On February 18, Toghrul Maharramov, a senior researcher at Scroll, said on the social media platform, If you spam GitHub repositories and fix spelling errors, you are just wasting your time and ours. In this tweet , Toghrul Maharramov specifically named Celestia and Starknet, accusing them of destroying encrypted OSS.

Scroll GitHub is full of spam

Toghrul Maharramovs dissatisfaction with Celestia and Starknet stems from their expansion of airdrops to developers and contributors.

According to Starknets latest airdrop criteria, developer Tom Kysar received 1,800 Starknet tokens for a commit on Starknets GitHub, which was just a spell check on a word in a Starknet document. Before the Starknet token was traded, the airdrop amount was worth $3,200.

Kysars success has spawned imitators who have flocked to tokenless project repositories on GitHub in hopes of receiving future airdrops, and Scroll is the attack of choice in this imitation craze.

Recently, short hunters have been spamming Scrolls GitHub repository with low-quality contributions, causing the team to spend a lot of time filtering spam. One Scroll developer said the core team is stretched thin and the issue could make their lives harder.

While Toghrul Maharramov said its not a big problem at the moment, spam submissions continue to increase, according to DLNewsreport, currently has over 1,100 questions, with 300 added in the past 24 hours. Despite the constant spam, Toghrul Maharramov said the team has the situation under control and it should take a few hours to filter out all the spam.

In fact, Tom Kysars word modification of Starknet is not comparable to spam, and it is not a bad thing for Celestia and Starknet to reward OSS contributors, as Toghrul Maharramov wants to express, Even the most noble cause in crypto, which is to reward open source There may also be perverse incentives for software contributors, and some may choose to take advantage of such incentives.”

Attack Github and roll out new tricks

Airdrops are designed to reward early users of DeFi protocols and turn the project’s first fans into a group that will guide the project’s next steps. For example, often these tokens are used to propose project changes. Toghrul Maharramov also said, “The goal of airdrops should be to distribute your tokens to as many users related to your project as possible.”

Cryptocurrency airdrops have become increasingly attractive as a small number of airdrop recipients have received bonuses worth tens of thousands of dollars, which has been a major problem for crypto projects.

In order to expand their potential airdrop rewards, farmers will create multiple wallet addresses, invest hundreds of hours and deploy complex strategies to conceal their farm activities, making millions of dollars as long as they do not get caught. Free tokens. In June last year, a team held a Zksync offline event in Shenzhen. More than 100 people on site held hundreds of thousands of addresses, and it continues to grow.

Inspired by the hair-raising myths of OP and ARB, a large number of people and funds poured into the hair-raising industry. They were frantically looking for new public chains and L2 that had not yet issued coins. Among them, L2 was the absolute main force in the interaction, with hundreds of thousands or even millions. The address is generated, and a massive amount of ETH enters it for meaningless interactions.

As for the project team, they know that most of the addresses are used by brushes and run away, so they will also find ways to counterattack. When the L2 heroes are competing for hegemony, a large part of the gas fees in L2 transactions on the market are handling fees, and the latter will flow into the pockets of the project parties. In addition, multi-chain development has also made cross-chain bridges a necessity. In particular, Orbiter Finance, which specializes in L2 low-fee cross-chain, has become the biggest winner. It earns millions of dollars every month by collecting bridge fees. More than 90% of this was contributed by the Wool Party.

Under this game, L2 made a lot of money from handling fees, and Lumao shifted from low cost and high return to high cost and low return, or even high cost and negative return. The hair-raising party members failed to achieve the goal of raising hair but were rejected. Many people exclaimed on Twitter that the hair-raising studio is about to go bankrupt.

Related Reading:PUA in the cold winter of encryption, hair-raising studio may face a wave of bankruptcy》

In an increasingly complicated industry, studios have to find new breakthroughs in hair-raising, and the new airdrop regulations of Celestia and Starknet and the temptation of thousands of dollars of airdrops from Kysar have undoubtedly pointed out the way for the hair-raising party. Public chains and Layer 2 move to GitHub for unissued currency projects.

A large number of trolls followed Kysars pattern and sent spam emails with low-quality contributions to Scrolls GitHub repository, and then fixed the spelling errors themselves, in order to obtain potential airdrops from Scroll.

Scrolls code base was subjected to spam attacks similar to Sybil attacks. Arbitrums $1 billion airdrop last March still suffered losses when thousands of Sybil attackers bypassed precautions and embezzled millions of dollars.

Although, faced with the threat of witches in airdrops, various projects began to deploy so-called witch hunters to detect and filter attackers. However, since witch attacks are difficult to ensure that DeFi users remain anonymous while only receiving one airdrop, for the encryption industry, It is becoming increasingly difficult for protocols to effectively exclude attackers. After all, most projects don’t want to risk excluding actual users and causing a PR storm like ParaSwap did.

While deceptive airdrops are considered fair game by some in the freewheeling world of cryptocurrencies, there are also those in DeFi who agree with the cunningness of Sybil attackers. But Toghrul Maharramov also hinted that attacking the Scroll repository would not result in an airdrop.