When distributing airdrops, projects are prioritising real users now more than ever.
Here’s why they are doing this:
Sybil farms only have one goal in mind:
Get the airdrop, dump it and move to the next one.
Projects know how mercenary capital can be, so they would not want to award tokens to wallets who would dump the tokens immediately.
Instead, they prefer to distribute tokens to true members of the community.
Ones that provided value to the project and are likely to contribute to the project long term.
The advent of Sybil farms has made it increasingly harder to differentiate real users from bots.
So projects have to use creative ways to define a real user.
Some projects use KYC methods (which I find ridiculous), while others use this metric:
Your wallet’s onchain footprint.
(Also known as onchain history/onchain reputation).
ZKsync’s blog post for the ZK token distribution shared some insights on how they awarded the allocation to wallets:
https://blog.zknation.io/zk-token/
The ZK airdrop focuses on identifying real users using a human-first approach. A wallet’s onchain history reveals a lot about its owner habits. Real people tend to be risk-on, especially the ones that feel like a part of a community. They spend time onchain, ape in, transact, try new protocols, and hold speculative assets. Bots and opportunists are the opposite. Bots take fewer risks with minimal effort while trying to blend into the community and extract value from it.
ZKsync awarded a generous airdrop to wallets that they deemed as real users.
(Whether the criteria they used was fair or not is a different topic altogether)
And here’s what your wallet’s onchain footprint really means: