Arbitrum behind the airdrop: The project side and the wool party's offensive and defensive upgrade road

2023-04-20 14:38

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Nowadays, the ecology of "Wanmao" has become a "conspiracy" between the project side, the user and the VC institution, each party takes what he needs, and finally draws benefits from the secondary market.

The History of the Airdrop: A Cat-and-mouse Game between the project and the Wool Party

Original source: ChainCatcher

A month ago, the Arbitrum Foundation officially announced the airdrops.

Although a lot of wool party in Arbitrum "very volume" in the air drop rules, but still can not deny, this is another huge coin circle to make rich movement. "Brush thousands of numbers" "took hundreds of thousands of tokens" "One night freedom" legendary story again widely spread.

The enthusiasm spilled over into projects such as Starknet, which has huge potential to sell cash. Following Arbitrum's announcement, other potential airdrops have seen a surge in daily active users recently, with zkSync and StarkNet seeing the most significant growth, with daily active households up more than 10 times, according to a tweet from 0xScope.

Netizens joked that recently zkSync Era interaction has been rolled up to "grandpa and grandma with pension". There are also many professional airdrop studios for zkSync airdrop professional "with masturbator", training classes and other businesses.

Less than three years after Uniswap's launch in September 2020, the format, nature, and scale of participation have all changed dramatically. Air drop is no longer simply a carnival on the chain, which involves the stakeholders also gradually involved in market makers, centralized exchanges, wallets, etc., so the exchange grab on, big households, Gas war, project official website down and other famous scenes also began to appear frequently.

But both the project side and the fleece party are escalating their defenses in this cat-and-mouse game, gradually evolving into a strange relationship of mutual antagonism and interdependence.

A brief history of airdrop

The first airdrop in crypto history dates back to 2014, when a programmer named Baldur Friggjar Odinsson created AuroraCoin, the "Icelandic bitcoin," and dropped 31.8 tokens for each of Iceland's 330,000 citizens. Since then, there have been a number of airdrops, but their impact has been limited. Until the wealth effect of Uniswap's UNI airdrop reignited the enthusiasm.

If we take Uniswap as the starting point for the Web3 airdrop extravaganza, then the airdrop development can be roughly divided into the following stages (types) :

1. Pre-snapshot interaction: In the early days of airdrop, users were eligible for airdrops as long as they had interacted at least once in the time period prior to the snapshot, such as Uniswap, 1inch, etc. Of these, Uniswap airdropped 15% of its tokens to over 250,000 users, who essentially received at least 400 UNI if they had used Uniswap before September 1, 2020, worth about $800 at the time.

2. Filter addresses based on a few criteria: After the stimulation of excessive profits in the first stage, the "wool party" group grew stronger and stronger. The project side began to add many restrictions on the qualification of air delivery, such as having interaction history in different months and the interaction amount higher than 100U. At this time, due to the rising market, the average airdrop value of the project is also rising. The average airdrop value of Ampleforth, Tornado.Cash is around $5,000, and Ribbon Finance's average airdrop value is even $60,000.

3. "Core" interaction requirements such as node buildingRecently, many projects have begun to raise the interaction threshold of test network users, especially public chain projects with "inevitable coin issuance", such as Aptos, Aleo, Iron Fish and other public chain projects. Most users need to purchase cloud servers. Take Aptos that has been airdropped as an example. Users need to participate in node testing, and to participate in node testing, they need to purchase overseas servers and perform environment configuration, and they need to have certain Linux foundation. For users, this type of interaction has a high threshold and high cost.

4, points system air dropPoints-based system incentivise users on the principle of more work, more gain. For example, NFT Blur's airdrop rule not only awards points based on the number of new users, the number of transactions and the amount of transactions, but also ensures user retention and loyalty through multiple airdrops and phased airdrops. Under the premise that the incentive is clearly priced and very clear, the network effect is naturally very considerable.

In fact, Arbitrum also belongs to the points system air drop "top students". Arbitrum the airdrop comprehensive consideration of many factors, comprehensive time span, interaction amount, interaction frequency, interaction frequency and other factors to the user step type airdrop, not only with subdivision, but also according to the anti-witch rules for minus points. While incentivizing large transaction users, some small cost users are also taken care of.

Arbitrum airdrop related data, there are still a small number of addresses have not received airdrop, source: Dune

5. Community reports on witch movement: In addition to screening and detecting witches by the rules of characteristics, some project parties will work together to identify more witch addresses and launch air drop hunters and witch reporting activities in the community. Hop, Optimism and Safe have all led to optimism about witches. Optimism, for example, was the optimism of 17, 000 people who engaged in an air survey and community tip-off last year, a rate of about 7%.

But similar community challenges have also been controversial. Last year's Safe airdrop, for example, stipulated that users who successfully reported an airdrop hunter would receive 25% of the informants' SAFE, and the remaining 75% would be distributed to everyone else who qualified. A reserve of 25 percent is allowed for airdrop hunters who come forward before being reported by others. Under the strong incentive, nearly a quarter of the 43,058 addresses initially eligible for airdrops have been identified as witch attackers and disqualified from the current airdrop program. Because the strafing surface was too large, the project was accused of not meeting the "Web3 spirit", "lack of structure", etc. As a result, few projects have resorted to similar anti-witch tactics since then.

6, KYC, spiritSoul binding token(SBT) and other authentication: One of the important use cases of SBT is indeed anti-witch, but it has not been widely used for airdrop detection by project parties for two reasons: first, the infrastructure of SBT is not perfect, and second, the network effect brought by "wool party" still needs to be utilized in the early development stage of Web3.

And, like KYC, SBT's use as an airdrop to detect witches remains controversial. Last September, Binance launched the soul-bound token BAB, which offers 14 potential drops for holding. However, many people criticized that this is undoubtedly "trading profits for souls", using some "wool and airdrops" can obtain a user's personal information, even cheaper than Web2.

Iron Fish, which is about to release airdropped privacy, has also received some criticism for requiring KYC in order to receive testing rewards. Iron Fish launches a website and sends out emails for motivated users, including verified emails and test sites. Once the user receives the notification, they go to the exchange portal and complete the KYC process. Each user is limited to one exchange of test network reward tokens.

In addition to the KYC process, Iron Fish will have an internal deduplication and approval process. On March 9, the official team announced in Discord that 97,281 (57%) accounts had been banned, 171,891 users had earned credits, and more accounts were expected to fail KYC and be further filtered.

Iron Fish token economic model

Overall, the history of airdrop evolution is a bit like the history of anti-witches.

In the process of constant confrontation and escalation, more and more project parties and data analysis platforms have formed their own standards and means for witch address recognition.

Data platform X-Explore As the witch's address is controlled by one entity, the same fund account is usually transferred to the witch's address to collect the wool. Therefore, the consistency of the fund source is the most direct criterion for judging the witch's address. Professional witches, or "fleecers," use scripts to control multiple addresses to interact with several potential airdrops, so "transaction record similarity" between addresses and addresses is another important indicator for judging witches.

Take Arbitrum as an example, compared with other project parties, it is more attentively in the air drop design, and comprehensive use of a variety of means. Trust Labs, an anti-witch data analysis platform, believes that Arbitrum has many outstanding points in anti-witch: 1) Arbitrum uses Nansen's address label and deliberately excludes CEX and Bridge addresses, which can reduce the number of accidental killings; 2) the core team, Offchain Labs, analyzed the witch behavior by itself, using the Louvain Community Detection Algorithm based on the capital network; 3) HOP's blacklist was considered.

the use of the Louvain Community Detection Algorithm based on the analysis of capital network and the use of the blacklist of past project parties are the more commonly used anti-witch strategies at present. In addition, TrustScan also considers anti-witch techniques such as batch operations and the same behavior sequence.

Of course, even though Arbitrum has been very strict with witches compared to other programs, there are still a lot of loopholes. X-Explore estimates that the Arbitrum airdrop still contains approximately 150,000 witch addresses and at least 4,000 witch communities. The project has no way to identify the following witches: 1. The address of the witch who came and went from the exchange; 2. Addresses of witches who spread money through contracts; 3. Addresses of witches who use cross-chain Bridges to transfer funds; 4. The address of the witch who has the gathering behavior after the snapshot; 5. Only for the addresses with witch behavior on ETH and Arbitrum, the witch detection results of other Layer 2 chains are not taken into consideration.

Although the project side air delivery conditions are more and more harsh, in the anti-witch technology is gradually specialized, refined, but the "wool party" is not weak, in the confrontation with the project side constantly armed themselves.

Ii. Specialization of "Wanmao Party" : Studios and distribution models tend to be mature

As the saying goes, "One foot high, the devil is ten feet high", the difficulty of masturbation increases with each mass airdrop. Retail investors gradually face the risk of no profit or even anti-masturbating, "wool party" also began to professionalize, a large number of airdrop studios, training classes and distribution models, also to a certain extent, marks the gradual maturity of this niche industry.

zkSync interactive gas cost table

In response to the project side's anti-witch strategy, the airdrop studio has evolved different coping strategies.

Qian Xin has been a "professional" since Uniswap was airdropped. Sensing the trend toward mass airdrops, he developed a habit of seeing projects and interacting regularly. One of his abiding principles is to interact with each other as an "early contributor" and operate manually. His airdrop strategy can almost be summed up as "no skill, all hard work."

In the recent Arbitrum airdrop, Qian Xinchun relied on manual operation of 69 numbers about half of the airdrop. In contrast, its recently established studio also tried group control and batch interaction for the first time in Arbitrum Ecology, but due to the highly repetitive transfer amount and interactive content, only 2 of the 1,300 addresses were airdropped, and the others were "killed". Qian has also been urging the "fleece" in his community to use fewer tools.

"I really recognize this ecosystem when I interact with projects, and I'm even willing to play the role of an early contributor," Qian said. The essence of airdrop is Gas subsidies, but if the ecosystem develops well, you don't even need to rely on airdrop to cover costs. He interactive on Arbitrum for two years, there are a lot of addresses through interactive Magic ecology, GMX and other good development projects to earn some money, thus covering the gas fees and other interaction costs.

Qian Xin believes that the airdrop studio and the primary market investment is very similar. The process of choosing which project to interact with, or "fleece", also requires industry awareness, high attention to the project side and timely capture of information. These behaviors are not fundamentally different from what investment and research institutions do.

And Qian Xin's strategy is different, Haotian airdrop studio "puppeteer" specially set up their own technical team to develop a set of more rigorous airdrop tools.

According to Haotian, the team had been doing investment research and investment in the primary and secondary markets at the very beginning, but after the Luna storm last year, the market continued to decline, especially the impact on the secondary market investment was huge, and the team had to start to consider how to better survive. There is a popular saying in the industry is "bear market masturbation, bull market speculation", for small investment institutions and ordinary users, want to cross the bull and bear, "masturbation" may be a choice. Therefore, after full investigation, the team decided to open up a special "masturbation" department. After the department was established, it conducted in-depth comparative research on the past star projects, and formed its own strategy on this basis.

Group control software operation interface

Last November, the team began experimenting with batch operations, and while they looked for tools like fingerprint browsers, group-control software, and cloud servers to improve interaction efficiency, they found that there wasn't a good product on the market that could adequately meet the current needs of non-scientist fleecers. Building on existing tools, the team set out to develop an interactive system that required no coding power.

According to the "puppeteer" team, in the recent Arbitrum airdrop, the studio has about a small thousand addresses to get the airdrop, but because last November began to develop the system has been officially put into use, so the time is relatively hurried, "otherwise there will be at most five thousand addresses can get the airdrop". In terms of specific interaction behavior, the team carries out interaction for the purpose of research and investment, which has certain requirements on the cost, time and frequency of interaction. In addition, after getting Arbitrum's airdrop, they did not rush to ship. "Puppeteer Team" said that the team had a very good experience of Arbitrum, a two-tier public chain, in the interactive process. In the future, they also hope to continue to deeply participate in the ecology and look for more opportunities.

And when it comes to the crypto market's reaction to the game, the Puppeteer team says,Airdrop studios are actually changing the investment landscape of the primary market. "A long time ago, ordinary users had a chance to get high quality chips like Flow on Coinlist, but since the big players entered the market, only venture capitalists like a16z and Sequoia could get early tokens for high quality projects, and Meitou allows ordinary users to get high quality chips."

According to the Puppeteers, the bear market that began last year seems to have been a little different, with not many users leaving the market, opting instead to "wank" and wait for interactive projects. In fact, to some extent, the wool party can help the high-quality project side through the bear market -- Arbitrum published a data in February, its chain agreement income is 780,000 dollars, which shows that in the meilao is also a real user, in the project side to bring actual benefits, accompany high-quality projects have been doing. In addition, the professionalization of masturbation will force the project side to be more professional in the direction of doing products seriously, thus promoting the development of the industry.

Iii. Redefine "Wanmao Party"

The crypto market seems to have changed its opinion of the "jerky party".

In the early days of airdrop, those who used a large number of addresses to interact in batches were regarded as speculators and disrupters. For serious project parties, "hormone liquidity" was not attractive. In the long run, good-looking data in the short term would not bring value to the project parties. In addition, the witch or witch community can lead to token hoarding, which affects the fairness of token distribution for projects.

Aptos, for example, had surprisingly high numbers in its final beta network -- the beta network completed over 800 million transactions and realized over 4,000 TPS in less than two weeks. After the airdrop, the number of active Aptos addresses, transactions and TPS decreased rapidly. According to the Aptos explorer, the current average TPS on the Aptos chain is only 10.

In addition, Aptos was not protected from witch attacks, which led to the victory of the Wool Party. As a direct result, there was huge selling pressure after the online of Aptos token.

Aptos Daily Active user change, source: GenliData

Aptos Composite trading volume change, source: GenliData

But objectively speaking, the Aptos airdrop triggered an unprecedented wealth effect and an out-of-circle network effect, and suddenly a large number of gold seekers flocked to Web3, eager to start looking for the next rich opportunity.

But the demise of ICO, the decline of IDO and VC for early projectstokenSeems to give the "wool Party" a "Liangshan hero" like a sense of justice and correctness. Early adopter airdrops have also become an ethical and politically correct requirement for many projects.

Crypto Kol@Huangdao once posted on its social media: "Meomao is not meomao in essence, but the original stock of blockchain star startups." Wang Feng, the founder of Element, also tweeted: "Over the past year, it has become a quasi-primary market investment..."

Many insiders agree with this kind of view, after all, like Arbitrum, Aptos this star project, only the top VC has the opportunity to get the early token share. And if the "hair" as an investment behavior, but to ICO security more.

From the ecological point of view, "Wanmao Party" has become an important part of the ecological development of Web3. Small white users are expected to enter the Web3 field through airdrop and gain considerable profits. The project side realizes the purpose of educating users through the interactive task of test network. However, in the early development of Web3, the project side really needed a large number of "fleece parties" to conduct certain stress tests in the test network stage to better improve the network performance. In addition, there is also speculation in the market that the project side can ensure the decentralization of token distribution through air drops, rather than highly concentrated on the team and VC, so it is in a favorable position to deal with the regulation and the big firm.

What's more, today's "wanmao" ecology has become a "conspiracy" between project parties, users and VC institutions, each of which takes what they need and finally draws benefits from the token secondary market.

Four, the ultimate evolution of air drop

As the industry "inrolls", track divisions will become more and more narrow. As professional airdrop studios emerge, so do professional anti-witch agencies.

The project side does have the need to protect the interests of real users, issue tokens fairly, and filter the wool party in order to optimize the product. The anti-witch can be called a "fine work", and the project side may not have enough technical means and time and energy to eliminate the witch account. The professional third party will not only be more complete from the identification algorithm, but also will assist the project side to design more operational strategies.

Trust labs is a specialized anti-witch studio. It has cooperated with some public chain, DAO, DID and other projects. Its anti-witch scenarios are not only limited to airdrop, but also applicable to scenes where there is a need for donation voting, market activities, and even user behavior analysis. Trust labs believes that a healthy and sustained Web3 community will gradually develop an anti-witch consensus, and in the future anti-witch meetings will be as mandatory as code audits.

However, X-Explorer believes that with the emergence of more and more "wiper parties" and professional airdrop studios, and the increasing automation of wiper with the introduction of Web2's black & Grey production team, the revenue from wiper track will be less positive. Meilao interacts with the project to test various performance of the project, so it is more inclined to cooperate between professional air drop studios and the project side, in the way of technical testing for various performance problems of the project on a large scale pressure test. The result is a "win-win" situation.

With the advent of ChatGPT, Twitter was flooded with tutorials on how to generate masturbation scripts using AI tools, lowering the bar for masturbation. It's not hard to imagine that AI's future behavior patterns will become more complicated and difficult to track, and the cost of fighting them will rise. Under this premise, the project needs the assistance of professional data analysis platform.

In fact, the Internet has a long history. As early as the Internet traffic war, under the stimulation of various kinds of wool, such as coupons, grab red envelopes, points exchange, VIP, there were also a lot of grey industries like hanging up wool software, studios and so on.

In the game field, spurred by the high profits of game equipment, gold mining studios and other grey products were also born, which realized the simultaneous online operation of large numbers of characters through multiple devices, multiple openers and cloud platforms, and utilized the third-party assistance such as key script or group control software to repeatedly brush in-game currency resources for profit. But security and data companies soon came up with more stringent testing tools and anti-hang-up software.

But will Web3 eventually become as sophisticated an anti-witch industry as Web2?

In the early stage of the industry development, the wealth effect caused by air drop and the ultimate ideal of decentralization are actually positive for more and more people to enter the web3 project. There are still gold mining opportunities and "dreams of sudden wealth", which is also the biggest charm of Web3. Therefore, most of the current project side in line with the philosophy of "water to clear, no fish", for this "dream" left a gap.

Will the Web3 industry follow a similar trajectory as the traffic dividend cycle ended and most of the fleece army faded away? It is certain that airdrop, as the concrete embodiment of the "community co-construction/leading" concept of Web3 project, will exist in the industry for a long time, providing a broad space for individual users who are committed to Web3.

Although studio "mew" reaped huge profits in the early days, with the increasing degree of airdrop and the upgrading of anti-witch methods, studio "mew" may enter an unsustainable stage and gradually fall silent when the studio's revenue cannot cover the cost of thousands of accounts.

StarkNet, zkSync, could it be the last hurrahs of the Fleecers?