‘Big sybil hunt’ and persistent users helped make the LayerZero airdrop a success, CEO said
A combination of powerful Sybil filtering and a laser focus on prioritizing developers and “durable” users has helped LayerZero's native token survive the airdrop, said Brian Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero Labs.
Pellegrino told Cointelegraph at Korea Blockchain Week that LayerZero did a number of “very unique” things during the weather, including a “huge sibyl hunt” that prevented bots from over-farming in an attempt to get their hands on its native ZRO (ZRO) tokens. The most dedicated users of the network.
“Our goal was to reward the real users, the most committed and persistent users.”
The price of LayerZero's native token ZRO is in stark contrast to Ethereum's layer-2 network rivals Starknet (STRK) and ZKsync (ZK) tokens, which airdropped into the market in 2024.
LayerZero has worked hard to balance the scales, Pellegrino said, adding that a priority for any team running an airdrop is “closing the gap between expectations and reality.”
“We did this big Sybil hunt. When we first announced Sybil, there was a very clear negative reaction to it because people didn't expect it to happen,” he said.
But as people started to see, we were really putting in a lot of effort and our goal was to get top placement for real users, so people would be very positive about Sibyl Hunt.
Despite the price cut, the ZRO outperformed competing mainstream airdrops.
LayerZero launched its ZRO (ZRO) token to users on June 20, first hitting the market at $4.40, according to CoinGecko data.
Despite consumer complaints about the implementation of mandatory donations for climate claims — Pellegrino admitted the group “didn't put people first” — ZRO's price has fallen 23 percent since its inception.
Brian Pellegrino at Korea Blockchain Week 2024 in Seoul. Source: Cointelegraph
Launching on the market at an opening price of $5, the STRK token has dropped to 1.3 million wallet addresses on February 20.
However, the Starknet token launch project has been marred by claims that it prioritized insiders over legitimate network users and failed to introduce protections from many “airspace stewards”.
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These Erdoop hackers are said to have used metrics on the developer platform GitHub to get themselves a disproportionately large amount of STRK tokens.
Out of the 1.3 million wallet addresses eligible for the STRK airdrop, the pseudonymous Yearn.finance developer Banteg said, an estimated 701,544 addresses were controlled by rebranded GitHub accounts.
The price of Starknet's STRK token has fallen by more than 91% as the number of active addresses on the network has dropped sharply, from 380,000 active accounts on February 20 to just 8,300, according to the data. Starkscan from the Starknet browser.
The number of active accounts on Starknet has dropped by 97% since the weather. Source: Starkscan
ZKsync first downloaded the ZK token to users on June 17 at a price of $0.31, and has since declined more than 67% to a price of $0.10 at the time of publication, according to CoinGecko.
Similar to Starknet, ZKsync's airdrops have been slammed by critics for “virtually no Sybil filtering,” allowing the network to be farmed by illegal poachers.
“ZKsync airdrop is out. It's likely an on-farm and off-farm airdrop,” Mudit Gupta, chief information security officer at rival Layer-2 network Polygon, wrote in a June 11 X post.
“As far as I can see, there is no Sybil filter,” Gupta added. “Anyone who knows the criteria can easily work on it.”
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