Reflections on the ZK Airdrop Controversy: The Golden Era of Mindless Farming to Get Rich is Over
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Reflections on the ZK Airdrop Controversy: The Golden Era of Mindless Farming to Get Rich is Over
The era of mindlessly profiting from easy gains is over; the time to get rich through strategic advantage is now.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: gm365
🪂 ZK's Airdrop Marks the End of an Era
One wave hasn't settled before another rises.
Just as the L0 CEO—creator of the "largest witch database in history"—remains trapped in battling bot clusters, the "biggest anti-farming event ever" has arrived: ZK was born.
Widespread despair followed, bordering on public outrage.
Why?
That which you expect the most from often hurts you the deepest. This holds true not only in emotions but also in Web3. zkSync, once hailed as the last hope among L2s, made us wait four long years—only to deliver a cold and heartless message: "Unfortunately, YOU are not eligible for the airdrop."
🍄 "Anti-Bot" Without Bot Detection
With 10 million addresses and 400 million transactions, how do you filter “real users” while claiming a so-called “original intention” of “for the public good, no bot checking”?
zkSync chose cold, rigorous mathematical rules to help.
The process can be broken down into three main steps: preliminary screening, allocation, and bonus weighting.
The seven criteria for entering the initial scoring pool were actually quite lenient—such as 10 transactions, depositing into DeFi protocols, holding a Magic Lamp, or donating to Lite. Most users who genuinely interacted with the ecosystem would likely qualify.
The real bottleneck—and where most users got filtered out—is the allocation phase. Unlike industry-standard metrics like monthly active wallets, transaction volume, or number of txs, zkSync used a mechanism similar to DeFi deposits: “fund retention.”
Requiring fund retention is normal for staking platforms like EtherFi, but applying such logic to filter users on an L2 feels “unacceptable,” even “heretical,” to most people.
As for the “bonus” stage, it’s merely icing on the cake—offering extra rewards to OGs, premium accounts, and deeply engaged users.
But few care about this anymore—when there’s no rice in the bowl, who bothers asking for chicken?
So here lies the core issue: an L2 that carried everyone’s highest hopes applied DeFi-style fund-retention rules, filtering out over 90% of user addresses and triggering the largest anti-farming disaster in history.
In comparison, issues like the huge disparity between top and bottom allocations, lack of transparency in distribution rules, or why NanSen wasn’t allowed to detect bots—all become secondary.
After all, when the peasants haven’t eaten, they naturally grow furious at the landlord feasting on fish and meat.
🍄 Post-Mortem of the Anti-Airdrop
Never mind the wasted time and effort over years—the gas cost alone from farming makes the loss hard to swallow, which is why some are demanding ZK refund their gas fees.
Emotional venting may bring temporary relief and solidarity, but it won’t help you move forward or keep earning in this space. Analyzing root causes, identifying blind spots, and adjusting strategies—that’s the right path.
Why did a project team that loudly proclaimed “community is everything” choose an anti-bot method that angered 90% of its users? There’s no need to overthink it. Put yourself in their shoes and re-examine the specific allocation rules mentioned earlier. You’ll realize they used just one mathematical formula to exclude both industrialized bot farms and ordinary low-tier farmers alike.
Why use fund retention and double weightings for DeFi deposits/LP positions to combat farming?
Two reasons:
1. For an L2, TVL is lifeblood
2. The team deeply understands (or rather, anticipates) how average users guess airmop rules—often incorrectly
During previous airdrops like ARB and STARK, influencers pointed out how easily exploitable they were because the rules were too predictable—just follow a few standard patterns.
Everyone thought the same way. KOLs taught the same playbook. People obediently followed, aided by third-party tools that tracked scores and rankings with pseudo-scientific seriousness.
This collective momentum lulled everyone into complacency, like frogs slowly boiled alive. They assumed little Monkey King ZK couldn’t possibly escape the palm of Buddha—that capturing its airdrop was a sure thing.
But surprise—they didn’t play by the rules. One simple rule based on fund retention knocked out every rule-abiding honest farmer.
Some say ZK’s airdrop rules filtered out low-end bot operations and average retail farmers, instead rewarding elite users and high-end bot farms (well-funded, high-quality bot addresses).
This observation hits the mark—in practice, it’s exactly what happened.
Take the L0 bot cluster, for example: thousands of addresses receiving 0.6 ETH on the same day, ultimately bagging millions in ZK tokens. A textbook case of a high-end bot operation.
In short, missing out on ZK stemmed from a severe misjudgment of the airdrop rules (born of overconfidence), compounded by the harsh reality that while everyone wanted multi-account setups, few had the capital to back them up.
🍄 Current State of Industrialized Farming
Judged by ARB or even STARK’s airdrop standards, the 90% of users filtered out by ZK would mostly qualify—even classified as “premium accounts”—and walk away with solid rewards.
So why didn’t it work with ZK?
Simple: times have changed. At the heart of it:
Industrialized farming has become too prosperous.
The maturity of the EVM ecosystem combined with AI tools like GPT-4 has drastically lowered the barrier to mass account creation and interaction, leading to severe inflation in account numbers and transaction counts.
This is the natural progression of the era—unstoppable by individual will.
It mirrors early industrial revolution scenes where skilled female weavers were replaced by mechanical looms. Craftsmen’s livelihood skills became worthless in the face of mechanized production. Low efficiency, high cost, error-prone—no match for tireless, emotionless machines.
Then and now—same story.
The age of industrialized farming is here. Simply running multiple accounts is no longer an advantage—it’s instantly matched, surpassed, and left behind by interaction scripts generated via GPT-4.
But this isn’t news only to you and me—project teams know it, VCs know it, exchanges know it too.
Address count and transaction volume are inflated—we all tacitly understand that, though opinions may differ on the degree of inflation.
But TVL is harder to fake—you need real money stacked up.
Hence, clever projects picked this hardest-to-fake metric as the core criterion for airdrop distribution.
This bears a striking resemblance to the male peacock’s extravagant tail.
A peacock’s tail is highly conspicuous, brings daily inconvenience, and even poses survival risks. Why would nature evolve such a “useless and dangerous” burden?
Because it’s precisely the hardest signal to fake—the ultimate “gold standard” that convinces female peacocks to mate. Any signal easy to counterfeit isn’t worth trusting.
Likewise, with enough setup, you can program your bot cluster to achieve perfect DAU, WAU, MAU stats, sky-high tx counts, massive trading volumes. Your soulless farming bots will dutifully interact until the end of time.
But maintaining hundreds of dollars in fund retention across each account? That’s something no script or GPT can solve for you.
Once again, money flows back into the hands of those who already have plenty. Even Web3 ends up just as unfair as Web2. Damn it.
🍄 Where Do We Go From Here?
With gas fees nearly negligible and industrialized bot farming rampant, where does the farming community go? Will Web3 still reward us brave pioneers of the digital gold rush?
One thing is certain:
▪️ Web3 is still early
▪️ Well-funded projects will continue to emerge
▪️ Airdrops are here to stay
▪️ Earning opportunities in Web3 still far exceed traditional Web2
What’s different now:
▪️ Times have changed
▪️ Rules keep evolving
▪️ Overly mature ecosystems mean fierce competition, making them marginal choices for ordinary users
Trust in the direction of the times. Right now, for ordinary people like you and me, our best shot at changing fate isn’t elsewhere—it’s right here, in Web3.
In terms of ROI and earning probability, airdrops remain the most accessible path for regular users to earn their first significant gains. Unfortunately, due to rapid industry changes and AI acceleration, the difficulty has sharply increased.
If in the past, blindly following KOL tutorials guaranteed success, moving forward will require much greater wisdom:
Choosing ecosystems, selecting projects, deciding interaction methods, balancing capital versus quantity, maximizing output.
The era of mindless farming for riches is over. The era of intelligent farming for wealth is now.
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@gm365
