Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
It has been several days since ZKsync (ZK) launched its airdrop, but the aftermath of the incident is still ongoing.
On the evening of June 22, Beijing time, X user k1z4 posted a rather provocative message: "Hey, ZKsync, I want to tell you that I finally completed the airdrop application and transfer of 350 wallets, and each wallet received an average of 18,871 ZK tokens. Unfortunately, I still don’t have enough money to buy a Lamborghini or a Beverly Hills villa... I was looking forward to getting more tokens, you disappoint me so much!"
According to the screenshot of holdings on the suspected Binance exchange released by k1z4, the user eventually obtained a total of 6,605,139 ZKs. Even if calculated based on the falling price of the currency at the time, the value was still as high as nearly 1.2 million US dollars.
After k1z4 showed off publicly, the news quickly spread on CT.
In the early morning of June 23, k1z4 once again posted several updates, roughly explaining his strategy as a "senior witch" to escape ZKsync witch detection.
First, k1z4 bluntly admitted that he was doing “airdrop farming”, but emphasized that the infrastructure he used to farm 350 wallets was more complex than most Layer2s today, so much so that no one, including ZKsync, could tell the difference between his robot and a real user based on the address behavior. “My robot looks more real than most real people.”
Specifically, k1z4 revealed that he used 350 IP addresses with independent caches, cookies, RPC, VPN, hosting services, and a series of AI tools, and then spent several days coding programs to allow the robot to learn how to interact like a real person based on various "airdrop strategies" commonly seen on X.
As a result, it is not only difficult to find the connection between these 350 addresses, but their interaction behaviors are also completely different. k1z4 later revealed that the airdrop amounts received by these addresses also varied, with the lowest being about 9,000 and the highest being 70,000.
However, k1z4 later mentioned that simply having technical capabilities is not enough, as such "airdrop farming" itself requires a lot of financial costs.
k1z4 revealed that in order to run these 350 robot addresses smoothly, he consumed 29.68 ETH in network gas fees alone; it cost an additional $21,000 to build the robot infrastructure, and paid 50,000 ZK each to two helpers (who helped detect the operation status of the robots); in addition, he also allocated 200 ETH of funds to allow the robot addresses to flexibly participate in the liquidity pools of major DeFi protocols on the chain.
k1z4 also mentioned that in order to ensure the normal execution of the strategy, he has invested a lot of time and energy in it. These things that cannot be priced are actually costs.
When answering the community's question "Are you doing this for researching new technologies or for money?", k1z4 showed off his values: "At first it was just for researching new technologies, but then I found it could be monetized... you already know the result."
However, although k1z4 finally received airdrop income far exceeding that of ordinary users, he was still not satisfied with this result.
When evaluating the benefits of this airdrop, k1z4 said in a final and heartbreaking way: “I am not satisfied with this number, I expect much more than this, but what can you expect from a blockchain that has raised $400 million but still cannot function properly?”
