About the Witch Report on Layerzero

Recently, the well-known cross-chain project Layerzero released a news article encouraging users who consider themselves "witches" to "turn themselves in" and also encouraging the reporting of other "witch" users.

This news has caused a stir in the industry.

Since the airdrop initiated by DeFi projects led by Uniswap in 2020, many projects in the crypto ecosystem have adopted airdrop tokens to attract seed users and establish initial communities, encouraging users to participate and interact with the projects.

The airdrop standards set by the earliest DeFi projects like Uniswap were very low; for example, Uniswap only required one transaction on the platform to receive 400 tokens.

Once these airdrop tokens went live, their prices were almost always hyped up significantly.

This led many users in the crypto ecosystem to see an opportunity to "make extra money" through airdrops.

As a result, people initially increased their interaction frequency, then later used multiple accounts for interactions, and eventually developed into specialized studios writing scripts for automated bulk trading with numerous accounts.

People referred to this operation as "shearing sheep"/"grabbing airdrops."

In my impression, one of the more exaggerated cases in the past two years was the Aptos airdrop, where several teams reportedly became overnight millionaires by exploiting this project.

Such stories further fueled the influx of opportunists.

However, are these bulk accounts participating in transactions really loyal users of the project? Clearly, most of them are not, but these users gradually became the main beneficiaries of the project's airdrops.

This completely contradicts the original intention of the project and is not conducive to developing truly loyal users. Therefore, later project teams began to use various methods to distinguish "real" users from "fake" users.

These users deemed "fake" are referred to by project teams as "witches"—similar to the witches described in Satoshi Nakamoto's "witch attack" in the Bitcoin white paper. Their purpose in entering the system is not for the healthy development of the system but rather for personal gain, potentially harming the system.

The identification of witches by project teams has evolved from initially distinguishing "witch" accounts through on-chain interaction behavior to later collaborating with data analysis teams in the crypto ecosystem (such as Nansen) to identify "witches," and now Layerzero not only uses various tools and collaborates with relevant teams but also initiates reporting measures.

I believe that the occurrence of events like Layerzero's is foreseeable in terms of trends.

From the perspective of project teams, as the startup costs increase, they will definitely become more cautious about token airdrops. Over time, the criteria for airdrop eligibility will become increasingly stringent.

From the users' perspective, whether they are dedicated opportunists or ordinary retail investors, the profits obtained from exploiting airdrops will also become thinner, eventually reaching a point where income is very close to the cost of investment.

The era of airdrops leading to overnight wealth will certainly become history.

I agree with the project teams' efforts to catch "witches," but I strongly dislike the method of using reporting to catch "witches."

This approach exploits and amplifies human weaknesses, deliberately creating distrust among people by inciting conflicts, thereby creating a situation where "the clam and the snipe contend, and the fisherman profits."

In my limited understanding, this practice has been used during some regrettable periods in human history.

Yet now, it is surprisingly emulated by crypto projects, and this project has even received backing from numerous top venture capitalists, which is truly disheartening for the industry.

This only indicates that the project team is incompetent in catching "witches" and has serious issues in their way of thinking.

I have not specifically spent time and energy using this project because I have generally been skeptical of such cross-blockchain main chain projects. So it is fortunate that I did not waste time and energy on such projects.

In the future, even if cross-chain is necessary, I will most likely not use such projects.

This Saturday (May 11), we will hold an online discussion on Twitter. For details, please see the link below:

++https://x.com/DaosViews/status/1787331370689446081++