Web3 must stand against the peril of airdrop hunters

The next is a sponsored visitor article from Sergey Shashev, the founding father of Broxus.

From Neighborhood Rewards to the Hunt for “Free Cash”

The neighborhood has been a driving power behind the event of Web3 functions and blockchains. Nevertheless, fostering and fascinating a neighborhood is difficult, particularly for brand new tasks. To deal with this, builders have applied varied financial mechanisms, resembling ICOs and staking.

Airdrops, typically missed, current one other vital incentive for the neighborhood. This device has grown into a substantial area of interest. In response to CoinGecko, the three largest airdrops so far—Uniswap, ApeCoin, and dYdX—collectively account for almost $12 billion. Over the previous three years, the full worth of airdrops has reportedly surpassed $26 billion.

Initially designed to reward lively neighborhood members, airdrops have turn into so profitable that they’ve turn into a pasture for skilled opportunists who exploit them for private acquire. These opportunists create a number of accounts to finish duties set by organizers, both mechanically or with low-cost labor.

Their rigged exercise ranges from posting fundamental content material on social media and transferring small quantities of cryptocurrencies to spamming a protocol’s supply code with ineffective commits, all in pursuit of what they finally see as “free cash.”

How Sybil Assaults Faucet Airdrops Dry

So, airdrop hunters have emerged as a brand new, actually malicious actor, disrupting the financial exercise inside Web3 and harming its future by diverting worth from real customers. In March 2023, Lookonchain reported on X (Twitter) about two “tremendous airdrop hunters” who exploited the Arbitrum airdrop, accumulating greater than $3 million value of ARB tokens from round 1500 addresses.

This incident shouldn’t be remoted. Most main airdrops within the final three years, together with these from Optimism, Uniswap, 1inch, and lots of others, have been equally targeted by hunters and their bot farms. An nameless raider claimed to The Block’s reporter, “Blur gave us one thing like $300,000, Arbitrum gave us round $180,000, Aptos gave us $125,000, and Optimism, $120,000.”

Not like true neighborhood members, airdrop hunters rapidly unload their rewards, inflicting instant worth drops, and transfer on to the following goal. Starknet, a extremely anticipated Layer 2 blockchain constructed on Ethereum, skilled this firsthand. Researchers discovered that the community was infiltrated by airdrop hunters months earlier than the launch of its native cryptocurrency in February 2024. The consequence? STRK plummeted 50% in its first two days of circulation, jeopardizing Starknet’s future. The hunters’ actions even drew the eye of the Chinese language police, who arrested a person on fees of stealing STRK tokens via id scams.

Different tasks, resembling Linea, EtherFi, and Connext Community, have additionally been drained via airdrops, experiencing what’s now termed a “Sybil assault,” a phenomenon in cybersecurity the place an attacker creates a number of pretend identities to realize affect or management in a pc community. If these perpetrators don’t get what they need, they typically publish defamatory statements concerning the challenge on social media, spreading FUD. That is primarily a public extortion. We at Everscale have noticed such a marketing campaign in opposition to our accomplice blockchain community Venom, launched a number of months in the past.

Ongoing Seek for the Final Safety In opposition to Sybil Assaults 

Regardless of acknowledging the issue, the trade has but to search out an efficient resolution. One method is to lift the eligibility standards for claiming airdrops. Nevertheless, even subtle airdrop packages like Arbitrum’s didn’t face up to the Sybil assault.

Some tasks try and compromise, like LayerZero’s current proposal to allocate smaller airdrops to searching accounts in the event that they self-identify as such. In any other case, their addresses risked being fully excluded from an airdrop. Nevertheless, distinguishing pretend accounts from actual ones stays a problem, to not point out the precedent of recognizing wrongdoers as eligible recipients of neighborhood rewards.

Different recommendations embody implementing rigorous id verification for all airdrop individuals. Tasks like Worldcoin’s iris verification or Humanity Protocol’s palm recognition supply potential options, however such procedures could compromise consumer privateness, a core worth of Web3. Apart from, skilled drop hunters have already discovered workarounds for every kind of “digital passports,” making a marketplace for shopping for and “pumping” digital identities in bulk. This measure solely raises the prices for fraudsters with out fixing the issue.

One other resolution proposed by Vitalik Buterin is the Soulbound Token (SBT), an NFT completely sure to an actual particular person (“soul”) that serves as a “proof of particular person” and identifier with out disclosing private particulars. Thus, SBTs might confirm a consumer’s popularity in a decentralized method: if an SBT’s document reveals a constructive popularity rating, its proprietor good points entry to airdrops, incentivizing benign habits. Nevertheless, SBTs are nonetheless extra of an idea and want broader adoption.

These and different choices are at the moment on the desk. My article requires wider dialogue and motion amongst all conscientious actors within the Web3 trade. We should handle the difficulty of airdrop raiders earlier than much more Web3 tasks and their conscionable supporters fall sufferer to new Sybil assaults. By figuring out a common method and set of requirements collectively, we’d get an opportunity to as soon as once more make the most of airdrops for his or her root mission: compensating vivid communities for his or her loyalty and dedication.

About Everscale

Everscale is a TVM blockchain powered by an infinite sharding mechanism, flexibly adapting to any workload in order that the dimensions of the load doesn’t have an effect on transaction occasions or community charges.

This makes Everscale an optimum blockchain for internet hosting high-scale and load-intensive decentralized functions. Over the previous years, Everscale has developed a thriving neighborhood and sturdy ecosystem of DeFi, GameFi, NFT, and different web3 tasks.