LayerZero warns sybil airdrop farmers to self-report or ‘receive nothing’

LayerZero has instructed sybil airdrop farmers to self-report by handing over their addresses to the team or risk receiving nothing from its planned token airdrop.

Airdrop hunters who self-report their sybil activity by May 17 will suffer an 85% haircut on their token allocation and be allowed to claim the rest of their tokens, the project said in an X post on Friday.

“We are giving all sybil users an opportunity to self-report within the next 14 days in return for 15% of their intended allocation, no questions asked,” LayerZero said.

LayerZero also published a blog post detailing the sybil filtering methods it used to detect mercenary airdrop farming activity.

Some of the filtering parameters include minting so-called valueless NFTS and spamming low-value transactions across multiple blockchains to register activity.

Sybil activity is a major problem for crypto projects, especially when an airdrop is expected. Mercenary users adopt sybil tactics that include a cluster of several addresses to drum up activity on target protocols or blockchains to secure a greater share of the airdrop.

As such, the user activity seen by project teams before announcing their airdrop often declines once the token distribution happens.

Projects such as Solana-based real estate trading marketplace Parcl lost 67% of its investor deposits after its airdrop last month. A similar decline happened with the Starknet blockchain after its airdrop in February.

The decline occurs because mercenary farmers move their funds to projects that have yet to distribute their tokens.

User activity on LayerZero has fallen by more than 50% since the DeFi protocol announced its highly anticipated airdrop snapshot.

LayerZero’s daily activity was around 300,000 cross-chain transactions on April 30, the day before it announced the airdrop. That figure is now at about 150,000, data from the protocol’s onchain explorer shows.

LayerZero, a protocol that enables connections between otherwise incompatible blockchains, announced the first snapshot for its airdrop and said it would provide more information about the token distribution later.

A snapshot shows the state of a blockchain at a particular time and can be used as a cut-off point to determine eligible recipients for an airdrop.

Recently, crypto projects have begun to adopt a process of airdropping tokens in multiple distribution rounds to discourage the mass exit of users post-airdrop. Protocols such as decentralised exchange Jupiter and Ethereum restaking platform EigenLayer have chosen to airdrop tokens in more than one round.

LayerZero might join this new wave as the team behind the protocol said the May 1 snapshot was the first for the airdrop. That has led to speculation that there will be other snapshots in the future.

Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. To share tips or information about stories, please contact him at osato@dlnews.com.