Written by: Nancy, PANews
On May 30, LayerZero’s weeks-long witch cleansing campaign officially came to an end. Although witch detection has become a routine part of airdrops for major projects, LayerZero’s fancy anti-witch campaign staged a crypto version of the “prisoner’s dilemma.”
In the story of "The Prisoner's Dilemma", two suspects were locked up in different rooms for interrogation after committing a crime. Due to the lack of sufficient evidence, the police gave several options. If both of them resisted, they would each be sentenced to 3 years due to insufficient evidence; if both of them confessed, they would each be sentenced to 5 years; if one confessed and the other resisted, the one who confessed would be sentenced to 2 years and the one who resisted would be sentenced to 7 years.
Today, the most classic case in this game theory is the true portrayal of the LayerZero airdrop event. As a highly valued head project, LayerZero naturally became the focus of many users after its launch. However, before the community could wait for the "big hair", it ushered in strict anti-sybil review.
The anti-witch movement: from self-surrender to mutual reporting
Earlier this month, LayerZero announced a 14-day self-reporting program for Sybil activities. In return, users who self-report will receive 15% of the expected distribution, but the list will not be made public. Users who are identified as Sybil users by LayerZero but do not self-report will not receive any token distribution.
In order to appease users and demonstrate fairness, LayerZero later stated that "witch self-reporting" is not aimed at individual users, but at large witches, and LayerZero employees are prohibited from participating in airdrop applications, and violators will be fired.
The self-reporting campaign has attracted the participation of many LayerZero users. In the view of many multi-account users/studios, rather than being identified by LayerZero later and gaining nothing, turning themselves in can retain some of the profits. According to data released by LayerZero Labs, more than 338,000 addresses self-reported during the witch self-reporting phase, and a total of more than 803,000 addresses were initially identified as potential 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.
But surrendering yourself is just the "appetizer" of LayerZero's anti-witch campaign, and "bounty reporting" makes this cleansing campaign even more inward-looking.
May 18 to May 31 is the bounty hunting period of LayerZero. According to the relevant submission page of LayerZero, a total of 3,550 reports were submitted.
However, this hunting activity has many twists and turns, and it has opened up a Shura field that tests human nature. According to LayerZero's witch hunting bounty activity rules, reporters need to provide at least 20 addresses that indicate witch operations. Bounty hunters who successfully report witches will receive 10% of the witch's expected token distribution, and the remaining 90% will be returned to eligible addresses. However, if the witch address originally deserves 0 tokens, then the bounty hunter will also receive 0. If the same address is reported, the bounty will be paid to the first reporter. Of course, in order to prevent users from being "accidentally killed", LayerZero allows addresses that are mistakenly reported as witches to appeal by filling out a form.
Immediately after the launch of the activity, many community reports were received. According to LayerZero CEO Bryan Pellegrino, more than 3,000 witch reports and 30,000 complaints were received within a few hours of the launch of the bounty activity. And because of a large number of spam emails that led to many GitHub accounts being banned, LayerZero had to announce a suspension of the witch hunting bounty activity two days after it was launched, and Bryan Pellegrino said that a margin mechanism would be introduced, and reporters would need to pledge 0.02 ETH to submit reports.
On May 28, LayerZero Labs announced the reopening of witch bounty report submissions and increased the deposit to 0.5 ETH. The event will end within 48 hours (8:00 am Beijing time on May 30). This means that only addresses that provide a deposit are eligible to submit reports, and the deposit will be refunded after the TGE if the report is submitted honestly or successfully. If the report contains theft of others' achievements, any form of fraud, lack of methodology, spam, etc., the deposit will not be refunded and will be destroyed. According to Ethereum browser data, LayerZero received more than 240 ETH within 2 days of the restart of the event, that is, it received about 480 reports.
Driven by economic interests, various reporting farces continue to unfold. For example, an employee of the LuMao studio chose to resign and report an internal account, a large airdrop address of a certain project was reported, and there were also users who targeted large accounts/LuMao KOLs to report witch clusters. There was even a rumor in the market that the security agency Trusta submitted 470,000 suspected witch addresses to Layerzero at one time, which the agency denied and said it would never report any addresses.
Image source: Community
However, this reporting mechanism has also led to many users being "accidentally injured". Bryan Pellegrino once responded that anyone can put anything they want in the report, but not every report is valid, and the "conclusive" standard is actually very difficult to achieve.
The "Analysis of LayerZero Witch Report" published by @vga.eth pointed out several points, among which the key points of the official analysis of witches are: 1. Clusters with tens, hundreds or thousands of addresses participating in the interaction, with obvious traces of funds, such as one-to-many transfers, many-to-one aggregation, etc.; 2. In order to increase the interaction of a chain, the cross-chain amount is 0.01 US dollars or less; 3. A large number of worthless NFTs are minted to increase the number of cross-chain interactions, and a small amount is fine; 4. Use popular witch interaction programs, such as L2 Pass, etc.; At the same time, witch hunter reports have the following points: 1. Transactions in the same cross-chain direction; 2. Addresses with consistent contract calls; 3. All contract interaction habits and sequences are consistent; usually withdrawals are made through the same centralized exchange account, with similar amounts and times; 4. The number of mainnet interactions is minimal and the EVM full-chain balance is small (less than 200 US dollars).
At present, the final list of witches has yet to be determined and is still waiting for the official review by LayerZero before being officially announced. However, according to Bryan Pellegrino’s previous statement, it is estimated that only 6.67%-13.33% of the 6 million addresses are eligible for airdrops, and he responded to the user’s latest question, “90%-95% of the reports must be valid, or even more, and of course bad reports are quickly ‘discarded’. Nothing is perfect.”
The witch hunt has come to an end, and users participating in LayerZero are waiting for a "judgment of fate."