ZKSync airdrop sparks controversy: a look at the dilemma of cold start for Web3 projects

author:@Web3Mario

Summary:The hottest topic last week was definitely the ZKsync public airdrop verification event. I was originally studying and writing some articles about TON.DAppHowever, seeing this controversial event and theCommunityAfter extensive discussions, I have some thoughts, so I wrote an article and hope to share them with you.

In general, ZKSync's airdrop plan adopts a distribution method based on property proof, focusing more on rewards for developers, core contributors and ZKSync's native Degen whales. This has created a situation where the native Degen whales are laughing and LuMao Studio is shouting.

CommunityThe focus of the debate: Is interaction the key or is the amount of funds the key?

For a long time, the Web3 industry seems to have formed a paradigm of attracting users to use products through Airdrops, thereby achieving a cold start for projects. This is even more true in the Layer2 track, by guiding developers and users to expect potential airdrops, stimulating developers to actively build and maintainDAppAt the same time, it stimulates users to bridge funds to the target Layer2 in the early stages of development and actively participate in the DApps running on the target Layer2, thereby achieving the purpose of activating the ecology. This has become a standard.

因此在过去，用户普遍对于ZKSync的空投预期是对标它的两个直接竞品，Arbitrum和Optimism。当然无论从行业影响力，VC背景，募资规模等角度来思考，这个结论都是合乎逻辑的，然而结果却大相径庭，这就导致了很多复用过去经验来参与ZKSync的用户似乎并没有得到期望内的奖励数量，从而导致了社区陷入到了广泛的争论中。

In order to explore the reasons behind this debate and explore some references for the future, it is natural to review the previous airdrop rules of Arbitrum and Optimism. First, let’s review Arbitrum’s airdrop activity, which dates back to March 2023. It allocated Arb airdrops accounting for 11.62% of the total supply to Aribitrum users, and also allocated Arbitrum airdrops to the Arbitrum ecosystem.DAOArb airdrop of 1.13% was allocated. The airdrop activity is set based on the snapshot data on February 6, 2023. The specific rules for users are as follows:

l Cross-chain to Arbitrum: Users need to transfer funds to Arbitrum One or Arbitrum Nova.

l Transactions in different time periods: The user has made transactions in two different months, six different months, or nine different months.

l Trading frequency and interaction: The user has made more than 4, 10, 25 or 100 transactions, or interacted with a corresponding number of smartcontractInteracted.

l Transaction Value: The total value of transactions conducted by the user exceeds US$10,000, US$50,000 or US$250,000.

l Providing liquidity: Users have deposited more than $10,000, $50,000, or $250,000 in liquid funds.

l Arbitrum Nova activity: The user has made more than 3, 5, or 10 transactions on Arbitrum Nova.

Each rule will have a specific score calculation method, with a maximum score of 15 points. This score is used to determine the number of Arb that the user can receive. The calculation method can be approximated as a linear relationship, but the starting reward starts at 3 points and the maximum reward is 10,200 Arb.DAO的奖励，则直接按照活跃度评估的方式来确定具体金额，从结果上看最终137个DAO获得了空投，其中Treasure和GMX获得的最多，分别为800万个Arb，按照当前的实质，这实在是一笔丰厚的收益。

Next, let’s review Optimism. Unlike Arbitrum, Optimism’s airdrops are divided into multiple rounds, with a total of 19% distributed as rewards. The first round of airdrops dates back to June 2022, with a total of 5% distributed to 260,000 addresses. So far, four rounds of airdrops have been carried out. The specific rules for each round of airdrops are as follows:

l Round 1: Ordinary users and active users were divided by the number of transactions, corresponding to addresses with 1 transaction and addresses with more than 4 transactions, as well as participants in Ethereum DAO and Ethereum multi-signaturewalletUsers, Gitcoin donors and cross-chain bridge users. Each identity corresponds to a fixed value reward, and the latter three rewards can be superimposed.

l Second round: Users whose total transaction gas fee is greater than 6.1 USD or whose coin age for participating in the delegated governance is more than 2000 can share 11,742,277 $OP;

l Round 3: Users who participate in the delegated governance and whose coin age exceeds 18,000 can share 19,411,313 $OP;

l Round 4: 10,343,757 $OP were allocated to NFT creators;

From the above review, we can easily find that the number of interactions is used as an important reference indicator in the specific activity settings. Users with more frequent interactions usually receive more rewards. However, this unspoken rule seems to have been abandoned by ZKSync. In the airdrop design of ZKSync, the qualifications and allocation of ZKsync users are divided into four consecutive steps to select and calculate. The specific rules are as follows:

l Eligibility screening:Each address that has conducted transactions on ZKsync Era and ZKsync Lite will be checked according to the eligibility criteria. It sets 7 criteria to screen eligible users, such asTokencontractMore than 10 interactions and nonTokencontract必须至少有30天活跃时间，在ZKsync Era至少发送5笔交易等。

l distribute:The specific amount of rewards for an address that meets the above criteria is calculated based on a value scaling formula that is based on the amount sent to ZKsync Era and the amount of these crypto assets inwalletA time-weighted average is calculated based on the retention time, and the allocation of each address is adjusted accordingly. At the same time, the funds participating in the DApp protocol will receive a 2x bonus, which means that if you transfer large funds to ZKSync, keep them for a long time, and actively use these funds to participate in some risky products, such as providing liquidity to DEX, you will get more rewards.

l multiplier:Addresses that meet certain criteria can receive multipliers in the distribution. These criteria are usually holding some high-risk ZKSync native altcoin or NFT.

l Sybil Detection:Finally ZKSync will also doWitchAttack detection ensures that most robots are filtered out. The detection criteria are based on two aspects: the source of the first ETH after the creation of an EOA address, and the interaction between the EOA address and the CEX deposit address. In fact, this also takes advantage of the characteristics of CEX KYC.

From the specific rules, it is not difficult to find that the number of interactions is not involved in the calculation of rewards, but the focus is on the amount of funds in a single account and the willingness to allocate risky assets. Therefore, when the results were announced, many people or studios who had interacted a lot on ZKSync based on past experience were surprised, which was also the source of the entire controversy. Because in order to increase the number of addresses that receive potential airdrops, these users usually choose to disperse large funds into address groups as much as possible. These address groups are usually hundreds or even thousands of addresses, and use small funds to participate in a certain agreement. By predicting some possible incentive behaviors, they frequently interact through automated scripts or manual methods to increase potential returns by completing tasks. However, the airdrop setting of ZKSync makes this strategy invalid. The handling fees paid by many frequently interacting addresses are even higher than the rewards they receive, which naturally caused dissatisfaction among this group of people.

Moreover, it is not difficult to find a large number of airdrop hunter KOLs in X. This group of people publish content with the theme of teaching people how to easily obtain airdrops from project parties. They usually have a wide fan base and strong appeal. Therefore, they put pressure on ZKSync officials through social media in the hope of changing this situation. However, judging from the official attitude, it seems to be very tough and did not modify the rules due to pressure, so the current situation has come about. The accusations and justifications of some possible evil behaviors triggered during the debate are the highlights of this public opinion war.

Judging from the results, the demands of both sides seem to be understandable. The right and wrong can only be determined from what perspective. But I think there are some things worth thinking about, that is, who are the core value users of the cold start phase of the Web3 project today, or what kind of users are the users who should be incentivized in the cold start phase.

Heavy interaction bringsWitchAttack problem, property proof brings monopoly problem

Airdrop rewards for early bird participants have been proven to be an effective means of cold starting Web3 projects. A good airdrop mechanism can help projects attract seed users efficiently in the early stages, and at the same time, complete user education by stimulating users to use key behaviors of the protocol, thereby increasing product stickiness. This is also the fundamental reason why most Web3 projects’ airdrop settings have focused on incentivizing interactive behaviors for a long time. However, this has brought a disadvantage, which is that it lowers the threshold for obtaining rewards, making it easy for activities to encounterWitchAttack. Because interactive behaviors are easy to be automated and batched, this gives a lot of room for professional teams to operate in batches. When a large number of robot accounts pour in, the protocol will experience a short-term false prosperity. However, these "users" are usually sparsely populated and cannot provide motivation for the future development of the project. After receiving the rewards, most of them will cash out to increase capital turnover and thus increase profits. This incentive mechanism dilutes the amount of rewards for the project's truly valuable users, which is really not worth the loss.

So why did this mechanism work well in the early days? This is naturally because there were not so many similar professional teams at that time, and most users had not yet formed a mindset for this incentive mechanism. The interactive behavior was still relatively pure and belonged to real users, which allowed the incentives to be distributed to these users more efficiently. The resulting wealth effect also helped the project party achieve the above benefits. However, with this camemake moneyThe effect of the airdrop effect has obviously failed to effectively attract real users. My personal experience is that the effectiveness of airdrop activities with interaction as the main incentive has basically reached its peak when Arbitrum airdropped.

This is also the fundamental reason why ZKSync wants to abandon the use of interaction numbers as the basis for identifying valuable users based on the relative size of assets. However, this method of proving property may not be without problems. Although it can effectively identify and eliminate the risk of witch attacks, the new problem that comes with it is the uneven distribution of wealth caused by monopoly.

We know that one of the core values of the Web3 project is the bottom-up distributed autonomy model.Xiaobai NavigationThis means that the support of grassroots users (real users with small amounts of funds) is the basic foundation for the development of a project. It is precisely because of grassroots users that some whale users may flock in and form a more sustainable development model. After all, the financial advantage is still available in most scenarios. Only when there are enough grassroots users can the benefits of whale users be large enough. Then the distribution system of property certificates will result in that at the beginning of the cold start, the benefits of whale users among its early bird users will be relatively obvious, which makes it difficult to form effective incentives for grassroots users, and naturally it is impossible to form a cohesive community.

In the final analysis, for Web3 projects, when designing a cold start mechanism, it is still necessary to carefully consider the valuable user portraits for their products, and design corresponding mechanisms according to the current environment. Effectively motivating the above valuable users while trying to avoid witch attacks is the top priority. Therefore, how to design your own cold start mechanism is a very valuable topic, and everyone is welcome to leave a message in my X to discuss. Brainstorm some interesting solutions together.

The article comes from the Internet:ZKSync airdrop sparks controversy: a look at the dilemma of cold start for Web3 projects

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