𝗣𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗯𝘀 𝟮𝟮:𝟭𝟲-𝟭𝟳: “𝘖𝘯𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘰𝘱𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘰𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘰 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘦 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘸𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘩 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘨𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘨𝘪𝘧𝘵𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘩–𝘣𝘰𝘵𝘩 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘱𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘺.”
The Airdrop Wars - the flames already fanned by Eigen Layer - exploded over the weekend. LayerZero was the casualty. Instead of glory, there was Ineptitude, misunderstanding and hastily written PR…But more than that, the airdrop hunters had become the hunted.
And to think, it had all been going so well...
Officially announced six months previously, the LayerZero TGE had in fact been on the radar for years. Lured like horse flies to the pungent smell of free money, almost six million wallet addresses had interacted with the protocol.
On Friday night $ZRO had a pre-market valuation of over $16 billion. Yet by the end of the weekend daily activity on the LayerZero flagship protocol Stargate had fallen 56%.
Twitter was a shambles, VCs, Pudgy Penguins, farmers, LayerZero founders and influencers fighting like demented seals on some godforsaken Arctic beach. How the argument ends could define not only the future of Layer0, but the summer of crypto, what community means in web3, and about $87 million trillion billion dollars.
For those that don’t know, LayerZero lets you bridge between forty+ chains - even those ridiculous ghost chains like Moonbeam and Horizen and Rari that nobody uses - allowing them all to sing, like the New Seekers, in perfect harmony.
Did someone say Interoperability?
Amongst the VC-funded tech arsenal of LayerZero is the ONFT. For the curious, the O stands for omni-chain. With it, you can ship NFTs between blockchains with all the ease and style of Roger Federer in his Wimbledon pomp.
And here is where the chaos began.
There are three major platforms that utilise LayerZero tech to move ONFTs: Merkly, Holograph and OmniX.
With the look and feel of a testing ground, all three allow you to register hundreds of transactions for almost nothing. And as you know, in the world of airdrops, transactions win prizes.
Since Merkly is on the Layer Zero ecosystem page. And since Layer Zero backed Merkly on their Twitter feed. And since Holograph has a leaderboard incentivising bridging... What would you do?
Bridge. Bridge. And bridge some more.
For supporting a nascent eco-system, helping increase TVL and DAUs and propelling Layer0 to the heady heights of crypto stardom, active participants would be rewarded.
At least, that is what they thought.
The LayerZero snapshot was taken on May 1st.
12.2K
On May 3rd, they tweeted:
“We believe it is in the protocol's best interest to distribute tokens to durable users — not sybil farmers.
If you are a sybil, you have two options:
Self-report sybil addresses for 15% of your intended allocation. No questions asked. The deadline to do so is May 17th.
Do not report and receive nothing when an address is flagged by our internal sybil report or by bounty hunters.
Yowzers!
They meant business.
And then the shit really hit the fan.
If you are a sybil, you have two options:
– Self-report sybil addresses for 15% of your intended allocation. No questions asked. The deadline to do so is May 17th.
– Do…
In the beginning, a sybil was defined as, ‘any individual using hundreds, maybe thousands, of addresses to gobble up tokens for the sole purpose of dumping them immediately.’
Clear, concise. If you had a wallet and wielded it with intent, avoided the scammers and the den of thieves and made legitimate transactions, you were not a sybil.
However, for their airdrop, LayerZero had a different definition. More nuanced, more frightening. See their Medium post:
🪂 If you are a single entity with tens, hundreds, or thousands of addresses participating in industrial farming.
🪂 If you minted a “valueless” NFT for the sole purpose of moving it around chains.
🪂 If you have used popular “sybil farming” applications such as Merkly, L2Pass, L2Marathon.
🪂 If you bridged $0.01 back and forth across chains for the sake of having touched a chain.
🪂 If you think you are a sybil, you are most likely a sybil.
Points 1 and 4 are legitimate and don’t need much commentary. Point 5 is too ambiguous to make sense.
Points 2 and 3 are what caused the fireworks after the snapshot had been taken. Mainly because the popular ‘sybil farming’ application Merkly is on the damn LayerZero ecosystem page and almost everyone had used it.
In fact, Merkly was the second most popular dapp in the LayerZero ecosystem.
As you can see, there's a lot of worthless NFTS floating around.
But notice also there is no mention of Holograph or OmniX in their definition. Both LayerZero tools for moving valueless NFTs between chains.
Favouritism?
Vested interest?
Either way, it’s not very ‘permissionless.’
"If you think you are a Sybil, you are most likely a Sybil"
If you're a real user who tested merkly or used it for a gas drop -- you're probably not a sybil.
If you literally only ever used merkly to send NFT in a…
It’s quite literally a use case of LayerZero
Using the refuel function on Merkly is genuinely valuable, and transferring ONFTs has been promoted by LZ themselves multiple times
Anxiety ridden airdrop farmers with 984 transactions over 684 days ago (including Aptos FFS), but had used Merkly, now found themselves ineligible for the airdrop.
Voted 37 times on Stargate?
Pushed $100K in volume?
Nope.
If you had used Merkly to move worthless NFTs around, or refill gas on strange ghost chains, you were now Ineligible for the airdrop.
And then the penguins made it worse. As penguins are want to do…
LayerZero had done some kind of partnership to take Pudgy penguins cross chain. As a result, holders would be eligible for the airdrop. However, it was quickly pointed out the top twenty pudgy penguins holders had made less than five transactions on LayerZero.
Five.
That made a lot of people angry.
But LayerZero weren’t finished. They launched a bounty.
Only these blade runners wouldn’t be hunting androids.
“If a sybil user does not self-report by the end of the 14-day period, we will move into the following 2 phases:
Phase 1: We will release our own list of all identified sybil users — those who are identified and did not self-report will receive nothing.
Phase 2: We will open a bounty where users can submit detailed reports of sybil activity. A successful report will result in the sybil user receiving nothing, and the bounty hunter receiving 10% of the sybil’s intended allocation.
Talk about community building.
Bounty Hunters are looking at fresh transactions on LayerZeroScan, and reporting any wallet that moves.
The post where Naim mentions a 50 wallet cluster is in fact not really a cluster, but someone dust-attacking a few top-ranking LZ wallets on the dune leaderboard, then driving the narrative that they all…
People are dust-attacking random wallets and reporting them.
Accusations are flying.
It’s ugly.
And this is all to say:
Airdrops are broken.
Wen ZKS?
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