Author: Mia, ChainCatcher
Editor: Marco, ChainCatcher
In addition to daily airdrops, Brother A's other focus during this period is to write appeal forms - more than 200 accounts and more than 100 boutique accounts in his studio have all been determined as witch accounts by LayerZero.
"In order to increase the probability of a successful appeal, 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 in accordance with LayerZero's requirements, stating that her "money-rolling" 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 hunting campaign". "I wanted to get rich by swindling money, but who knew that swindling money 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."
LayerZero's previous report showed that 800,000 addresses 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 hunting action" has raised the game between the project party and the "swindling money" party to a new stage: censorship, self-exposure, and reward for reporting. These words that run counter to the spirit of crypto freedom have aroused many controversies for a while.
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 like trash.
On May 30, LayerZero's "witch hunt" officially ended, and Sister Hua and Brother A are still waiting for the results of the trial.
The "hot cake" LayerZero
Brother A has been in the crypto circle for a long time, and 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, a large-scale airdrop studio was formed.
In his opinion, 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 a more valuable airdrop token." 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: financing team and 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 A+ round of 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 B round of 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 expected airdrops, LayerZero is a "big meal" that will be delivered to the mouths of "money-grubbing" people.
Individual money-grubbing parties and money-grubbing studios began to wait for opportunities. For a time, research reports on LayerZero were flying everywhere, and various airdrop tutorials were circulated in the community.
The interactive data of LayerZero has also exploded. Since the announcement of financing in April last year, the interaction volume on the LayerZero chain has begun to surge, and the number of transactions per day has exceeded 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 interactive behaviors to ensure that each address can complete the interactive tasks to meet the airdrop standards and isolate the accounts.
Increasing costs
In LayerZero's interactive actions, the sunk costs of "scamming" are accumulating.
Because of the high fees and opaque charges, LayerZero's cross-chain product Stargate once became the "cross-chain assassin" in the mouths of the scramblers. Since there were no detailed information in the early days, many users found that they had to spend 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 she had bought some STG tokens at a unit price of $0.9 for staking because of the need for cashing in. Since then, due to the overall market decline, the value of this part of STG has been cut in half.
When talking about the cost of cashing in this time, 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 were used for interaction to ensure that there would be no counter-cashing."
Sister Hua said that this was the first time she used multiple accounts to cash in. Because she had received good airdrop rewards for participating in the interaction with a single account before, she "spended her money" to try it this time, and the overall cost was 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 biggest "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 witch users, LayerZero also provides two ways out: one is to "expose" and report the witch 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, and then 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 even introduced a reporting mechanism. Those who successfully report will receive 10% of the tokens of the reported account.
By the end of the first round of witch self-reporting, 803,000 addresses were initially identified as potential witches, of which more than 338,000 addresses reported themselves 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, less than 40% of the 338,000 addresses chose 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 the addresses", but most of the multi-account Mao Party and studios have been "killed" in the first round of purges.
Kill and love
The game between the project party and the 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, the Mao studio is not an ordinary person.
After experiencing many major airdrops, most mature studios now have their own investment research team, technical team and interaction team, and the "money-pulling" has gradually evolved from a user loyalty behavior of "getting rewards at almost zero cost" to a professional technical team.
Facing witch censorship, the studios' 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 "money-pulling party" on "witches" and "anti-witches".
In the eyes of studios like Brother A, the "money-pulling" party has made a lot of contributions to the activity on the chain, and the "money-pulling" behavior has gradually become an important part of the activity 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.
The generation of a large amount of interactive data allows the project party to optimize and stress test the project in the early stage, while earning business income.
For the Mao party, they risk being "completely unaware of 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 this regard, He Bi, who is also a Mao party and crypto KOL of Layerzero, said, "The radical Odyssey and PUA are all so intense. Mao is over and I am out".
They ridicule themselves, and in front of Layerzero's anti-witch mechanism, they have completely become "tools" to create false prosperity on the chain.
The controversial reporting mechanism
In the increasingly competitive market, "witch hunting" has gradually become a game of human nature.
When talking about why witches were investigated, Brother A and Sister Hua unanimously pointed the finger at the "mutual reporting" mechanism.
In their view, although multiple accounts were used to swipe airdrops, considering the witch problem, risk prevention and control were also carried out on the boutique accounts, but all accounts were "annihilated" this time. In fact, the "mutual reporting" stage lasted from May 18th to 31st, which means that this was not one of the reasons.
But the reporting mechanism that tests human nature has still caused controversy in the crypto community.
Layerzero announced that community users are encouraged to report witch behavior 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 achievements of other players can be sacrificed and ignored.
He Bi said: "Human nature is evil. Every time you check the witch, you can see the darkness of human nature."
Sister Hua also said that this is a "lose-all" method. She can accept the strict rules of Layerzero, but mutual reporting must be 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 successfully reported address will be returned to the airdrop pool, this also means that the airdrops shared by users will increase, and "mutual reporting" seems to be a weapon for ordinary thieves to promote "thieves justice".
There are rumors that an employee of a thieves studio chose to resign and report internal accounts; 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 the social platform that anyone can write anything they want into the report, but not every report is valid.
This seems to indirectly verify the speculation of "expansion" of reporting.
LayerZero successfully used human nature to turn the "witch hunt" into a war between individual thieves and studios.
Each has its own position
Today's coin-making 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 and 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 rewards. A large number of airdrops have also had a great impact on the project.
"Anti-witch" has always been the main theme of justice in the coin-making 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 party."
While individual users are glad that they have not been listed as witches, they also lament that Layerzero's "anti-witch" rules are strict and anti-human.
Most studios said that although this is a "Waterloo", any studio has experienced being counter-robbed. Real studios will 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 wooling itself. Not all studios are optimistic about Layerzero, and they may not consider other wooling 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 judgment of fate.
With the end of the airdrop snapshot, Layerzero on-chain interactions have also begun to return to calm. Coupled with user dissatisfaction caused by the radical "anti-witch" strategy, Layerzero on-chain data has hit a one-year low.
On May 19, the total number of messages on that day was only 39,000, down 94% from the previous high.
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