TechFlow reports, according to Twitter user lingland09, a professional airdrop farmer controlled 21,877 Sybil wallets on zkSync and employed a sybil strategy by funding all wallets with small amounts of ETH, then deployed a non-open-source $GEM token.
His actual operation involved creating a non-open-source DEX, enabling trades between his various wallets. He provided over 80 ETH in liquidity for the $GEM token within his own DEX contract, thereby inflating the $GEM token's value and testing trades. Then, he swapped the $GEM tokens received across the 21,877 wallets for ETH, realizing a profit of 0.6–0.7 ETH. Subsequently, he re-engaged in $GEM token trading. (All these transactions were executed via bots written by him, not manually.)
Since all liquidity was supplied by this single user, he faced no slippage and conducted 10 transactions at the lowest possible cost on the zkSync Era network. His bot replicated this algorithmic pattern across the next 21,000 wallets without any slippage, as the user dynamically adjusted liquidity as needed. By spending only 1.5 to 2 dollars worth of ETH in fees per wallet, he achieved a transaction volume equivalent to $10,000 and completed 10 transactions, carefully spread across different months, weeks, and days—solely to mimic participation patterns typical of qualifying users in other L2 projects.
