About Layerzero's witch investigation

Recently, the well-known cross-chain project Layerzero released a news, encouraging users who think they are "witches" to "surrender" and also encouraging them to report other "witches".

This news caused an uproar in the industry.

Since a number of DeFi projects led by Uniswap launched airdrops in 2020, many projects in the crypto ecosystem have adopted the method of airdropping tokens to encourage users to participate in projects and interact in projects in order to attract seed users and establish initial communities.

The earliest DeFi projects such as Uniswap set very low airdrop standards. For example, Uniswap only needs to conduct one transaction on the platform to obtain 400 tokens.

As soon as these airdropped tokens go online, their prices will almost always be hyped up very high.

This has made many users in the crypto ecosystem see the opportunity to "earn extra money" through airdrops.

So everyone started to increase the frequency of interaction, then used multiple accounts to interact, and then later developed into a special studio to write scripts to use a large number of accounts for automated batch transactions.

People call this operation "薅羊毛"/"撸空投".

In my impression, the most exaggerated one in the past two years is the airdrop of Aptos. There are several cases on the Internet that have become rich overnight because of the wool of this project.

Such stories have further inspired the wool party to flock in.

However, are these bulk accounts participating in the transaction really loyal users of the project? Obviously most of them are not, but these users have gradually become the main beneficiaries of the project's airdrops.

This is completely contrary to the original intention of the project party, and is not conducive to the development of truly loyal users. Therefore, the subsequent project parties also began to use various means to identify "real" users and "fake" users.

These users who are considered "fake" are called "witches" by the project parties---just like the witches in the "Witch Attack" described by Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin white paper, their purpose of entering the system is not for the healthy development of the system, but for their own interests and possible damage to the system.

The identification of witches by the project parties has also evolved from the earliest identification of "witch" accounts through on-chain interactive behaviors, to later cooperation with data analysis teams in the crypto ecosystem (such as Nansen) to identify "witches", and then to today Layerzero not only uses various tools, cooperates with relevant teams, but also initiates reporting and exposing tactics.

The occurrence of such incidents in Layerzero, I think it is foreseeable from the trend.

From the perspective of the project side, as the startup cost becomes higher and higher, token airdrops will certainly become more and more cautious. The further we go, the more stringent the qualification for airdrops will be.

From the perspective of users, in the future, whether it is a full-time wool party or an ordinary retail investor, the profits obtained from the wool-pulling method will become increasingly thin, and may eventually reach a certain level where the income and input costs are very close.

Getting rich overnight from airdrops will definitely become history.

I approve of the project side catching "witches", but I am very disgusted with the way of catching "witches" by reporting and exposing.

This method exploits and amplifies the weaknesses of human nature, deliberately creates distrust between people by instigating conflicts between people, and thus creates a situation where "the snipe and the clam fight, and the fisherman benefits".

In my limited knowledge, this practice was used in some unbearable periods in human history.

But now, it has been imitated by crypto projects, and this project has been funded by many top venture capitals. This is really unbearable for this industry.

This can only show that the project team is incompetent in catching "witches" on the one hand, and has serious problems in thinking on the other hand.

For this project, I have not spent time and energy to use it, because I have always been not optimistic about such cross-blockchain main chain projects. So fortunately, I did not waste time and energy on such projects.

In the future, even if I want to cross the chain, I will most likely not use such a project.