zkSync airdrop under fire for Sybil attacks and ineligibility cases

The long-awaited layer-2 blockchain zkSync airdrop checker was revealed today , with 17.5% of the token supply destined for 695,000 wallets. Despite the significant supply allocation, nearly 90% of all addresses that interacted with the blockchain got out of the reward distribution, sparking backlash from part of the crypto community on how Matter Labs fought against Sybil users.

The first controversy around the airdrop relates to the reward cap, which was 100,000 tokens. As highlighted by the user who identifies himself as Olimpio on X, 155 wallets surpassed this limit. 

Mudit Gupta, Chief Information Security Officer at Polygon Labs, said that the zkSync airdrop was probably the “most farmable and farmed airdrop ever,” as it presented “no Sybil filtering” and anyone aware of the eligibility criteria could farm it easily.

Sybil is the term used to address users who fake interactions and use multiple wallets to become eligible. Since airdrops are a way to reward early adopters who engage with an ecosystem, they are considered harmful to those campaigns.

Adam Cochran, a partner at Synthetix, also stated the zkSync airdrop was not “a well-planned airdrop from a Sybil perspective.

“Those criteria are easy to not hit as a real user, and easy to hit as a farmer, and had no anti-sybil program. Real users could easily use 1-2 dapps or only a handful of tokens on your chain when it’s so new and has so few projects. Projects really need to put more thought into this stuff if they don’t want turbo dumping mercenaries,” said Cochran.

The user identified as “Artemis the Sybil Hunter” shared that Sybil accounts are bagging over 2 million ZK tokens by depositing identical Ethereum (ETH) amounts on the same day, resulting in 15,000 tokens airdropped to each wallet. What’s more, nearly all of them are flagged on the LayerZero Labs Sybil list,” he added. Further research suggests that the token volume allocated to Sybil users could be over 12.7 million.

https://twitter.com/artemis_rsch/status/1800463892352782345

Additionally, artificial intelligence-focused research firm Kaito AI measured the crypto community sentiment on X through their upcoming feature, finding out that users are not happy about Sybil attacks concerns, ineligibility related to those attacks, and a disparity in rewards.