199 payment accounts; and a total gas consumption of 657.43 ETH.


Official website display interface, for reference only
Behind the operation principle and token economics
Similarly, according to information on their official website, the RFND token is deployed on the Base network, and claiming the corresponding tokens does not incur gas fees. The contract address is 0x26FB8F2F3b26C750ee34005C1930dEb232940CFe, with a buy/sell tax of 0, a maximum token supply of 100 billion, and a lock-up period of 1 year.


Rough token economics
According to information from the Dexscreener website, the RFND token price briefly exceeded $0.000005 before steadily declining. The current price is $0.00000018, with a remaining circulating market value of only $185,000.


Official website information interface
Lessons learned: Token refund model differs from Meme coins
To some extent, RFND can be considered a failure now, with the token price approaching zero and the website running unstably. This is not the first attempt in the Ethereum and L2 ecosystem.
In December 2023, a project initiated by Electric Capital, Frame, also attracted a lot of market attention. Under the guise of “building a blockchain network for creators and collectors,” the project would provide feedback on the amount of FRAME tokens a user would receive based on the number of NFT projects they participated in and the gas costs incurred. Top NFT players such as Zeneca and Lasercat also participated.
However, as time went on, the last post of the project has been stuck at January 30th of this year. Although they claimed to have postponed the mainnet launch and the deadline for token claiming after listening to community feedback, the project can be considered dead in terms of results.
Therefore, we can draw some lessons from these two projects:
Token refund projects are heavily influenced by the blockchain network ecosystem and it is difficult to “create such a mechanism without the corresponding network mechanism”;
Token refund project tokens are unlikely to become Meme coins, lacking in both intentional planning and meme attributes;
Token refund projects heavily rely on project operation and marketing rhythm, making it easy to fall into a “dumping after tokens are claimed” spiral, leading to the project’s death.
This point can be seen in our previous article “Base Chain Data DAO Token RDAT Revealed with a 50-fold Increase in Three Days,” RDAT’s demise was not only due to the project’s underestimated operations but also due to the “speed decay” of related narratives.
Conclusion: Stay watchful, token refund projects far from over
Despite the many issues, it is clear that the token refund project’s track has not come to an end. If more projects attempt from different perspectives, combining different market environments and operational rhythms, they may also create a unique wave in the cryptocurrency field.
After all, as a hot track in the current market, meme coin projects may also be a direction for the transformation of token refund projects.
This means endless possibilities.