Last week, the hottest topic was undoubtedly the incident of the public airdrop verification of ZKSync. I was originally studying and writing about my experience in DApp development for TON, but after seeing this controversial event and the extensive discussions it sparked in the community, I had some thoughts and decided to write an article to share with everyone.
Overall, ZKSync’s airdrop scheme adopts a property-based distribution method that focuses more on rewarding developers, core contributors, and ZKSync’s native Degen whales. This has created a situation where the native Degen whales are laughing while the fur-laundering studios are complaining.
The focus of the community debate: Is interaction key or is the amount of funds key?
For a long time, it seems that the Web3 industry has formed a paradigm of using airdrops to attract users to use products and achieve project cold start. This is especially true in the Layer2 track, where developers and users are guided by expectations of potential airdrops, stimulating developers to actively build and maintain DApps, and encouraging users to bridge funds to target Layer2 in the early stages of development and actively participate in DApps running on target Layer2. This has become a standard practice.
Therefore, in the past, users generally expected ZKSync’s airdrop to be on par with its two direct competitors, Arbitrum and Optimism. Of course, from the perspective of industry influence, VC background, fundraising scale, etc., this conclusion is logical. However, the results were quite different, which led to a wide-ranging debate in the community.
In order to explore the reasons behind this debate and discuss some lessons for the future, it is natural to review the airdrop rules set by Arbitrum and Optimism. Let’s first review Arbitrum’s airdrop activity, which dates back to March 2023. It allocated 11.62% of the total supply of Arb to Aribitrum users and 1.13% of Arb to DAOs running in the Arbitrum ecosystem. The airdrop activity was based on snapshot data from February 6, 2023, and the specific rules for users were as follows:
– Cross-chain to Arbitrum: Users need to transfer funds to Arbitrum One or Arbitrum Nova.
– Transactions in different periods: Users have conducted transactions in two different months, six different months, or nine different months.
– Transaction frequency and interaction: Users have made more than 4, 10, 25, or 100 transactions, or interacted with the corresponding number of smart contracts.
– Transaction value: The total value of transactions conducted by users exceeds $10,000, $50,000, or $250,000.
– Providing liquidity: Users have deposited more than $10,000, $50,000, or $250,000 in liquidity.
– Arbitrum Nova activity: Users have made more than 3, 5, or 10 transactions on Arbitrum Nova.
Each rule has a specific scoring method, with a maximum score of 15, which is used to determine the amount of Arb that users can claim. The scoring method can be approximated as a linear relationship, but the starting reward is 3 points and the maximum reward is 10,200 Arb. As for the rewards for DAOs, the specific amount is determined directly based on the level of activity. From the results, a total of 137 DAOs received the airdrop, with Treasure and GMX receiving the most, 8 million Arb each, which is quite a generous reward.
Next, let’s review Optimism. Unlike Arbitrum, Optimism’s airdrop was conducted in multiple rounds, with a total distribution of 19% of the total supply. The first round of airdrop dates back to June 2022, in which 5% of the rewards were distributed to 260,000 addresses. So far, four rounds of airdrops have been conducted, and the specific rules for each round are as follows:
– Round 1: Users who had made at least 1 transaction, users who had made more than 4 transactions, participants in Ethereum DAOs, users of Ethereum multisig wallets, donors to Gitcoin, and users of cross-chain bridges were eligible for rewards. Each identity corresponds to a fixed reward, and the rewards for the latter three can be stacked.
– Round 2: Users whose total transaction gas fees exceeded $6.1 or users with a coin age of more than 2,000 who participated in delegated governance were eligible to share 11,742,277 $OP.
– Round 3: Users with a coin age of more than 18,000 who participated in delegated governance were eligible to share 19,411,313 $OP.
– Round 4: 10,343,757 $OP were allocated to creators of NFTs.
From the above review, we can see that the specific activity settings in both cases consider the number of interactions as an important reference indicator, and users who interact more frequently usually receive more rewards. However, this implicit rule seems to have been abandoned by ZKSync. In ZKSync’s airdrop design, the eligibility and distribution for ZKSync users are divided into four consecutive steps, with the following general rules:
– Eligibility screening: Each address that has conducted transactions on ZKSync Era and ZKSync Lite will be checked based on eligibility criteria. There are 7 criteria used to screen eligible users, such as interacting with non-token contracts more than 10 times and non-token contracts must have been active for at least 30 days, sending at least 5 transactions on ZKSync Era, etc.
– Distribution: When calculating the specific reward amount for an address that meets the above criteria, it is confirmed based on a value scaling formula. This formula calculates a time-weighted average based on the amount sent to ZKSync Era and the time these crypto assets have been held in the wallet, and adjusts the allocation for each address accordingly. Additionally, funds participating in DApp protocols will receive a 2x bonus. This means that if you transfer a large amount of funds to ZKSync, hold them for a long time, and actively use these funds to participate in some risky products, such as providing liquidity to DEXs, you will receive more rewards.
– Multiplier: Addresses that meet specific criteria can receive a multiplier in the distribution. These criteria usually involve holding some high-risk ZKSync-native tokens or NFTs.
– Sybil detection: Finally, ZKSync also performs Sybil attack detection to filter out most of the bots. The detection criteria are based on the first ETH source of a certain EOA address after it is created, and the interaction between the EOA address and CEX deposit addresses. This makes use of the characteristics of CEX KYC.
From the specific rules, we can see that the calculation of rewards does not involve the dimension of interaction frequency, but instead focuses on the amount of funds in individual accounts and the willingness to hold risky assets. Therefore, when the results were announced, many users who had interacted heavily on ZKSync with the expectation of receiving a large number of rewards were shocked because the fees they paid for these frequent interactions were even higher than the rewards they received. Naturally, this caused dissatisfaction among this group of users.
Furthermore, we can see a large number of airdrop hunters and KOLs in the X community. These individuals mainly focus on teaching people how to easily obtain airdrops from project teams and usually have a wide fan base and strong influence. Therefore, they put pressure on ZKSync’s official team through social media, hoping to change the situation. However, the official response seems to be firm and there have been no rule changes in response to the pressure, leading to the current situation. The accusations and defenses raised during the debate regarding potential malicious behavior are the highlights of this public relations battle.
From the results, it seems that both sides’ demands can be understood, and the right and wrong can only be discussed from different perspectives. However, there are some things worth considering, such as who are the core value users in the cold start stage of Web3 projects, or what kind of users should be incentivized in the early stages.
Heavy interaction leads to Sybil attacks, while property-based proof leads to monopoly issues.
Rewarding early participants based on airdrops has proven to be an effective means of cold starting Web3 projects. Well-designed airdrop mechanisms can help projects efficiently attract seed users in the early stages and educate users by stimulating their use of key protocol behaviors, thereby increasing product stickiness. This is why, for a long time, most Web3 projects have focused on incentivizing interaction behaviors in their airdrop settings. However, this approach has a downside, which is lowering the barrier to receiving rewards and making the activity susceptible to Sybil attacks. Because interaction behaviors are easily automated and batched, it provides ample room for professional teams to conduct bulk operations. When a large number of robot accounts flood in, although it may create a brief false prosperity for the protocol, these “users” are usually opportunistic and cannot provide motivation for the future development of the project. After receiving the rewards, most of them will cash out to increase capital turnover and enhance their own returns. This incentive mechanism dilutes the rewards for those truly valuable users, which is not worth it.
So why does this mechanism work well in the early stages? This is because at that time, there were not so many professional teams like this, and most users had not formed a habitual thinking about this incentive mechanism. The interaction behaviors were still relatively pure and belonged to real users. This allowed the rewards to be more efficiently distributed to these users, and the resulting wealth effect helped the project achieve the aforementioned benefits. However, with the influence of the money-making effect that comes with it, this approach is obviously no longer effective in attracting real users. In my personal experience, the utility of airdrop activities that focus on interaction as the main incentive had reached its peak by the time of the Arbitrum airdrop.
This is also the fundamental reason why ZKSync wanted to abandon the use of interaction numbers as the basis for identifying valuable users and instead focus on the relative scale of assets. However, this property-based proof method may also have its own problems. Although it can effectively identify and exclude the risk of Sybil attacks, it also leads to unequal distribution of wealth caused by monopolies.
We know that a core value of Web3 projects is a bottom-up distributed autonomous model. This means that the support of grassroots users (users with small amounts of funds) is the foundation of a project’s development. It is only with a sufficient number of grassroots users that large whale users can enter and form a more sustainable development form, after all, the advantage of funds is still present in most scenarios. Only when there are enough grassroots users can the profits for whale users be substantial. However, the distribution system based on property proof can lead to more obvious benefits for whale users among early bird users during the cold start, making it difficult to effectively incentivize grassroots users and form a cohesive community.
In the end, for Web3 projects, it is important to carefully consider the value user profile for their own products when designing cold start mechanisms, and design corresponding mechanisms based on the current environment to effectively incentivize these value users while avoiding Sybil attacks. Therefore, how to design one’s own cold start mechanism is a very valuable topic, and I welcome everyone to leave comments and discuss in my X. Let’s brainstorm some interesting solutions.
Tags:
Arbitrum
Optimism
WEB3
zkSync
Ethereum
Wu Shuo Blockchain Real
Source link:
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/_5y7xA8Hkp3Gmb5Wg920nA
Note: The translation is a direct translation of the original article.
