LayerZero airdrop hunters: We are the tools of false prosperity on the chain, and we are also the donkeys that are killed after we are done with our

Original title: "People who are "witch hunted" by LayerZero: We are "tools" to create false prosperity on the chain"

Original author: Mia, ChainCatcher

In addition to daily airdrops, another focus of Brother A during this period is to write appeal forms - more than 200 accounts and more than 100 boutique accounts in his studio have all been judged as witch accounts by LayerZero.

"In order to increase the probability of successful appeals, the team uses chatgpt to write appeals, filling in different reasons for each account, and even using different languages. The core idea is "I am a real user." Brother A told ChainCatcher.

Sister Hua also filled out the appeal form according to LayerZero's requirements, stating that her "fleecing" account is personal, not a witch account of the studio.

Before that, 20 accounts that Sister Hua had worked hard for half a year were identified as witch accounts by the project party, and became the target of the hunt in LayerZero's massive "witch hunt".

"I wanted to get rich by swindling, but I didn't know that swindling would lead to losses." Sister Hua smiled bitterly to ChainCatcher.

As for whether it is useful, Brother A and Sister Hua both said that they just did their best and left it to fate. "There are too many accounts that have appealed, and the project party can't see them all."

The report previously released by LayerZero showed that there are 800,000 addresses that are potential witch accounts. Although the final list has not yet been announced, it is expected that the number will not be small.

This "witch hunt" has raised the game between the project party and the "swindling" party to a new stage: review, self-exposure, and reward for reporting. These words, which run counter to the spirit of crypto freedom, have stirred up a lot of controversy.

The "fleecing" who once had the upper hand no longer have the advantage as the Web3 industry develops step by step.

Both sides have good reasons: the project side hopes to airdrop tokens to real users, rather than the studios that sell them en masse as soon as they go online; the studios said that after paying real money to help the project improve data and test performance, they were abandoned.

On May 30, LayerZero's "witch hunt" officially ended, and Sister Hua and Brother A are still waiting for the results of the trial.

"Hot Cake" LayerZero

Brother A has been in the crypto industry for a long time. When the mining business was suppressed, he turned to the airdrop track.

During the operation of the mining farm, the original investment research and technical team, plus the connections accumulated in the circle, formed an airdrop studio of initial scale.

In his view, every large-scale airdrop behavior is a long-term value investment, and researching the financing team behind the project has also become a focus. The team focuses on investment research on investment projects of well-known institutions such as A16Z, Paradigm, and Coinbase, and large-scale financing is standard.

"A high financing amount means that the project has a high valuation, and a high valuation often means more valuable airdrop tokens." Brother A introduced.

In the early days of the studio, it also got good airdrop projects such as ARB, Aptos, Sui, and Wormhole, which was considered a good return in the overall bleak market.

LayerZero has two natural advantages: a financing team and a high valuation, and has become the focus of Brother A's attention.

In March 2022, LayerZero, a full-chain interoperability protocol that aims to become the "simplest and lightest way to transmit cross-chain information", completed a $135 million round of A+ financing, and entered the ranks of Web3 unicorns with a valuation of $1 billion. Institutions such as a16z, Sequoia Capital, and Coinbase Ventures participated in the investment.

In April 2023, LayerZero completed another $120 million round of B financing, with a valuation rising to $3 billion. This time, the investment institution also introduced traditional capital.

When the financing was completed, LayerZero announced that it would consider "governance token airdrops."

With such strong funds and airdrop expectations, in the eyes of "money-grubbing" people, LayerZero is a "big meal" that will be delivered to their mouths.

Individual money-grubbing parties and money-grubbing studios began to wait for opportunities. For a time, research reports on LayerZero were flying all over the sky, and various airdrop tutorials were circulated in the community.

LayerZero interaction data also saw an explosive increase. Since the announcement of financing in April last year, the volume of interactions on the LayerZero chain has begun to surge, with the number of transactions per day exceeding 200,000. The number of transactions of the official cross-chain product Stargate has also begun to rise on a large scale, with the number of transactions per day being around 150,000.

Brother A also made intensive arrangements. The technical team used the code to batch generate 200 money-grubbing wallets, plus 100 high-quality accounts, and a money-grubbing operation lasting more than half a year began.

Brother A introduced that the team will carry out designated daily interactions to ensure that each address can complete the interactive tasks to meet the airdrop standards and isolate accounts.

Increasing costs

In LayerZero's interactive actions, the sunk costs of "scamming" are accumulating.

Due to the high fees and opaque charges, LayerZero's cross-chain product Stargate once became the "cross-chain assassin" in the mouths of the "scammers". Since there were no detailed information in the early days, many users found that they had to pay huge fees when paying the GAS fee, and the fees for each currency were not uniform.

Brother A said that for the LayerZero airdrop, he had to endure Stargate's high cross-chain fees.

Sister Hua also hates this. She said that because of the need to make money, she once bought some STG tokens at a unit price of $0.9 for staking. Since then, due to the overall market decline, the value of this part of STG has also been cut in half.

When talking about the cost of this money-making, Brother A said that the cost of each account of LayerZero is more than 200U, and the investment goal is to get an airdrop of about 1000U on a single account. "To be on the safe side, 100 high-quality accounts are also used for interaction to ensure that they will not be reversed."

Sister Hua said that this is the first time she has used multiple accounts to make money. Because she has received good airdrop rewards for participating in the interaction with a single account before, she "spends a lot of money" to try it this time, and the overall cost is about 3000U.

But when the potential witch addresses were announced, Brother A and Sister Hua were dumbfounded. Brother A’s studio account and 100 boutique accounts were wiped out.

Sister Hua’s 20 accounts were also not spared. Sister Hua joked, “I wanted to get rich by swindling, but I didn’t know that swindling would lead to losses.”

The largest “anti-witch action” in history

The witch hunt from LayerZero wiped out their accounts.

On May 2, LayerZero officially announced that the first snapshot had been completed and stated that the actual total number of users was about 5.8 million.

The next day, LayerZero announced that it would distribute tokens to persistent users (not witch users) out of “continued trust in community members.” As for Sybil users, LayerZero also provides two options: one is to "self-expose" and report the Sybil address by yourself, so as to retain 15% of the airdrop allocation; the other is to wait for the internal screening of the project party, after which you will not receive any tokens.

In addition, LayerZero also stated that the witch detection report will be written in cooperation with Chaos Labs and Nansen.

This also makes witch monitoring more stringent, which is undoubtedly a wake-up call for studios and professional wool-pulling parties who have been looking forward to airdrops for a long time and make a living by wool-pulling.

LayerZero has even introduced a reporting mechanism. Those who successfully report will receive 10% of the tokens of the reported account.

As of the end of the first round of witch self-reporting, 803,000 addresses were initially determined to be potential witches, of which more than 338,000 addresses self-reported as witches. Each address that meets the requirements will receive 15% of its expected token allocation, and the remaining 85% will be returned to qualified users. Compared with 800,000, only less than 40% of the addresses choose to "surrender".

The purge is still going on. In the next two weeks of "bounty hunting", LayerZero received a total of 3,550 "witch hunting" reports, each of which contained at least 20 addresses indicating witch operations.

The industry generally believes that the final list will "retain 6.67% - 13.33% of addresses", but most of the multi-account Mao Mao Party and studios have been "killed" in the first round of purges.

Killing and loving

The game between the project party and the Mao Mao Party has been evolving.

Hop Protocol pioneered this "encirclement and suppression" plan, locking the screening target to the studio, focusing on screening suspected of manipulating multiple accounts for batch interaction; using commonly used "witch brushing" applications such as Merkly, L2 Pass, L2 Marathon; and cross-chain interaction with very small amounts.

Under all kinds of "self-exposure", "screening" and "reporting", witch screening seems to have become a "encirclement and suppression" cleaning scene, and the studio has become a lamb to be slaughtered.

However, LuMao Studio is not an ordinary person.

After experiencing the baptism of many major airdrops, most mature studios now have their own investment research team, technical team and interaction team. LuMao has gradually evolved from the user loyalty behavior of "getting rewards at almost 0 cost" to a professional technical team.

In the face of witch censorship, the studio's anti-witch censorship methods are everywhere, from random interaction scripts, decentralized and independent IP addresses, to stricter account isolation.

There is always a game relationship between the project party and the Mao Mao Party on "witches" and "anti-witches".

In the eyes of studios like Brother A, Mao Mao Party has made a lot of contributions to the activity on the chain, and Mao Mao behavior has gradually become an important part of the active data on the chain.

As Layerzero previously announced the airdrop expectations, many project parties will release news about airdrops and launch Odyssey tasks in the early stages of the project to encourage users to interact with the studio on the chain, thereby forming a "false prosperity" on the chain.

With the generation of a large amount of interactive data, the project party can optimize and stress test the project in the early stages, while earning business income.

For the Mao Mao Party, they risk "not knowing the airdrop rules" and conduct free testing and on-chain contributions for the project party. In the words of Sister Hua, "the project party collects the handling fees, but they get nothing."

In response, He Bi, who is also a Layerzero fan and crypto KOL, said, "The radical Odyssey and PUA are all so intense. The hair-pulling is over and I'm out."

They ridiculed themselves that in front of Layerzero's anti-witch mechanism, they have completely become "tools" to create false prosperity on the chain.

Controversial reporting mechanism

In the increasingly competitive hair-pulling market, "witch hunting" has gradually become a game of human nature.

When talking about why they were investigated for witches, Brother A and Sister Hua unanimously pointed the finger at the "mutual reporting" mechanism.

In their view, although multiple accounts were used to pull airdrops, considering the witch problem, risk prevention and control were also carried out on the boutique accounts, but this time all accounts were "annihilated."

In fact, the "mutual reporting" phase lasted from May 18 to 31, which means that this was not one of the reasons.

However, the reporting mechanism that tests human nature has still caused controversy in the crypto community.

Layerzero announced that it encourages community users to report witches to each other, and successful reporters can obtain 10% of the airdrop share allocation of the reported address.

This undoubtedly plays the darkness of human nature to the extreme. In order to obtain the 10% airdrop reward, the results of other players can be sacrificed and ignored.

He Bi said: "Human nature is evil. Every time you check witches, you can see the darkness of human nature."

Sister Hua also said that this is a "lose-for-all" approach, and that she can accept the strict rules of Layerzero, but mutual reporting is definitely a "harmful to others and yourself" behavior.

Another studio that did not participate in Layerzero's wool-pulling also said that "mutual reporting" is undoubtedly a backward behavior, which not only "disgusts" users, but also makes the project bear a bad name.

"Mutual reporting" has not only become a game between the project party and the studio, but also a struggle between the studio and individual users. Since 90% of the airdrop tokens of each account will be returned to the airdrop pool for each successful report of an address, this also means that the airdrops shared by users will increase, and "mutual reporting" seems to be becoming a weapon for ordinary wool-pulling people to promote "wool-pulling justice".

There are rumors that an employee of a wool-pulling studio chose to resign and report an internal account; there are even rumors in the market that a "hunter" submitted a witch report of 480,000 addresses.

LayerZero co-founder Bryan Pellegrino responded on social media that anyone can write anything they want into the report, but not every report is valid.

This seems to indirectly verify the speculation that the report is "expanded".

LayerZero successfully used human nature to turn the "witch hunt" into a war between individual porn fans and studios.

Each has its own stance

Today's porn track is more like a Shura field.

The Sybil Attack phenomenon has existed since the Web1 era. It was first proposed by John R. Douceur of Microsoft Research Institute in 2002. It originated from the 1973 science fiction novel "Sybil". The anonymous property of Web3 on the chain has become an excellent breeding ground for Sybil attacks. Sybil attackers can easily create batch addresses to obtain multiple airdrop rewards. They often cash out their positions after receiving the rewards. A large number of airdrops have also had a great impact on the project.

"Anti-Sybil" has always been the main theme of justice in the wool-pulling track, which has protected the interests of the project party and most individual users to a certain extent.

The studio believes that it has contributed to the activity on the chain during the interaction.

In the words of Sister Hua: "Everyone is using real money to interact with the project."

While individual users are glad that they are not listed as witches, they also lament that Layerzero's "anti-witch" rules are strict and inhumane.

Most studios said that although this was a "Waterloo", any studio has had the experience of being counter-rolled. Real studios do not care about this small defeat, but will look at a broader market.

Some studios and professional players also said that there are personal investment risk preferences in the wool itself. Not all studios are optimistic about Layerzero, and they may not consider other wool projects in the Layerzero ecosystem in the future.

In addition, some multi-account players and studios still said that they will wait for the final fate judgment.

With the end of the airdrop snapshot, the interaction on the Layerzero chain has also begun to return to calm. Coupled with the user dissatisfaction caused by the radical "anti-witch" strategy, the data on the Layerzero chain has hit a new low in a year.

On May 19, the total number of messages on that day was only 39,000, a 94% drop from the previous high.

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