In 2014, a programmer named Baldur Friggjar Odinsson invented the "Icelandic Bitcoin" AuroraCoin and airdropped 31.8 tokens to each of Iceland's 330,000 citizens. Although there have been many airdrops since then, the impact has been limited. It was not until the wealth effect brought about by Uniswap's UNI airdrop that people's enthusiasm for airdrops was rekindled.
If we take Uniswap as the starting point of the Web3 airdrop feast, then the development of airdrops can be roughly divided into the following stages (types):
1. Interaction before snapshot: In the early days of airdrops, users were eligible for airdrops as long as they interacted at least once in a certain period of time before the snapshot, such as airdrops from projects such as Uniswap and 1inch. Among them, Uniswap airdropped 15% of its 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.
2. Filter addresses based on a few conditions: After experiencing the first phase of huge profits, the "wool party" group continued to grow, and the project party began to add many restrictions to the airdrop qualifications, such as interaction history in different months, interaction amount higher than 100U, etc. 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 US$5,000, and the average airdrop value of Ribbon Finance even reaches US$60,000.
3. "Hardcore" interaction requirements such as building nodes: Recently, many projects have begun to raise 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, where users mostly need to purchase cloud servers. Taking Aptos, which has already issued airdrops, as an example, users need to participate in node testing, and participating in node testing requires purchasing overseas servers and configuring the environment, which requires a certain Linux foundation. For users, this type of interaction threshold is high and the cost is high.
4. Points-based airdrops: The points-based system incentivizes users based on the principle of more work, more pay. For example, the airdrop rules of the NFT market Blur not only issue points based on the number of new users, the number of transactions, and the 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 very clear, the network effect generated is naturally very considerable.
In fact, Arbitrum is also a top student in the point-based airdrop. Arbitrum airdrop takes into account many factors, including time span, interaction amount, interaction frequency, and interaction frequency, to provide users with a tiered airdrop. There are not only bonus points, but also deductions based on anti-witch rules. While incentivizing large traders, it also takes care of some low-cost users.
5. Community witch reporting campaign: In addition to screening and detecting witches through special rules, some project parties will work together to identify more witch addresses and launch airdrop hunters and witch reporting activities in the community. Previously, Hop, Optimism, and Safe have all launched witch reporting campaigns. For example, in Optimism's airdrop last year, 17,000 witches were caught through official investigations + community reports, with a witch rate of about 7%.
But similar community challenges have also caused great controversy. For example, during the Safe airdrop last year, it was stipulated that users who successfully reported airdrop hunters could obtain 25% of the SAFE of the reported person, and the remaining 75% would be distributed to all other eligible people. For airdrop hunters who voluntarily surrendered before being reported by others, 25% can be retained. Under strong incentives, nearly a quarter of the 43,058 addresses that initially met the airdrop conditions have been identified as witch attackers and disqualified from this airdrop plan. Because the sweeping area is too large, the project party has been accused of not conforming to the "Web3 spirit" and "lacking pattern". Therefore, few project parties have adopted similar anti-witch measures since then.
6. KYC, Soul Bound Token (SBT) and other identity authentication: One of the important use cases of SBT is indeed anti-witch, but it is not currently widely used by project parties for airdrop detection for two reasons: one is that the SBT infrastructure is still imperfect, and the other is that in the early development stage of Web3, the network effect brought by the "wool party" still needs to be utilized.
In addition, like KYC, SBT still faces great controversy when used for airdrop detection of witches. In September 2022, Binance launched the soul-binding token BAB, which can obtain 14 potential airdrops by holding it. However, many people criticized that this is undoubtedly "exchanging interests for souls", and a user's personal information can be obtained through some "wool and airdrops", and the method is even cheaper than Web2.
Although the airdrop conditions of the project parties are becoming more and more stringent, and the anti-witch technology is gradually becoming more professional and refined, the "wool party" is not to be outdone and continues to arm itself in the confrontation with the project parties.
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