On February 18th, Toghrul Maharramov, a senior researcher at Scroll, stated on social media that "if you send spam to a GitHub repository and fix spelling errors, you are just wasting your own and our time." In this tweet, Toghrul Maharramov specifically named Celestia and Starknet, "accusing" them of disrupting encrypted OSS.

Scroll GitHub is full of spam emails

Toghrul Maharramov's "dissatisfaction" with Celestia and Starknet stems from their expansion of airdrops to developers and contributors.

According to the latest airdrop standard of Starknet, developer Tom Kysar received 1,800 Starknet tokens for making a single commit on Starknet's GitHub, which was just a spelling check for a word in the Starknet documentation. Prior to the token transaction, the value of this airdrop was worth $3,200.

Kysar's success has spawned some imitators, who have flocked to the tokenless project repository on GitHub in hopes of receiving future airdrops, and Scroll is the preferred target of this wave of imitation.

Recently, bear hunters have been sending low-quality contributions spam to Scroll's GitHub repository, causing the team to spend a lot of time filtering out spam. A Scroll developer said that the "core team is struggling" and this issue may "make their lives even more difficult".

Although Toghrul Maharramov stated that it is not currently a major issue, the content of spam submissions continues to increase. According to DLNewsreport, there are currently over 1,100 issues, with an increase of 300 issues in the past 24 hours. Despite the continuous spam, Toghrul Maharramov stated that the team has taken control of the situation and "filtering out all spam should take a few hours."

In fact, Tom Kysar's word modifications to Starknet cannot be compared to spam emails. Additionally, Celestia and Starknet rewarding OSS contributors is not a bad thing, as Toghrul Maharramov expressed, "Even the most noble cause in the crypto industry, rewarding open-source software contributors, may lead to some improper incentives, and some people may choose to take advantage of these incentives."

Attack Github, new tricks for hacking emerge

The airdrop aims to reward early users of DeFi protocols and turn the first batch of fans of the project into a group that guides the next steps of the project. For example, these tokens are usually used to propose project changes. Toghrul Maharramov also stated that "the goal of the airdrop should be to distribute your tokens to as many users as possible who are relevant to your project."

Due to the fact that a small number of airdrop recipients have received bonuses worth tens of thousands of dollars, the appeal of cryptocurrency airdrops has become increasingly significant, which has become a major issue for cryptocurrency projects.

In order to expand their potential airdrop rewards, the "Lumaodang" will create multiple wallet addresses and invest hundreds of hours in deploying complex strategies to conceal their farming activities. As long as they are not caught, they can earn millions of dollars in free tokens. Last June, a team held a Zksync offline event in Shenzhen, where more than 100 people held hundreds of thousands of addresses, and the number is still growing.

Under the stimulation of the OP and ARB's myth of making money, a large number of people and funds have poured into the cryptocurrency industry. They are crazily searching for new public chains and L2s that have not yet been launched. Among them, L2 is the absolute main force for interaction. Hundreds of thousands, even millions of addresses have been generated, and massive amounts of ETH have entered to do "meaningless" interactions.

For project parties, knowing that most addresses are fake and will run away after taking advantage, they will also find ways to counteract. In the L2 competition, a large part of the gas fees in L2 transactions on the market are transaction fees, which will flow into the project party's pocket. In addition, multi-chain brushing has made "cross-chain bridges" a must-have, especially Orbiter Finance, which focuses on low L2 transaction fees and cross-chain, has become the biggest winner, earning millions of dollars a month by collecting "bridge tolls", of which more than 90% are contributed by wool party.

Under this game, L2 earns a lot of handling fees, and the profit model has shifted from "low cost and high return" to "high cost and low return", even "high cost and negative return". The "wool party" did not get the wool but was counter-wooled. Many people exclaimed on Twitter that "the wool studio is about to usher in a wave of bankruptcies".

Related reading: "PUA under the crypto winter, the hair removal studio may face bankruptcy".

For the increasingly turbulent industry, studios have to find new breakthroughs. The new airdrop rules of Celestia and Starknet, as well as the tempting airdrops worth thousands of dollars on Kysar, undoubtedly point the way for the wool party to turn from new public chains and Layer2 to GitHub projects that have not yet issued coins.

A large number of furries imitated Kysar's routine and sent low-quality contributions to Scroll's GitHub repository as spam emails, and then fixed their own spelling errors in order to potentially receive Scroll's airdrop.

The spam harassment and witch attacks suffered by Scroll's codebase are similar. In March of last year, Arbitrum's $1 billion airdrop still suffered losses of millions of dollars as thousands of witch attackers bypassed preventive measures and embezzled funds.

Although various projects have started deploying so-called "witch hunters" to detect and filter attackers in response to the threat of witches in airdrops, it has become increasingly difficult for protocols in the cryptocurrency industry to effectively exclude attackers due to the difficulty of ensuring that DeFi users remain anonymous while receiving only one airdrop. After all, most projects do not want to take the risk of excluding actual users and causing a public relations storm like ParaSwap did.

Although in the world of cryptocurrency where anything goes, deceptive airdrops are seen by some as a fair game, and some DeFi enthusiasts even admire the cunning of the witch attackers. However, Toghrul Maharramov also suggested that attacking the Scroll repository would not result in receiving the airdrop.

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