An Interview with Trusta Labs: The Chaos and Order of Airdrops

Original | Odaily Star Daily

Author | Azuma

LayerZero’s largest witch purge in history has officially come to an end.

Over the past month, LayerZero has captured the community’s attention with its every move, from calling on witches to reveal themselves to retain 15% of the airdrop allocation, to proactively collaborating with Chaos Labs, Nansen, and other data analysis institutions to screen, and to incentivizing hunters to actively report with a 10% reward, mobilizing the masses to fight against each other.

Especially the final reporting process, although this is not an original design of LayerZero (previously Hop Protocol and others have also had this design), as one of the most attention-grabbing potential airdrop projects in the market, the waves caused by LayerZero this time are far greater than those of its predecessors. Driven by interests, countless hunters have submitted thousands of witch reports to LayerZero, forcing Github to resort to account suspension measures to alleviate server pressure. Even after the activity migrated to Commonwealth and added a 0.5 ETH deposit requirement, the hunters still submitted over 3000 witch reports within a short three-day window.

From the results alone, it seems that LayerZero has achieved the desired results in this community-wide event - obtaining a large amount of data samples, which can be used as a basis for adjusting the airdrop rules. However, from the feedback of the community, the controversies and doubts surrounding this event have never dissipated. From the validity of the reports submitted by the hunters, to whether professional institutions will turn into hunters and hunt down projects, to whether LayerZero, as an auditing referee, can balance efficiency and fairness, and whether the final witch list will be reused by later projects, and even the far-reaching impact of this model on the airdrop paradigm, many issues in the market have not been effectively addressed.

For this, Odaily Planet Daily specifically contacted Trusta Labs, hoping to find the answers to these issues from a more professional perspective. As a Web3 re-entrepreneurship project of the former big factory anti-fraud team, Trusta Labs has quickly risen in the past year with strong data analysis capabilities and precise human insight capabilities, providing professional airdrop design services and on-chain AI data analysis services to B-end, and has personally undertaken airdrop rule design for many top projects such as Celestia, Starknet, and Manta, and provides quantified standards for on-chain value assessment through the on-chain scoring standard MEDIA Score for C-end, helping users to have a clearer understanding of their address behavior and gradually becoming one of the most attention-grabbing and topical professional institutions in the airdrop field.

LayerZero conducted a large-scale social experiment, but what were the results?

Looking back at the development history of airdrop design, it is essentially the dynamic game history between the project party and users (including witches). Since the classic airdrop of Uniswap, the projects that followed have come up with elaborate rules in the design, until now, with the high-profile approach of LayerZero, overall, the project party has been continuously increasing the strength of the crackdown on witches.

Ultimately, Trusta Labs believes that the fundamental reason is that as more and more users (including witches) enter the airdrop market, the situation of ‘many monks and little porridge’ has formed and continues to intensify, creating a mismatch between the high expectations of users and the chips that the project party can provide. Based on this trend, later project parties have to choose to increase their efforts to attack, snatch food from the witches, and then compete for more chips recognized by the project party from normal users.

For projects like LayerZero with interactive addresses reaching the level of millions, this is especially true. However, LayerZero did not choose to delegate a professional institution for airdrop design like earlier leading projects such as Arbitrum and Starknet, but instead initiated this nearly month-long large-scale social experiment “hands-on”, attempting to launch a more thorough siege against the witch.

However, in the view of Trusta Labs, there are certain problems in the planning and execution of LayerZero’s experiment, which is the fundamental reason for the significant community response.

From a planning perspective, the biggest problem is that LayerZero did not clarify the token economic model and the airdrop allocation in advance. In short, no one knows how much will be airdropped? Which addresses are eligible? The so-called self-disclosure can retain the original share of 15%, and reporting can get 10%, but no one knows how much the original share is; there are no details on how the deducted tokens will be distributed… Opacity means there is room for manipulation, which is difficult to convince the community.

As for the execution level, the effectiveness of the three major links, self-disclosure, screening, and reporting, is also questionable.

First of all, in the self-disclosure section, Trusta Labs believes that this form is actually difficult to have a significant effect because the addresses that choose to self-disclose generally cannot obtain too many shares, and the overall chip allocation is relatively small. In retrospect, the proportion of addresses that choose to self-disclose is not high. In addition, LayerZero’s original intention was to improve the screening mechanism through the logical behavior of self-disclosed addresses, but because the addresses that choose to self-disclose are relatively scattered, and witches generally appear in clusters and have the same behavioral logic, it is difficult to obtain unified logic through scattered samples.

Next is the official screening process, LayerZero has entrusted Chaos Labs and Nansen to conduct witch logic analysis. However, after the list was released, a large number of users reported that their unique addresses were marked as witches. LayerZero had to open an ‘appeal’ channel for secondary checks. Trusta Labs speculates that LayerZero may have included too many low-share addresses in the sample selection, resulting in model bias and certain logical omissions in witch identification.

The biggest problem comes from the reporting process. The original intention of LayerZero to actively mobilize the community may be to reduce workload and improve efficiency through collaborative efforts. However, in reality, LayerZero needs to individually verify over 3000 reports to filter out valid reports with logical grounds. This has become a more time-consuming and labor-intensive task. If the screening is done roughly, it is easy to cause omissions. If it is done meticulously, it requires a large amount of manpower and time cost. In fact, even LayerZero founder Bryan Pellegrino himself has expressed the hope of having more time to deal with these matters. In addition, due to the occurrence of malicious reporting, list plagiarism, address poisoning, and other behaviors in the reporting process, the dark side of human nature is fully exposed, and the community’s dissatisfaction is gradually escalating.

Odaily Note: Pellegrino lamented in a post on X, hoping to have another two months to conduct a detailed inspection.

In conclusion, LayerZero has initiated an unprecedented witch cleansing experiment in the industry. This courage and hard work are commendable, but in retrospect, there may still be many areas for improvement in the planning and execution of this experiment.

LayerZero plants trees, zkSync takes a break?

After the end of the LayerZero experiment, someone once asked, after such a month of tossing, the team spent a lot of time and effort, and the community’s energy was exhausted, who is the real winner?

In response to this issue, the answer given by Trusta Labs is somewhat unexpected - zkSync… In Trusta Labs’ view, the biggest achievement of this LayerZero experiment is the final witch list, while the subsequent projects can benefit from it, and the community’s noise will only focus on LayerZero instead.

Trusta Labs predicts that project teams with TGE plans in the coming period may choose to wait for LayerZero’s specific list and compare it with their own screening rules. For example, zkSync, another highly anticipated airdrop project, the team can completely use LayerZero’s list to achieve rigorous witch screening in a relatively gentle way, thus avoiding community backlash after triggering community emotions caused by trademark issues again.

As for whether LayerZero’s three-layer deep cleaning mode will become a new paradigm for airdrops in the future, Trusta Labs does not think so.

From the perspective of the project party, LayerZero’s case has proven that this is not a simple job, it is both time-consuming and a great test for the team’s human insight and stress resistance. Throughout the cryptocurrency industry, it is difficult to find a second founder like Pellegrino who can understand the thoughts of witches and is full of energy - Bryan, a former professional poker player, can engage in multilingual high-frequency “online debates” with the community on X or Telegram every day, and even enjoy it - so it is difficult for other projects to emulate this.

How to design a reasonable airdrop?

Looking at the Airdrop schemes of major projects in the current market, they can be roughly divided into two major schools: “radical” and “moderate”.

“Radical” representatives are obviously LayerZero, which is committed to eliminating all witches. The main reason for such projects to choose high-profile actions is not only to improve rule design, but also to create momentum for the upcoming TGE and attract more attention through more traffic-oriented gameplay. However, as mentioned earlier, such actions require high energy and resilience from the project itself, with a high level of difficulty in replication.

In addition, the rapid rise of point-based airdrop schemes represented by EigenLayer and Blast in the past year can also be considered “radical” in a sense. Projects that choose the point-based system are generally in the early stages of development, with core products yet to be launched and unable to accumulate interaction data. Therefore, they need to use simpler metrics (TVL) to please VCs or convince the market—“PoW to PoS,” using points to attract larger TVL and more market attention in advance. However, in the view of Trusta Labs, “points are tokens that can be infinitely issued,” giving project parties greater autonomy and more flexible operating space. The market has already shown a sense of aversion, and if the point system is to continue to exist in the future, it may need to develop in a more transparent direction, such as the pure on-chain points scheme promoted by the collaboration between Trusta Labs and Linea.

More projects will still choose the relatively traditional ‘middle-of-the-road’ approach, that is, they screen themselves quietly underwater and suddenly release airdrop announcements one day. For such projects, the biggest challenge mainly lies in address analysis, after all, how to reasonably select data samples and determine the behavior logic of witches is not easy.

Trusta Labs’ suggestion is that the project party should directly and efficiently delegate the professional part of the airdrop design to professional institutions. The institutions will work with the project party to complete the design of the rules based on the project party’s needs and preferences.

**If you want to design a reasonable airdrop, the project party needs to have a top-down design concept for the airdrop and adhere to basic principles such as data-driven, transparent rules, fairness, and inclusiveness.**The first step is to clarify the token economic model and the distribution ratio; the second step is to profile different user groups (developers, early users, active users, other ecosystem participants, etc.), and choose the focus direction to determine the allocation ratio of each group; the third step is the concrete witch screening work.

Trusta Labs provides a relatively clear definition of the distinction between witches and ordinary users (commonly known as ‘wool parties’). In the view of the institution, ‘witches’ generally refer to those who use studios as the main body, use scripts to batch operate a large number of accounts for on-chain interaction, and have a strong consistency in behavior trajectories in the address cluster; while the so-called ‘wool party’ (airdrop farmer) generally refers to those individuals who interact based on their own cognition and planning for the purpose of airdrops. The addresses of such users are relatively few and are generally operated manually. In terms of screening work, the focus should be on ‘witches’ rather than ‘wool parties.’

Will professional institutions do ‘rat warehouses’ or ‘hunting’?

Previously mentioned, Trusta Labs has personally taken on airdrop designs for many top projects such as Celestia, Starknet, and Manta in the past few months. In response, some users have also raised questions, such as whether professional institutions like Trusta Labs will take advantage of the situation to profit from ‘insider trading’?

And in the recent LayerZero reporting process, a report list containing 470,000 addresses caused a huge stir within the community (later the community discovered, based on third-party data from Dune, that most of the 470,000 addresses are the top 600,000 addresses interacting with LayerZero, and it is hard to imagine that it is a single entity performing batch operations). Some also suspected that the list was from Trusta Labs.

In response to such doubts, Trusta Labs’ response is: “Trusta Labs hopes to keep its business simple, transparent, and professional, and will absolutely not do anything under the table based on its own technological advantages, nor will it compete with end users for benefits. Otherwise, it will not be conducive to the long-term existence of its own business, nor will it be conducive to the fair development of the industry.”

For example, the “rat warehouse” issue may be profitable in the short term, but once exposed, it will have an irreversible impact on the institutional reputation, thus affecting the future business development; and the “bounty hunter” issue, reporting witches generally requires an explanation of the behavior logic, which may lead to the exposure of the institution’s witch algorithm, and the potential drawbacks far outweigh those small gains.

Trusta Labs also specifically mentioned the report covering 470,000 addresses in the reporting process of LayerZero: ‘Users who know a little bit about it can see that the report is simply nonsense, and we can’t write such embarrassing things…’

Airdrops are getting more and more exciting. Do ordinary users still have a chance?

Looking back at the development history of the airdrop market, with the increasing popularity of the concept of “lumaos” and the continuous entry of powerful roles such as scientists and studios, it seems that the threshold for obtaining airdrops is getting higher and higher. Many readers have feedbacked to us that the airdrops in 2024 seem to have taken a lot of money, but the overall returns are not even as good as the level of one or two “big hairs” in previous years, and the frequency of “anti-lumaos” has also increased significantly.

For ordinary users, the wealth effect of airdrops seems to be gradually dissipating. In response to this issue, Trusta Labs offers a unique suggestion based on its own experience.

In the view of Trusta Labs, “stroking the fur” is one of the best ways for users to understand the project. Users can regard it as an alternative way of researching, and if they find suitable targets that match their own cognitive aesthetics, especially those high-potential projects in niche tracks, they can use this as an aid to make investment decisions. In the experience of Trusta Labs, the institution systematically understood Celestia’s business model and ecological potential when helping with the airdrop design, and shortly after TIA went online, they heavily bought in and made substantial profits in the secondary market.