Reflection on Airdrop Policy: The End of the Era of Earning Easy Money

Recently, the airdrop sector has experienced significant turbulence. Projects such as ZKsync, LayerZero, and Blast, which were highly anticipated for their TGE in June, ended up becoming the "largest anti-rouge" and the "largest witch database". Additionally, a large-scale airdrop from a certain trading platform also imposed penalties on users who obtained rewards through multiple KYC registrations. The profit-seeking individuals not only faced anti-rouge measures but were also labeled as witches, resulting in heavy losses. The airdrop sector, once seen as a pathway to wealth, has now lost its luster.

The number of Airdrop Tokens is already limited, and with the continuous downturn of the market, most Airdrop Tokens peak upon listing and then plummet, resulting in many opportunists ultimately incurring losses. So, is this chaos a temporary phenomenon, or an inevitable result of the industry developing to a certain stage?

This article will combine recent controversial cases such as the ZKsync Airdrop, LayerZero's anti-witch measures, and the Blast points system to analyze the current landscape and future trends of the airdrop track in depth. We believe that the era of getting rich through airdrops is over, and everyone should abandon their fantasies and seek development directions with more practical value.

ZKsync Airdrop: Matthew Effect, Suspected Pre-Determination, Neglecting Old Users

Although the airdrop of ZKsync has a high share, the distribution plan has caused dissatisfaction in the community, mainly for three reasons:

First, there is a clear Matthew effect. Only 10% of addresses receive rewards, and among them, 1.3% of addresses receive 23.9% of the Airdrop, with a reward gap as high as 100 times.

Second, there are allegations of "front-running". Some NFT holders who did not participate in the ZKsync ecosystem received Airdrops, with shares even exceeding those of active users. Multiple project parties within the ecosystem also reported feeling unfairly treated.

Third, early users have been overlooked. Although the mainnet has been online for 4 years, early loyal users did not gain an advantage in this allocation.

ZKsync explained it by citing anti-witch measures, but the actual effect was not good. Some players claimed to have received 660,000 Airdrop tokens using 350 addresses, while over 3,300 addresses labeled as witches by a certain L2 also received rewards. ZKsync did not take measures to respond to community doubts, leading to user disappointment and a continued decline in mainnet activity.

LayerZero: The Largest Witch List in History

LayerZero adopts a public and transparent airdrop policy, but the biggest point of contention is the witch problem. The project initiated a two-month review after the snapshot, which includes two rounds of filtering by a joint data company and community reports.

The community reporting system has sparked widespread discussion. Unlike before, LayerZero has included all 6 million addresses that have been used in the review process. This has led the community to fight back using methods such as DDoS, causing the review work to be postponed.

The reporting system fully utilizes the imagination of the masses and has discovered various signs of witches:

1. ENS Domain Registration Rules
2. Non-EVM chain and testnet address association
3. Similarity of On-chain Voting Behavior
4. Social Media Account Linking

Ultimately, LayerZero confiscated approximately 10 million tokens that belonged to witch addresses, involving over 1 million addresses, becoming the largest witch database in Web3 history. This triggered a mass exodus, with many abandoning interactions with other cross-chain projects.

Redefining "Witch"

Subsequently, multiple projects joined the anti-witch initiative, but the definition of "witch" was not uniform. Some projects classified certain non-authentic user behaviors directly as witches; for instance, a cross-chain bridge regarded wash trading as junk trading and confiscated rewards. LayerZero defined some commonly used applications for profit extraction as witch tools, but ultimately only downgraded low-value interactions rather than blacklisting them.

Blast: The Collapse of the Points-based Airdrop

As an alternative to interactive airdrops, the points system has always been controversial. Blast, as the pioneer of the points system, has set up two types of points: regular points and gold points. Gold points can multiply regular points by up to 120 times.

However, Blast suddenly introduced gold points after the mainnet launch, catching users off guard:

1. The profits of early large lock-up users are infinitely diluted.
2. Require users to continue to keep their assets on the network for interaction.
3. If most assets are withdrawn, the increase in regular points will decline, and the effect of gold points will be significantly reduced.

This is considered a typical "anti-rou". After the rules were announced, Blast TVL dropped by one third within 10 days.

The points system ultimately evolves into a game of social influence and large holders. When projects no longer recognize points, or when points are significantly diluted, the points that users have worked hard to earn may become invalid due to review, and this distribution method is gradually being rejected by the community.

Airdrop赛道日薄西山

The airdrop wealth model has been hot for 4 years but has now declined. Since the beginning of this year, with the growth of KOL fans and the expansion of studios, people's attention to airdrops has become overheated, but personal gains have sharply decreased. From Wormhole to ZKsync, the airdrop rewards per single address have significantly decreased within six months.

Many projects perform poorly at TGE, reflecting user dissatisfaction with low returns and investor concerns about low liquidity and high FDV projects. In contrast, some projects that distribute Airdrops to non-ecosystem users have not sparked much controversy, as recipients do not have to incur significant costs.

There has long been an incentive incompatibility between airdrop farmers and project parties. Farmers engage in a lot of meaningless interactions to obtain rewards, while project parties prefer to reward real users. A few years ago, anti-witch resources were scarce and the threshold was low, making it common for most people to profit. However, airdrops are now returning to their essence, no longer allowing users who have not made real contributions to benefit.

A co-founder of a cross-chain project stated that airdrops are gifts for early users, not rewards or growth tactics. Another founder emphasized that user donations are not mandatory, and receiving airdrops is not a given.

The large-scale "anti-arbitrage" has cooled down the enthusiasm for arbitrage, and the false prosperity is collapsing. Project teams need to consider how to attract regular users and avoid automated bots. For the arbitrage community, the era of high returns is over, and expectations should be lowered; they should no longer fantasize about getting rich through on-chain interactions.

Airdrops are not worried about scarcity but rather about inequality. Now that the Web3 market is close to saturation, in today's environment where there is an abundance of opportunists, becoming rich through airdrops has become an illusion.