Safe launched a campaign to report airdrop hunters, striking a blow in the air
Most of the wool party are not true builders in the industry; they are like a swarm of locusts, moving from one crop to the next after consuming a field.Author: longcrypto, The Path of DeFi
On September 8, the digital asset management platform Safe launched a community challenge, where users who successfully reported airdrop hunters could receive 25% of the SAFE from the reported party, while the remaining 75% would be distributed to all other eligible participants. Airdrop hunters who voluntarily confessed before being reported by others could retain 25%.
This move by the project team stirred up a commotion in the airdrop community:
"This might be the last wave of airdrops based on a single dimension."
"Once the SAFE bounty is out, the airdrop industry is finished!"
Soon, Safe's GitHub repository was flooded with reports.
(Source: https://github.com/safe-global/safe-user-allocation-reports/issues)
One user reported 1,341 addresses in one go, all created from the same address by the same wallet, with a total of 1,010,599 SAFE airdropped, meaning 25% would be 252,649 SAFE.
However, according to tschubotz, the head of product and operations at Safe, not all of the reported addresses may meet the criteria for airdrop hunters. For example, if a wallet created Safe using a relayer, the relayer would be the account that created all the Safes, which does not constitute airdrop hunter behavior.
It seems that the Safe project's call for community reporting has received a positive response, and the path to wealth through airdrops appears to be increasingly blocked by the project's stricter thresholds. In reality, airdrop hunters are also evolving.
Counterattack of Airdrop Hunters
In early May this year, the cross-chain bridge Hop Protocol took the lead against airdrop hunters by launching a community initiative to report addresses involved in witch attacks (referring to individuals attempting to create multiple account identities for deception and disguise). Ultimately, out of the initial 43,058 addresses that met the airdrop criteria, 10,253 were identified as witch attackers and disqualified from this airdrop plan.
Although the Web3 "people reporting people" behavior initiated by Hop has been looked down upon by many Web3 practitioners, who criticize the project for lacking vision, once HOP set the precedent, more projects naturally followed suit. For example, Optimism mobilized the community to identify over 17,000 fraudulent addresses, redistributing approximately 14 million OP to eligible users.
Since then, the airdrop hunting has entered the 2.0 era.
Strategies to avoid being "counter-hunted" by projects have begun to emerge online. For instance, Odaily mentioned five methods in an article:
- Use mixing platforms and other methods to obscure the transfer relationships between wallets.
- The behavior of witch attacks should be as "randomized" as possible; centralized batch operations have become the primary target for bounty hunters.
- Use different wallet addresses for different projects; it's best to create a new batch of wallet addresses for each project.
- Focus on a small number of accounts; currently, community reports often consider ten addresses as the lower limit for witch attacks.
- Be low-key and avoid showing off everywhere.
Airdrop expert "He Bi" also summarized four tips:
- Directly transfer in bulk, batch hunting;
- Frenzied trading volume for dex-type projects;
- Batch creating 10,000 addresses for L2 projects.
- Report oneself.
By following the above strategies, after a project initiates a reporting reward activity, one can report their own previously used addresses to claim 25% of the airdrop. Moreover, compared to high-quality airdrop hunting, this method is more efficient, lower in cost, and has higher certainty. If the project wants the community to report but is reluctant to offer rewards, then these accounts are essentially preserved. After all, not many people would volunteer to do this for free while facing criticism.
Therefore, Safe's crackdown on airdrop hunters cannot effectively curb the airdrop hunters; on the contrary, it will likely push them to become more extreme, creating more invalid accounts and using scripts for bulk interactions, still winning by volume and taking most of the rewards.
The Dual Nature of Airdrop Hunting
Since the DeFi Summer last year sparked airdrop frenzy, professional airdrop hunters have emerged in Web3. From the initial manual interactions to scientists using scripts for bulk account creation.
Airdrop hunting has a dual nature. On one hand, it can serve the purpose of user education and attracting VCs. After a new protocol or product is launched, the project can quickly build DAPP data with almost no marketing costs, thanks to airdrop hunters, achieving a cold start for the project. Typically, airdrop hunters provide very detailed guides, which can serve the purpose of user education. At the same time, the project team can leverage impressive data to strengthen their negotiating position with investors, potentially securing more funding and higher valuations.
On the other hand, airdrop hunting leads to false prosperity in the industry and exploits project teams. Most airdrop hunters are one-time users; they rush in during the early stages of a protocol's market launch, bringing active and interaction data that is hard to withstand the test of time. For example, the witch attacker accounts identified by HOP accounted for 23.81% of the total accounts, while Sudoswap saw a decrease in users after the project team showed a lack of sincerity in distributing airdrops.
(Sudoswap's daily active users sharply declined after the plan was announced)
Most airdrop hunters are not true builders of the industry; they care about how much capital they can invest to gain returns, rather than the long-term development of the project. After draining one project, they eagerly rush to the next, like a swarm of locusts, moving from one field to another after consuming all the crops.
