“Optimism airdrop is for the people and not the sybils,” Optimism Foundation wrote. Accordingly, 17,000 addresses belonging to airdrop farmers have been recently disqualified from receiving the first OP airdrop. The corresponding 14 million OP tokens recovered will be distributed to the remaining recipients of the airdrop.
Optimism Foundation Filters the Sybils
Ethereum scaling solution Optimism, which says it will roll out many airdrops in the future, announced its Airdrop #1 on April 26, 2022.
This particular airdrop is aimed at rewarding users for healthy use of the Optimism ecosystem both as early adopters and active project users.
Equally, active Ethereum participants such as DAO voters, multi-sig signers, Gitcoin donors on Layer 1 (L1), and users priced out of Ethereum have been marked out for OP rewards.
From the Airdrop #1 announcement, over 250,000 addresses were initially eligible for the OP airdrop. Though a carefully thought out set of criteria and screening techniques were employed, Optimism Foundation still perceived that some airdrop farmers (sybils) had slipped through the cracks.
As a result, further screening and sybil filtering techniques were onboarded which resulted in an additional 17,000 addresses being disqualified from the airdrop.
Worthy of note is that the Optimism token (OP) is not live yet. Hence, the airdrop has not been distributed. The team warns against any token mimicking its name or ticker. However, the OP Airdrop #1 distribution date will only be announced on the project’s official Twitter account (@optimismPBC), in the next few months.
What is Airdrop Farming?
Airdrop farming is the process whereby traders deliberately game the system to win multiple airdrops from different wallet addresses. This process is also referred to as a sybil attack. It is usually embarked on by people who presume that a particular project might introduce an airdrop in the future.
In airdrop farming, sybil attackers create multiple wallets and initiate transactions using them. Also, they link these addresses to the necessary applications to carry out key on-chain operations. All of these are usually done with the hope that some, if not all of these addresses will be eligible for any corresponding airdrops.
Airdrop farming isn’t new in the crypto space. Over the years, several users have benefitted massively from several crypto projects using this tactic. It’s rather interesting to see projects like Optimism beating sybils in their game.
About Optimism
Optimism is a low-cost and lightning-fast Ethereum Layer Two (L2) blockchain. The project deals majorly with the writing of software that scales Ethereum technology thereby creating the rails for highly impactful projects with no success-guaranteed business model.
Per the project’s vision statement, Optimism pledges to uphold the values of Ethereum by producing infrastructure that promotes the growth and sustainability of public goods.
To note, Optimism had its mainnet launched in December 2021. This was closely followed by the introduction of a native governance token (OP) and the Optimism Collective.
