LayerZero Pre-Airdrop Announcement “Witches Can Surrender”: Will it Have a Long-Term Impact on Airdrop Culture? What is the Final Choice of the Large Airdrop Studio?
Summary:
LayerZero, a cross-chain interoperability protocol backed by well-known investments such as a16z and Redshirt Capital, is seen as a love-hate feast by airdrop enthusiasts. They love the potential airdrop of the $ZRO token but hate the delay in its distribution. With over 4.8 million users, a significant proportion of them feel like “airdrop slaves”. LayerZero finally announced the confirmation of the airdrop on May 4, accompanied by a peculiar mechanism for witches to surrender and a reward system for witch hunters. Let’s take a closer look at what these rules imply.
Cryptocurrency market participants commonly expect to receive airdrops while engaging with a well-funded public chain or protocol. For project teams, witches are necessary as they represent a major return on marketing investment. When more participants expect to receive airdrops, they are likely to go to great lengths to bring in friends, advertise, use automated bots, create multiple wallets, and engage in wave after wave of transactions, resulting in increased trading volume and user count. The key contributor to this airdrop harvesting is the “airdrop studio” company.
However, when it comes to token distribution, project teams need to regain control. To ensure fairness for the majority of participants and prevent excessive token concentration, they have to burn witches at the stake, similar to the witch hunts in the Middle Ages, to establish their authority and make an example of the witches within their community.
LayerZero has designed the witch surrender mechanism prior to the airdrop. The first step is to let witches self-destruct, with the condition that there will still be rewards for surrendering.
LayerZero will give all witch users an opportunity to self-report within the next 14 days. Those who report will still be eligible to receive 15% of their expected allocation in the subsequent airdrop. The reporting deadline is May 17, 11:59:59 UTC (May 18, 19:59 Taiwan time).
After the self-reporting period for witches, the following two stages will occur:
Phase 1: The project team will release a list of identified witch users. Those who have been identified but did not self-report will not receive any airdrop.
Phase 2: The project team will offer bounties, and users can submit detailed reports on witch activities. Successful reports will result in no rewards for witch users, while bounty hunters will receive 10% of the expected witch allocation.
In essence, LayerZero’s weapon is to control people who are aware that they are witches by exploiting their psychological expectations, while also guaranteeing that even if they are witches, they will still receive a 15% share of the airdrop.
For users who engage in airdrop harvesting, since they are unaware of the anti-witch mechanisms currently possessed by LayerZero and whether they are blacklisted, it is like entering a gambling game where they either win and receive 1 (100%) or lose and receive nothing (0). Therefore, the original expected value is 1 * 0.5 + (-0) * 0.5 = 0.5.
However, this number does not include the cost calculation. The cost of airdrops includes time, transaction fees, studio work hours, labor costs, computer equipment, internet, automated programs, and workspace rent. It is evident that costs are not easily quantifiable. But witches instinctively realize that the surrender mechanism allows them to choose not to gamble, resulting in a higher expected value. This approach is specifically aimed at users who incur higher costs in airdrop harvesting, especially those who are uncertain about the allocation and find it difficult to estimate a 100% airdrop based on speculated token prices. By not being witches, they can return to being obedient human users. The more wallets witches have, the greater the probability that they will choose to surrender.
Airdrops of cryptocurrencies may seem full of opportunities to receive “free money,” but users often overlook the fact that their time, energy, and transaction fees are already being exploited by the project team before token distribution. It is only after the airdrop that users need to recalculate to determine if they have gained or lost and if they have been counter-harvested.
If we consider airdrops as a form of “win or lose” gambling, then project teams, as the house, have rather ambiguous rules. There are no clear rules for winning rewards, no guarantee of the value of rewards, and they can even backtrack on their promises (based on the author’s personal experience of ranking in the top 1% of an airdrop reward but being disqualified as a witch).
If project teams solely focus on making the game highly enticing, users may start losing as soon as they engage in airdrop harvesting.
Referring back to LayerZero’s airdrop, I anticipate that the witch surrender mechanism will lead studios or large-scale airdrop enthusiasts to adopt a simple game strategy of “partial self-reporting.” Since large-scale enthusiasts adopt various interaction strategies and divide their wallets into groups, not all wallets are used in the same way. Good automated interaction bots can even disperse interaction behaviors and try to avoid being labeled as witches. Partial self-reporting is a relatively safe approach for projects of LayerZero’s magnitude.
The subsequent “witch hunting reporting mechanism that offers a 10% reward” will once again stir up the mentality of studio employees: should I report my boss? Will my boss know it was me who reported? The reported wallet interaction patterns will become part of the witch’s history, making industrialized airdrop harvesting even more challenging.
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