Author: Biteye
In the past, airdrops in the cryptocurrency world were an exciting "get-rich-quick myth." In the era of Uniswap, ENS, and Arbitrum, early users and project teams mutually benefited each other, and evangelists and builders shared the dividends, forming a short but real "golden honeymoon."
However, turning the clock back to 2023-2026, the entry of massive amounts of capital, the extreme infighting of professional studios, and the unlimited expansion of project teams have completely distorted the nature of the airdrop track.
"Interactive rewards" has turned into a "cyber harvesting field," and the initial benefits of exploiting users have become a systemic form of reverse exploitation.
Retail investors have been redefined: free testers, low-cost liquidity providers, and a constant stream of data producers.
In an environment where rules are opaque for a long time and expectations are repeatedly rewritten, what is often rewarded in the end is being wiped out, diluted, or even eliminated directly.
In this article, we review 12 landmark "anti-freeze" projects in the history of airdrops, and analyze how trust was gradually eroded.
1. Hop Protocol (HOP): Ushering in the "Witch" era.
● Anti-fraud process : HOP, a star cross-chain bridge platform, pioneered the chilling "Sybil" mechanism. The rules are extremely enticing: the whistleblower can take a share of the reported address. It's as if Shang Yang, who practiced collective punishment thousands of years ago, has traveled to Web3.
● Characteristics of anti-fraud: Mutual harm among the masses at the grassroots level. Project teams have delegated the dirty work of verifying the association of on-chain addresses to users, exploiting human greed to incite infighting within the community, and even directly uploading the list of whistleblowers to GitHub for the entire industry to "reuse".
● Profound Impact: After HOP, investigating Sybil became "politically correct" for all token issuance projects, and on-chain interaction transformed from "experiencing decentralized products" into an extremely fraught cat-and-mouse game of internal conflict. While combating Sybil is necessary, shifting the responsibility of oversight entirely to the community, or even encouraging mutual harm, severely damaged the community ecosystem.
2. Blast: The father of the infamous "points-based system"
● The process of reverse exploitation : Blast, which boasts the top-tier halo of Paradigm, abandoned the traditional interaction model and required users to lock up ETH or stablecoins in exchange for "points". The rules were changed frequently, and large investors and top NFT players made huge profits, while ordinary users, after locking up their tokens for several months, could not even keep up with the interest rate of risk-free financial products during the same period.
● Characteristics of Anti-Fraud: Ponzi scheme-like and blind box-like gambling. Users are swept up in endless FOMO and become free ATMs for the project's TVL data.
● Profound Impact: Since Blast, the "points-based system" has become the industry standard. The original intention of the points system was to encourage long-term user participation, but frequent rule adjustments and severe imbalances in rewards ultimately led to a loss of user trust in the project. Web3 freeloaders became Web2 laborers, and the decentralized spirit that Web3 was proud of died completely under the calculations of capital.
3. LayerZero (ZRO): The tipping point of trust collapse
● The anti-fraud process : After 18 months of cross-chain interaction that caused users to burn through huge amounts of gas fees, the project team launched the strictest witch vetting in history on the eve of token issuance, even requiring users to "voluntarily confess" in exchange for a portion of their retained shares, otherwise their entire holdings would be wiped out. A large number of real active users and small studios were wiped out.
● Characteristics of anti-fraud: Extreme arrogance and "presumption of guilt". The project team pockets all the exorbitant transaction fees contributed by users, but then treats and humiliates them like thieves.
● Profound Impact: LayerZero single-handedly destroyed the grand narrative of "multi-chain interaction." While the manipulation of data by companies like Tencent (the "Princess Agents") requires censorship, the brutal implementation of the "presumption of guilt + confession mechanism" further accelerated the collapse of trust. From then on, Tencent became infamous, and "anti-fraud" became a Damocles' sword hanging over the heads of all those who exploit loopholes. Retail investors finally understood: in the face of absolute interpretation, your efforts are worthless.
4. zkSync (ZK): The complete end of the L2 interactive airdrop era
● The Anti-Fraud Process : As one of the four former L2 kings, zkSync had kept the community in suspense for several years. After absorbing hundreds of millions of dollars in gas fees, its airdrop rules revealed a shocking black box: the weight of transaction count and activity level was significantly reduced, and "funds retention over a specific period" was used as the core threshold. This resulted in a large number of long-term interactive users who had accompanied the project's growth receiving nothing, while insider trading and new accounts that had hastily deposited funds reaped huge shares.
● Anti-fraud characteristics: Use "activity level" to cheat for gas, and then use "funds" to kick people out of the game.
● Profound Impact: zkSync's extremely blatant exploitation led the entire market to completely despair of L2 airdrops. While controlling Sybil and the volume-boosting army was necessary, the opaque rules disheartened genuine early contributors. Subsequent L2 launches faced the predicament of being "unpopular," with no retail investors willing to become free on-chain laborers.
5. Infinex: Public offering mechanism collapses
● The Anti-Fraud Process: As a cross-chain DeFi aggregation platform endorsed by Synthetix founder Kain Warwick, Infinex was once seen as a representative of "orthodoxy" by the community. It induced users to invest significant funds and effort through Patron NFTs and a months-long points program. However, when the public sale began in January 2026, the community was met with an extremely high FDV valuation, an absurdly imposed "mandatory one-year lock-up," and a chaotic distribution logic. Participation on the first day of the public sale was a disastrous failure, forcing the project team to repeatedly and urgently "patch" and modify the rules amidst widespread criticism.
● Characteristics of the anti-fraud scheme: "Public sale reversal" under high expectations. This operation, which first uses the NFT narrative to make promises and then temporarily changes the public sale mechanism, instantly turns the investment of long-term supporters into a locked-in sunk cost.
● Profound impact: The Infinex incident completely exposed the risks of the "NFT + points for public sale" model, and earned the community's endless condolences to the project team.
6. Linea: The term "black slave" originated with Linea.
● The anti-manipulation process : It took the art of PUA to an outrageous level: it launched the Galxe Odyssey mission, which lasted for two years and had an absurd number of phases. Users were required to answer questions, perform cross-chain operations, swap, and mint worthless NFTs with zero liquidity, like slaves, and were finally forced to cooperate with extremely cumbersome KYC procedures.
● Characteristics of Anti-Penetration: An indefinitely protracted war of attrition. You're always doing tasks, always accumulating LXP points, always being subjected to manipulation, while the mainnet's coin issuance remains perpetually out of reach.
● Profound Impact: Linea turned "completing tasks to get airdrops" into a full-time job with extremely low hourly wages and immense mental anguish. As a result, a large number of users became exhausted and left the community, marking the complete bankruptcy of the OAT (On-Chain Achievement Token) narrative.
7. Grass: DePIN's free generator
● The process of reverse exploitation : As a star project in the DePIN field, it encouraged users to leave their computers running to contribute idle bandwidth. Countless people kept their computers on 24/7 to farm points, even paying out of their own pockets to buy clean overseas IPs. As a result, when the tokens were issued, the project team kept the vast majority of the shares for themselves or allocated them to venture capitalists. Retail investors who had worked hard to mine tokens for months couldn't even cover the electricity and proxy IP costs after selling them.
● Characteristics of anti-leeching: Taking advantage of others without any investment. Under the guise of Web3 development, it blatantly steals the physical resources of Web2 users.
● Profound impact: Grass's reversal made the market realize that many so-called DePIN projects are essentially "freebie software", which directly led to a precipitous drop in retail investor participation in similar projects.
8. Monad: L1 Airdrop Terminator
● The process of counter-speculation : As a highly anticipated high-performance L1 project, Monad attracted long-term testnet interaction from the community. In October 2025, the MON airdrop was launched. Although 230,000 addresses were open for application, the overall allocation ratio of the community was only about 3.3%. A large number of real testnet users were wiped out or received only a meager share due to strict Sybil vetting, while KOLs and some early associates received a large number of quotas.
● Characteristics of the anti-fraud scheme: Extremely low resources and stringent review after high expectations. The project team attracted a large number of testnet users with a technical narrative, and then distributed all the tokens to KOLs.
● Profound Impact: The Monad incident further lowered the community's expectations for airdrops to new L1 projects. Although the early announcement of the testnet didn't count, the lack of intervention during the process, and the fact that nothing was delivered during the TGE, left genuine early contributors feeling betrayed. Subsequently, enthusiasm for similar high-performance L1 projects significantly declined, accelerating the shift in the L1 field from "a flourishing of activity" to "cautious observation."
9. Babylon: The Bitcoin Ecosystem's Incompatibility and its Imitation
● The process of "reverse airdrop" : An attempt to forcibly transplant Ethereum's staking mechanism to the Bitcoin network. During the mainnet event, due to the capacity limitations of the BTC chain and extremely high network congestion, many retail investors paid exorbitant miner fees but still failed to stake, resulting in direct financial losses. Those users who were lucky enough to successfully stake found, after six months of locking up their funds, that the airdrop returns were far less than those from trading on exchanges or buying financial products.
● Characteristics of anti-fraud: Extremely high trial-and-error costs. Forcibly creating FOMO sentiment on the BTC chain, which does not support smart contracts, ultimately leads to retail investors being mercilessly devoured by exorbitant gas fees.
● Profound Impact: It poured a bucket of cold water on the overheated BTC L2 market. It proved, through painful lessons, that simply replicating Ethereum's PUA model is fundamentally unworkable in the Bitcoin ecosystem. This severely eroded the trust and patience of veteran Bitcoin players in this emerging ecosystem.
10. Backpack: The Backlash of Frenzied Data Boosting and the Trust Crisis of "Chinese-Focused Data"
● The Anti-Fraud Process: Backpack, which raised $37 million, launched a "trading volume = points" campaign, exploiting the community for two years. On the eve of TGE, a sudden crackdown on strict KYC and the "one device, one IP" black box witch hunt resulted in the wiping of a large number of accounts. The survivors fared equally poorly: one large investor spent $300,000 in transaction fees to generate $15 billion in trading volume, only to receive $150,000 in tokens (a net loss of 50%). Users' hard-earned money was directly converted into profits for the project team.
● Characteristics of Anti-Fraud: A simple and blatant "reverse drain." While wash trading does require strict scrutiny, only reviewing it after token issuance is a blatant attempt to profit from transaction fees under the guise of an airdrop. Furthermore, the token BP plummeted 68% in its first week of listing, with users being quietly drained dry amidst endless wash trading.
● Profound Impact: The image of Chinese entrepreneurs was completely tarnished. The China region became the hardest hit area, and the stereotype of "Chinese people running a business = exploiting others" was deeply ingrained in the community, leading to an unprecedented crisis of trust for subsequent Chinese-led Web3 projects during their cold start.
11. EdgeX: The Decline of Perp DEX
● The Anti-Airdrop Process: After the L2 crash, Perp DEX, which required real money to pay transaction fees, was once seen by retail investors as the last refuge for airdrops. Although Lighter set a good precedent, by the time edgeX TGE came along: existing users spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees only to receive airdrops worth less than a thousand dollars, while more than 80 new "insider trading" addresses with no interaction records raked in nearly $100 million in airdrops. Subsequently, on-chain detectives confirmed its connection with black market makers, and the official account immediately closed comments and disappeared, leaving behind a mess.
● Characteristics of anti-fraud: It involves blatant insider trading, retail investors acting as data cows, and project teams not even bothering to implement it.
● Profound Impact: The EdgeX fiasco completely shattered the narrative of wash trading on Perp DEXs, turning endorsements from top institutions into a euphemism for sophisticated fraudulent practices. Retail investors were utterly disillusioned, and smart money accelerated its return to centralized exchanges (CEXs) or native L1 exchanges.
12. Genius: The final straw that broke the camel's back for the Maoists.
● The Reversal Process: Genius was seen as the last hope, but after the community frantically inflated trading volume, TGE received a dramatic turnaround: claiming the airdrop within 7 days would automatically burn 70% of the tokens, with a maximum of 30%; alternatively, users could choose to lock their tokens for one year to receive the full amount. Under immense public pressure, the project team subsequently launched an emergency "refund" option – within 48 hours of receiving the TGE, users could choose to burn 100% of their airdrop amount in exchange for a refund of the fees charged by Genius.
● Characteristics of Anti-Fraud: Users invest real money based on a premium of trust, only to be told at the last minute, "Either take a small amount and leave, or spend another year with the project team."
● Profound Impact: Genius's questionable actions completely demystified the "top-tier platform narrative." It was described by the community as "the final straw that broke the camel's back for those who exploit loopholes."
Conclusion: A drastic measure, a fundamental change.
From HOP's witch hunt list to Blast's nested points system, and LayerZero's self-surrender massacre... these twelve project teams have jointly written an absurd and cruel history of blood and tears for retail investors in the cryptocurrency world.
But the truth may be even more brutal: this is not only a premeditated harvest, but also a collective karma of speculation and greed.
For a long time, the cryptocurrency market has only cared about "whether to issue tokens and how to distribute airdrops," ignoring whether the products have real product value (PMF) or can generate sustainable revenue. Project teams have precisely exploited this greed – you want the airdrops, they want your principal and transaction fees.
Now, the airdrop bubble has burst, and countless people have been left battered and bruised. While this is undoubtedly tragic, it can also be seen as a drastic and decisive cleansing.
The market has finally been forced to return to common sense: traffic attracted by airdrop expectations is ultimately a mirage, and only products with genuine product-market fit (PMF) are worth investing time and money in.
This is the end of airdrops, and the rebirth of Web3. Those projects that started with PUA and black-box operations will eventually be eliminated by users voting with their feet; while those projects that are truly willing to build with the community and return to the essence of value will win more precious trust from the ruins.
For those who enjoy trolling, this is a painful lesson and a sobering turnaround.
