Original author: Nian Qing, ChainCatcher

A month ago, the Arbitrum Foundation officially announced the airdrop information.

Although many wool parties were killed in Arbitrum's "very cumbersome" airdrop rules, it is still undeniable that this is another massive wealth-creation campaign in the currency circle. The legendary stories of "swiping thousands of accounts", "taking hundreds of thousands of Tokens" and "freedom overnight" are widely circulated again.

Enthusiasm overflows to projects with huge potential for currency issuance such as Starknet. According to 0x Scope Twitter, after Arbitrum announced the airdrop, other potential airdrop projects have seen a surge in daily active users recently, among which zkSync and StarkNet have seen the most obvious growth, with the number of daily active users increasing by more than 10 times.

Netizens ridiculed that the recent zkSync Era interaction has involved "there are grandpas and aunts who bring their pensions into the venue". And there are also many professional airdrop studios that have carried out professional "leading" and training courses for zkSync airdrops.

It has been less than three years since the airdrop feast started by Uniswap in September 2020, and the form, nature, and scale of participation of airdrops have undergone tremendous changes. The airdrop is no longer simply a carnival on the chain, and the stakeholders involved in it are gradually involved in market makers, centralized exchanges, wallets, etc., so the exchange grabs it, the big players smash the market, the Gas war, and the official website of the project party Famous scenes such as downtime have also begun to appear frequently.

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1. A Brief History of Airdrop Involution

The first airdrop in the history of encryption can be traced back to 2014, when a programmer named Baldur Friggjar Odinsson invented the "Icelandic Bitcoin" AuroraCoin, and airdropped 31.8 tokens for each of Iceland's 330,000 citizens. Although there have been many airdrops since then, the impact has been effective. Until the wealth effect brought about by Uniswap’s UNI airdrop, people’s enthusiasm for airdrops has been rekindled.

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

1. Interaction before snapshot:In the early days of airdrops, users are eligible for airdrops as long as they have interacted at least once in a certain period of time before the snapshot, such as the airdrops of Uniswap, 1inch and other projects. Among them, Uniswap airdropped 15% of the tokens to more than 250,000 users. Basically, as long as you have used Uniswap before September 1, 2020, you can get at least 400 UNI, which was worth about $800 at the time.

2. Filter addresses based on a few conditions:After experiencing the stimulation of the first stage of huge profits, the "Wool Party" group continued to grow, and the project party began to impose many restrictions on air investment qualifications, such as having interaction history in different months, and the amount of interaction is higher than 100 U. At this time, due to the rising market conditions, the average airdrop value of the project party is also rising. The average airdrop value of projects such as Ampleforth and Tornado.Cash is around 5,000 US dollars, and the average airdrop value of Ribbon Finance even reaches$60,000。

3. Requirements for "hard core" interaction such as building nodes:Recently, many projects have begun to increase the interaction threshold for testnet users, especially for public chain projects that "must issue coins", such as Aptos, Aleo, Iron Fish and other public chain projects. Most users need to purchase cloud servers. Specifically, take Aptos, which has been airdropped, as an example. Users need to participate in the node test, and to participate in the node test, they need to purchase overseas servers and configure the environment. They need to have a certain Linux foundation. For users, the threshold for this type of interaction is high, and the cost is high.

4. Point-based airdrop:The point system motivates users based on the principle of more pay for more work. For example, the NFT market Blur’s airdrop rules not only distribute points based on the number of new recruits, transaction volume, and transaction amount, but also ensure user retention and loyalty through multiple airdrops and phased airdrops. Under the premise that the incentives are clearly marked and the price is very clear, the resulting network effect is naturally very considerable.

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

5. Community reporting witch movement:In addition to filtering and detecting witches through specific rules, some project parties will also work together to identify more witch addresses, launching airdrop hunters and reporting witches in the community. Hop, Optimism, and Safe have all launched campaigns to report witches before. For example, in the Optimism airdrop last year, 17,000 witches were caught through official investigations + community reports, and the witch rate was about 7%.

But similar community challenges have also sparked controversy. For example, during the Safe airdrop last year, it was stipulated that users who successfully report airdrop hunters can get 25% of the reported SAFE, and the remaining 75% will be distributed to all other eligible people. For airdrop hunters who voluntarily turn themselves in before being reported by others, 25% can be kept. With strong incentives, nearly a quarter of the 43,058 addresses initially eligible for the airdrop have been identified as Sybil and disqualified from this airdrop program. Because the scanning area is too large, the project party is accused of not conforming to the "Web3 spirit" and "lack of pattern". Therefore, few project parties have adopted similar anti-witch methods since then.

6. Identity verification such as KYC and soul-bound tokens (SBT):One of the important use cases of SBT is indeed anti-sorceress, but it is not widely used by project parties for airdrop detection. There are two reasons: one is that the SBT infrastructure is not yet perfect, and the other is that the "wool party" still needs to be used in the early development stage of Web3. "The network effect brought about.

In addition, like KYC, SBT still faces considerable controversy when it is used for airdrop detection of witches. In September last year, Binance launched the soul-bound token BAB, and you can get 14 potential airdrops if you hold it. However, many people criticized that this is undoubtedly "exchanging benefits for souls", using some "wool and airdrops" to obtain a user's personal information, and the method is even cheaper than Web2.

IronFish, a private public chain that will soon release airdrops, has also attracted a lot of criticism because it requires KYC to obtain test rewards. Iron Fish launches website and sends emails to incentivized users with verified emails and test outlets. After the user receives the notification, go to the exchange portal and complete the KYC process. Each user is limited to one testnet reward token redemption.

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Iron Fish Token Economic Model

Overall, the history of the evolution of airdrops is somewhat synonymous with the history of anti-witches.

In the process of continuous confrontation and escalation, more and more project parties and data analysis platforms have formed their own standards and methods for witch address identification.

According to the analysis of the data platform X-Explore, since witch addresses are multiple addresses controlled by one entity, usually the same fund account will be transferred to these witch addresses to carry out the behavior of fleece, so the consistency of the source of funds is the judgment The most straightforward standard for witch addresses. Professional witches or "wool party" will use scripts to control multiple addresses to interact with several potential airdrop projects, so the "similarity of transaction records" between addresses and addresses is another important criterion for judging witches index.

Taking Arbitrum as an example, compared with other project parties, it is more careful in airdrop design and uses a variety of methods comprehensively. Trust Labs, an anti-sorceress data analysis platform, believes that Arbitrum has a lot of points in anti-sorceress: 1) Using Nansen’s address label, it deliberately excluded CEX and Bridge addresses, which can reduce manslaughter; 2) its core team, Offchain Labs, personally In the next analysis of witch behavior, the Louvain Community Detection Algorithm was used to analyze based on the capital network; 3) Considering the blacklist of HOP.

Using the Louvain Community Detection Algorithm based on the analysis of funding networks and using the blacklist of past project parties are currently more commonly used anti-sybil strategies. Additionally, TrustScan considers anti-Sybil tactics such as batch operations and sequences of identical behavior.

Of course, even though Arbitrum is already very strict on witches compared to other projects, there are still many loopholes. According to X-Explore's estimates, the Arbitrum airdrop still contains about 150,000 witch addresses and at least 4,000 witch communities. The project party has no way to identify the following witches: 1. Sybil addresses that deposit and withdraw funds from the exchange; 2. Through 5. The sybil address that uses the cross-chain bridge to transfer funds; 4. The sybil address that has collection behavior only after the snapshot; Sybil detection results from other Layer 2 chains are taken into consideration.

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2. Specialization of the "Mao Mao Party": Studios and distribution models tend to mature

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Online zkSync interactive gas cost table

In response to the anti-witch strategy of the project party, Airdrop Studio has also evolved different coping strategies.

Qian Xin is a "professional account" since the Uniswap airdrop period. After feeling the trend of large-scale airdrops, he developed the habit of regularly looking at projects and interactions. One of the principles he has always adhered to is to interact in the state of "early contributors" and perform manual operations. His airdrop strategy can almost be summed up as "no skills, all relying on diligence."

In the recent Arbitrum airdrop, about half of Qian Xin’s 69 numbers that were manually operated received the airdrop. In contrast, its recently established studio also tried group control and batch interaction for the first time in the Arbitrum ecosystem. However, due to the highly repetitive transfer amount and interactive content, only 2 of the 1,300 addresses were finally airdropped, and the others were "killed" "Are. Qian Xin has also been persuading the "wool party" in his community to use less tools.

"When I was interacting with projects, I really recognized this ecology, and I was even willing to play the role of an early contributor." Qian Xin said that the essence of airdrops is gas subsidies, but if the ecology develops well, you don't even need to rely on airdrops to cover costs. He has been interacting with Arbitrum for two years, and many addresses have made some money by interacting with well-developed projects such as Magic Ecosystem and GMX.

Qian Xin believes that airdrop studios are very similar to investments in the primary market. The process of choosing which project to interact with or "rolling wool" also requires industry awareness, maintaining a high degree of attention to the project side, and capturing information in a timely manner. These behaviors are not fundamentally different from what investment research institutions do.

Different from Qian Xin's strategy, Haotian's airdrop studio "Puppeteer" specially formed its own technical team to develop a more rigorous airdrop tool.

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Group control software operation interface

In November last year, the team began to try batch operations. Although they found a lot of tools to improve interaction efficiency, such as fingerprint browsers, group control software, and cloud servers, they found that there are currently no good products on the market that can fully meet the current needs Scientist Wool Party" needs. Therefore, on the basis of existing tools, the team set out to develop an interactive system that can be operated without the ability to code.

According to the "Puppeteer" team, in the recent Arbitrum airdrop, about a thousand addresses in the studio have received the airdrop, but because the system started to be developed in November last year was officially put into use, so the time is relatively short, "otherwise at most There will be 5,000 addresses that can get the airdrop.” In terms of specific interaction behavior, the team interacts with the purpose of investing in research, and has certain requirements for the cost, time and number of interactions. Also, after receiving the Arbitrum airdrop, they were in no rush to ship. The "Puppeteer Team" said that the team had a very good experience with Arbitrum, the second-tier public chain, during the interaction process, and hopes to continue to deeply participate in the ecology and look for more opportunities in the future.

When it comes to the encrypted market’s evaluation of the “Mao Mao Party”, the “Puppeteer” team believes that,Airdrop studios are actually changing the investment landscape in the primary market."A long time ago, ordinary users had the opportunity to get relatively high-quality chips like Flow on Coinlist, but since the entry of large institutions, only large venture capital institutions like a16z and Sequoia can get early tokens of high-quality projects , and the airdrop can allow ordinary users to get chips for high-quality projects.”

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3. Redefining the "Mao Mao Party"

The encryption market seems to have changed its opinion on the "Mao Mao Party".

In the early days of the airdrop, wool parties who used a large number of addresses to interact in batches were regarded as speculators and spoilers. For serious project parties, "hormone liquidity" was not attractive. In the long run, short-term good-looking data It does not bring value to the project party. In addition, witches or witch communities will lead to token hoarding through swiping, which will affect the fairness of project token distribution.

Taking Aptos as an example, its data in the final testnet stage is astonishingly high-the testnet completed more than 800 million transactions in less than 2 weeks, achieving more than 4000 TPS. After the airdrop, the number of active addresses, transactions and TPS of Aptos dropped rapidly. According to Aptos explorer, the current average TPS on the Aptos chain is only 10.

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Changes in Aptos’ comprehensive trading volume, source: GenliData

But objectively speaking, the Aptos airdrop has triggered an unprecedented wealth effect and a network effect out of the circle. For a while, a large number of gold diggers poured into Web3, and began to seek the next opportunity to get rich with enthusiasm.

However, the demise of ICO, the decline of IDO and the monopoly of VC on early project tokens seem to have endowed the "Wool Party" with a sense of justice and correctness like a "Liangshan hero". Airdrops to early users have also become the market's "moral requirements" and "political correctness" for many projects.

Encrypted KOL @黄道once posted on his social media: "Mao is not essentially masturbation, but the original stock of blockchain star start-ups." And Element founder Wang Feng also said on Twitter: "Observation in the past year shows that masturbation has become a quasi-primary market investment..."

Many people in the circle agree with this point of view. After all, for star projects like Arbitrum and Aptos, only top VCs have the opportunity to get the early token share. However, if you regard "lugging hair" as an investment behavior, it will be safer than ICO.

From an ecological point of view, the "Mao Mao Party" has become an important part of the ecological development of Web3. Novice users are expected to enter the Web3 field through airdrops and obtain considerable benefits, and the project party achieves the purpose of educating users through interactive tasks on the testnet. In the early days of Web3 development, the project team did need a large number of "wool parties" in the test network stage to conduct certain stress tests to better improve network performance. In addition, there are also speculations in the market that the project party can ensure the decentralization of token distribution through airdrops, rather than being highly concentrated in the team and VC, so it is in a favorable position to deal with supervision and go to big exchanges.

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4. The ultimate evolution of airdrops

As the industry "involutes", the track division will become more and more finer. With the emergence of professional airdrop studios, there will also be the emergence of professional anti-witch organizations.

The project party does have the need to protect the interests of real users, issue tokens fairly, and filter wool parties in order to optimize products, and anti-witch can be called a "fine job", and the project party does not necessarily have sufficient technical means and time and energy Excluding witch accounts, professional third parties will not only have more complete identification algorithms, but will also assist project parties in designing more operational strategies.

The Trust labs mentioned above is a studio dedicated to anti-witches. It has already cooperated with some public chains, DAO, DID and other projects. Scenarios that require user behavior analysis. Trust labs believes that a healthy and sustainable Web3 community will gradually form an anti-witch consensus. In the future, anti-witch will become a must for project parties just like code audits.

And X-Explorer believes that with the emergence of more and more "mao-mao parties" and professional airdrop studios, as well as the entry of Web2's black and gray production teams, the automation capabilities of mao-mao are becoming more and more perfect. After the degree of involution intensified on the Mao track, its earnings are not optimistic. Maomao is to interact with the project and test various performances of the project, so it is more inclined to cooperate between professional airdrop studios and project parties, and conduct large-scale pressure tests on various performance issues of the project in the form of technical testing .In the end, a "win-win" situation will be formed.

With the emergence of ChatGPT, Twitter has also begun to be filled with various tutorials using AI tools to generate masturbation scripts, making the threshold of "mao masturbation party" gradually lowered. It is not difficult to imagine that in the future, with the help of AI, the behavior pattern of the "Mao Mao Party" may become more "confusing" and difficult to track, and the cost of confrontation will also increase accordingly. Under this premise, the project party needs the assistance of a professional data analysis platform.

In fact, the Internet has a long history of fluffing wool. As early as the Internet traffic war, under the stimulation of coupons, grabbing red envelopes, point redemption, VIP and other wool, many gray industries such as hang-up software and studios were also born.

In the game field, under the stimulation of high profits such as game equipment, gray products such as Dajin Studio have also been born. Through multiple devices, multiple openers, cloud platforms, etc., a large number of characters can be online at the same time, using button scripts or group control software, etc. The third party assists in repeatedly swiping in-game currency resources to make a profit. But soon, various security and data companies soon appeared more stringent detection tools and anti-hanging software.

But will Web3 end up with an anti-witch industry as fine-tuned as Web2?

In the early stage of industry development, the wealth effect caused by airdrops and the ultimate ideal of decentralization are actually positive for more and more people to enter the web3 project, and there are still opportunities for nuggets and "sudden wealth" "Fantasy" is also the biggest charm of Web3. Therefore, most of the current project parties leave a gap for this "dream" in line with the philosophy of "when the water is clear, there will be no fish".

In the Internet industry, with the end of the traffic dividend cycle, most of the wool party army has died down. Will the Web3 industry follow a similar trajectory? What is certain is that airdrops, as a concrete manifestation of the Web3 project's "community co-construction/leading" concept, will exist in the industry for a long time, providing a broad space for individual users who are interested in Web3.

Although the studio-style "mao mao" reaped huge profits in the early stage, with the deepening of airdrop involution and the upgrade of the project party's anti-witch methods, when the studio's revenue cannot cover the cost of thousands of accounts, the studio The traditional "mao plucking" may enter an unsustainable stage and gradually become silent.

Will StarkNet and zkSync be the last carnival of the wool party?