Original title: "People who are "witch hunted" by LayerZero: We are "tools" to create false prosperity on the chain"
Original author: Mia, ChainCatcher
In addition to his daily airdrops, Brother A’s other work focus during this period is to write appeal forms - more than 200 accounts and more than 100 premium accounts in his studio have all been identified as witch accounts by LayerZero.
“In order to increase the probability of a successful appeal, the team used chatgpt to write the appeal, 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 as required by LayerZero, stating that her "毛毛" account was personal, not the studio's witch account.
Prior to this, 20 accounts that Hua Jie had worked hard on for half a year were identified as witch accounts by the project team, and became the target of the LayerZero's massive "witch hunt".
"I wanted to get rich by picking up fur, but it ended up in poverty." Sister Hua said to ChainCatcher with a wry smile.
As for whether it is useful, Brother A and Sister Hua both said that they just try their best and leave it to fate. "There are too many accounts that have filed complaints, and the project team can't read them all."
A previous report released by LayerZero showed that there are 800,000 addresses that are potential Sybil accounts. Although the final list has not yet been announced, the number is expected to be considerable.
This "witch hunt" has brought the game between the project owners and the "money-pulling" owners to a new stage: censorship, self-exposure, and rewards for reporting. These words, which run counter to the spirit of crypto freedom, have aroused a lot of controversy.
The "fleecing" players 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 and helping the project improve data and test performance, they were abandoned.
On May 30, LayerZero’s “witch hunt” officially came to an end, while Hua Jie and A Ge are still awaiting the outcome of the trial.
"Hot cake" LayerZero
Brother A has been in the crypto circle for quite a while, and when the mining business encountered suppression, he switched to the airdrop track.
The original investment research and technical team during the operation of the mine, plus the connections accumulated in the circle, formed an airdrop studio of initial scale.
In his opinion, every large-scale short-drop behavior is a long-term value investment, and researching the financing team behind the project has also become a focus. The team focuses its 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 more valuable airdrop tokens,” Brother A introduced.
In the early days of the studio, we also got some good airdrop projects such as ARB, Aptos, Sui, Wormhole, etc., which was considered a good return under the overall bleak market conditions.
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 Series A+ financing round 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 US$120 million Series B financing, with its valuation rising to US$3 billion. This time, the investment institution also introduced traditional capital.
When the financing was completed, LayerZero announced that it would consider "governance token airdrop".
With such abundant funding and expected airdrops, LayerZero is a feast that will be delivered to the mouths of those who are looking to make money.
Individuals and studios started to wait for opportunities to take action. For a while, research articles about LayerZero were everywhere, and various airdrop tutorials were circulated in the community.
LayerZero interaction data has also seen an explosive increase. Since the announcement of financing in April last year, the volume of LayerZero on-chain interactions has begun to surge, with the number of transactions per day exceeding 200,000. The number of transactions on the official cross-chain product Stargate has also begun to increase 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 Lumao wallets, plus 100 premium accounts. A Lumao 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.
Rising costs
In LayerZero’s interactive actions, the sunk costs of “pulling hair” are accumulating.
Because of its high fees and opaque charges, LayerZero's cross-chain product Stargate once became a "cross-chain assassin" in the mouths of the Mao Party. Since there were no detailed information in the early days, many users only found out that they had to pay a huge fee when paying the GAS fee, and the fees for each currency were not uniform.
Brother A said that for the LayerZero airdrop he had no choice but to endure Stargate’s high cross-chain fees.
Sister Hua also hates this. She said that in order to make money, she once bought some STG tokens at a unit price of US$0.9 for staking. However, due to the overall market decline, the value of this part of STG was halved.
When talking about the cost of this airdrop, Brother A said that the cost of each account of LayerZero is more than 200U, and the investment goal is to get about 1000U airdrop on a single account. "To be on the safe side, 100 premium accounts were used for interaction to ensure that there would be no reverse airdrop."
Sister Hua said that this was her first time to use multiple accounts to collect money. She had received good airdrop rewards by participating in the interaction with a single account before, so she "spended a lot of money" to give it a try, and the overall cost was about 3000U.
But when the potential witch address was announced, Brother A and Sister Hua were dumbfounded. Brother A's studio account and 100 high-quality accounts were completely destroyed.
None of Hua Jie’s 20 accounts were spared. Hua Jie joked, “I wanted to get rich by playing with fur, but who knew it would lead to loss.”
The largest anti-witch operation in history
Let their accounts be wiped out, witch hunt from LayerZero.
On May 2, LayerZero officially announced that the first snapshot had been completed and stated that the actual total number of users was approximately 5.8 million.
The next day, LayerZero announced that it would distribute tokens to persistent users (rather than Sybil users) out of "continued trust in community members." LayerZero also provides two options for Sybil users: one is to "self-expose" and report the Sybil address by yourself, thereby retaining 15% of the airdrop allocation; the other is to wait for the project's internal screening, after which 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.
As of 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 self-reported 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, only less than 40% of the addresses chose to "surrender".
The purge continues. During the next two weeks of “bounty hunting,” LayerZero received a total of 3,550 “witch hunt” 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 Zedongs and studios have been "killed" in the first round of cleansing.
Killing and loving each other
The game between the project owners and the profiteers has been evolving.
Hop Protocol pioneered this "encirclement and suppression" plan, targeting studios, focusing on screening those suspected of manipulating multiple accounts for batch interactions; using commonly used "witch volume-boosting" applications such as Merkly, L2 Pass, and L2 Marathon; and conducting cross-chain interactions with very small amounts of money.
With all the "self-exposure", "screening" and "reporting", witch screening seems to have become a scene of "encirclement and suppression", and the studio has become a lamb to be slaughtered.
However, LuMao Studio is no ordinary company.
After experiencing several major airdrops, most mature studios now have their own investment research team, technical team and interaction team. LuMao has also gradually evolved from a user loyalty behavior of "getting rewards at almost 0 cost" to a professional technical team.
In the face of Sybil censorship, studios have a wide range of anti-sybil censorship methods, from random interaction scripts, decentralized and independent IP addresses, to stricter account isolation.
There is always a game relationship between the project owner and the Mao Mao Party on "witches" and "anti-witches".
In the eyes of studios like Brother A, the money-grabbing party has made a lot of contributions to the on-chain activity, and money-grabbing behavior has gradually become an important part of the on-chain activity data.
Just as Layerzero previously announced its airdrop expectations, many project parties will release news about airdrops and launch Odyssey missions in the early stages of the project to encourage users to interact with the studio on the chain, thereby creating a "false prosperity" on the chain.
The generation of a large amount of interactive data allows project parties to optimize and stress-test projects in the early stages while earning business revenue.
For the freeloaders, they take the risk of being "completely unaware of the airdrop rules" and provide free testing and on-chain contributions to the project parties. In Hua Jie's words, "the project parties get a lot of fees, but they themselves get nothing."
In this regard, He Bi, a Layerzero fan and crypto KOL, said, "The radical odyssey and pua are all so intense. The fandom is over and I'm out."
They self-deprecatingly said that in the face of Layerzero’s anti-witch mechanism, they have completely become “tools” to create false prosperity on the chain.
Controversial reporting mechanism
In the increasingly competitive hair-pulling market, "witch hunt" has gradually become a game of human nature.
When talking about why they were investigated for witches, Brother A and Sister Hua both pointed the finger at the "mutual reporting" mechanism.
In their opinion, although they used multiple accounts to receive airdrops, they took the witch problem into consideration and also carried out risk control on premium accounts. However, this time all the accounts were "annihilated."
In fact, the "mutual reporting" phase lasted from May 18th to 31st, which means this was not one of the reasons.
However, the reporting mechanism, which tests human nature, has still caused controversy in the crypto community.
Layerzero announced that it encourages community users to report witches to each other, and successful reporters can receive 10% of the airdrop share allocation of the reported address.
This undoubtedly plays with the darkness of human nature to the extreme. In order to obtain the 10% airdrop reward, the results of other freeloaders can be sacrificed and ignored.
He Bi said: "Human nature is evil. Every time we investigate witches, we can see the darkness of human nature."
Sister Hua also said that this is a "lose-for-all" approach. She can accept that Layerzero's rules are strict, but reporting on each other is definitely an act of "harming others and oneself."
Another studio that did not participate in the Layerzero project also said that "mutual reporting" is undoubtedly a retrograde behavior, which not only "disgusts" users, but also brings a bad name to the project.
"Mutual reporting" has not only become a game between the project and the studio, but also a struggle between the studio and individual users. Since 90% of the airdrop tokens of each account will be returned to the airdrop pool for each successful report, this also means that the airdrops received by users will increase, and "mutual reporting" seems to be a weapon for ordinary leechers to promote "leecher justice".
There are rumors that an employee of a certain LuMao studio chose to resign and report an internal account; there are even rumors in the market that a certain "hunter" submitted a witch report on 480,000 addresses.
LayerZero co-founder Bryan Pellegrino responded on social media that anyone can write anything they want into a report, but not every report is valid.
This seems to indirectly verify the speculation that the report was "exaggerated".
LayerZero successfully exploited human nature and turned the "witch hunt" into a war between individual porn stars and studios.
Each has its own position
Today's wool-pulling 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 in 2002 and originated from the 1973 science fiction novel "Sybil". The on-chain anonymity of Web3 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 after receiving the rewards. A large number of airdrop sales have also had a great impact on the project.
"Anti-witch" has always been the main theme of justice in the field of money-making, and to a certain extent has protected the interests of project parties and the vast majority of individual users.
The studio believes that it contributed to the on-chain activity during the interaction.
In the words of Sister Hua: "Everyone is using real money to interact with the project."
While individual users are thankful that they have not been listed as witches, they also lament that Layerzero's "anti-witch" rules are strict and inhumane.
Most studios said that although this was a "Waterloo", every studio has experienced being defeated. A real studio would not care about this small defeat, but would look at a broader market.
Some studios and professional players also said that there are personal investment risk preferences in hair salons, and not all studios are optimistic about Layerzero, and they may not consider other hair salon projects in the Layerzero ecosystem in the future.
In addition, some multi-account players and studios still stated that they will wait for the final judgment of their fate.
With the end of the airdrop snapshot, Layerzero on-chain interactions have begun to return to calm. Coupled with user dissatisfaction caused by the radical "anti-witch" strategy, Layerzero on-chain data has now hit a one-year low.
On May 19, the total number of messages was only 39,000, a 94% drop from the previous high.
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