Author: gm365 Source: X, @gm365
ZK’s airdrop marks the end of an era
Before one wave subsides, another wave rises.
While the L0 CEO, who created the "largest witch library in history", was still immersed in fighting against the witch cluster, the "largest anti-slash in history" ZK was born.
For a time, there was widespread grief and grief, and it was almost as if God was wrathful and people were resentful.
Why?
The one you have the most expectations for often hurts you the most. This is true for Web3. zkSync, the last hope of L2, waited for 4 years, but all it got was a ruthless "Unfortunately, YOU are not eligible for the airdrop".
“Anti-Witch” without investigating witches
10 million addresses, 400 million txs, adhering to the "original intention" of "the world is for the public, no witch investigation", screening "real users", how to do it?
zkSync chooses to use the cold and strict laws of mathematics to help.
It is generally divided into three steps: initial screening, allocation, and addition.
To be honest, the 7 criteria for entering the points pool for initial screening are very loose. For example, 10 tx, depositing DeFi projects, holding a magic lamp, Lite donations, etc. I believe that most people who interact "seriously" can enter the pool.
The allocation process is the highlight, and it is also the "big filter" for most users to be exposed. Because the allocation here is not based on the "industry gold standards" such as the monthly activity of your wallet, transaction volume, tx number, etc., but the "fund retention" consistent with the DeFi deposit project.
It is quite normal for staking projects like EtehrFi to require fund retention, but when an L2 uses similar rules to filter users, most people feel it is "unacceptable" or even "treasonous".
As for the "bonus" link, it is the icing on the cake, and is targeted at those "old OGs", high-quality accounts, and deep users.
But this is not something that many people care about, because everyone finds that the rice in the bowl is gone, who cares whether there are chicken legs or not?
Therefore, the core here is: an L2 that everyone has the highest expectations for, a rule similar to the DeFi project that uses card funds to retain, filtered out more than 90% of user addresses, leading to the largest anti-stealing tragedy in history.
In comparison, the disparity between the maximum allocation and the minimum living security households, the opaque allocation rules, and why NanSen is not allowed to investigate witches are all secondary issues.
The main problem was that the poor and lower-middle peasants had no food to eat, which made them hate the landlords' extravagant food and fish even more.
Reverse the game
Not to mention the waste of N years of time and energy, the gas reversal alone is unbearable, so some people are calling for ZK to refund the gas.
Emotional expression can indeed help you find resonance and relieve your anger, but it will not help you move forward or continue to make money in the industry. Analyzing the reasons, checking for omissions and shortcomings, and correcting policies and strategies are the right way.
There is no need to delve too deeply into why the project team, which always claims that "community is everything", chose an anti-Witch method that angered 90% of users. If you put yourself in the project team's perspective and examine the specific rules of the "distribution" link mentioned above, you will find that the project team has excluded all industrialized Witch clusters and ordinary users with subsistence allowances through just this one mathematical formula.
Why choose to retain funds and double the bonus on DeFi deposits/LP to fight against witches?
Two reasons:
1. For L2, TVL is the lifeblood
2. The project owner is well aware of the ordinary users’ speculation about the “airdrop rules” (actually a misjudgment)
When ARB and STARK were airdropped before, some KOL said that airdrops were too easy to be industrialized and farmed because the rules were too easy to guess and there were only a few of them.
Everyone thinks so, KOLs teach so, and people consciously or unconsciously follow the instructions step by step. There are even a bunch of third-party tools to help everyone collect relevant data and seriously come up with address rankings.
Wave after wave of fueling the flames, like boiling a frog in warm water, has made everyone lose their vigilance, thinking that you, a little Monkey King ZK, still cannot escape from the palm of my, Tathagata Buddha’s hand, and it is a foregone conclusion that your airdrop can be controlled by me.
What was the result? ZK did not play by the rules. He used a trick to retain the amount, defeating all the honest people who followed the script.
Some people say that ZK's airdrop rules filter out all low-end industrialized witch studios and ordinary retail investors, and allocate them to high-end users and high-end witch studios (those with deep pockets and high-quality witch addresses).
This observation is very accurate and, in practice, it is indeed true.
For example, the L0 witch cluster distributed 0.6 ETH in batches on the same day, and eventually received millions of ZK witch clusters. This is a typical case of a high-end witch cluster.
In other words, the reason why we didn’t get ZK this time was due to a serious misjudgment of the airdrop rules (caused by underestimating the enemy) and the double squeeze of everyone wanting to have multiple accounts but not having enough funds.
Industrial Farming Status
If judged by the airdrop rules of ARB or even STARK, the vast majority of the 90% of users who were screened out this time met the standards, and some even rose to the category of “premium accounts” and got a good result.
But why doesn’t it work for ZK?
It's simple, times have changed. At its core:
The industrialized farming system is too prosperous.
The over-maturity of the EVM ecosystem and the addition of GPT4’s AI tools have led to a sharp drop in the threshold for batch account creation and interaction, which in turn has led to a serious inflation in the number of accounts and tx.
This is the evolutionary path of the times and cannot be changed by personal will.
It is very similar to the scene in the early days of the Industrial Revolution when skilled female textile workers were replaced by machine spinning. The skills that handicraftsmen rely on to make a living are not worth mentioning in the eyes of mechanized producers. Low efficiency, high cost, and prone to errors are not comparable to the ruthless and uncomplaining machines.
At that time and moment, it was just like this moment.
The era of industrialized farming has arrived. Being able to access multiple accounts is no longer an advantage. You will be caught up with, overtaken, and left behind by the interactive codes generated by GPT4 in a matter of minutes.
However, this situation is not only known to you and me, but also to the project party, VC, and exchange.
The number of addresses and tx numbers are inflated, which is a tacit knowledge among everyone. Perhaps there are only different opinions on the injection ratio.
However, the TVL indicator is more difficult to fake because it requires the accumulation of real money.
Therefore, smart projects conveniently choose this indicator which is the most difficult to fake as the core rule for airdrop distribution.
In this respect, it is similar to the male peacock's gorgeous tail.
The male peacock's tail is extremely eye-catching, which brings a lot of inconvenience to his life and may even put his life in danger. Why did nature evolve such a "useless and dangerous" encumbrance?
Because this is the most difficult "signal" to fake, and it is the "gold standard" for convincing the female peacock and making her willing to commit herself to the other party. Signals that can be easily faked are not worth believing.
Similarly, as long as you are willing and set the program parameters, you can create perfect daily, weekly, and monthly activity data, super high tx numbers, and super high transaction volumes for your address cluster. Anyway, the ruthless hair-pulling machine will work tirelessly for you to interact until the end of time.
But maintaining hundreds of U of funds in each account is not something that any program or GPT can help you do.
Money once again flows into the hands of those wealthy people who have plenty of money. Even Web3 is still as unfair as Web2, MD.
where is the road
In an era where gas fees are negligible and industrial witches are everywhere, where will the wool-pulling community go? Will Web3 still reward us brave warriors who are rushing to the west for gold?
what can be confirmed is:
▪️ Web3 is still in its early stages
▪️ Large financing projects will emerge in an endless stream
▪️ Airdrops never end
▪️ Web3 still offers more opportunities and amounts to make money than traditional Web2
The difference is:
▪️ Times have changed
▪️ The rules are always changing
▪️ The ecosystem is too mature and the competition is too fierce that it has become a tasteless choice for ordinary people
We must believe in the choice of the times. At present, the opportunity for ordinary people like you and me to change our destiny is not elsewhere, but here, in Web3.
In terms of the probability of making money and ROI, airdrops are still the most suitable track for ordinary people to make their first pot of gold. Unfortunately, due to the rapid changes in the industry and factors such as AI support, the difficulty has increased dramatically.
If you used to be able to reap a lot just by following the KOLs’ tutorials, now I’m afraid your wisdom will be tested even more:
Choose an ecosystem, choose a project, choose an interaction method, how to balance funds and quantity, and how to maximize output.
The era of getting rich by mindlessly picking hair is over, and the era of getting rich by picking hair is now.
