What is a Vampire Attack?

A strategy where a new platform drains resources — such as liquidity and users — from an established one by offering better incentives to switch.

SushiSwap famously enticed Uniswap's liquidity providers to migrate their funds by offering additional rewards in SUSHI tokens, effectively executing a vampire attack.

• Incentives: New platforms offer irresistible benefits to encourage a switch.

• Rewards: Immediate and tangible rewards for switchers, like higher yields or governance tokens.

• Effects on Competitors: The attacked platform suffers reduced liquidity, a diminished user base, and potentially a loss of confidence.

Here’s a half baked crazy idea. What if vampire attacks were used by web3 platforms to migrate users from web2 platforms. Imagine, for example, making a vampire attack on a web2 social network in an attempt to not only create new accounts and activity on a new web3 social platform but to ensure users will stay by weakening the web2 network’s “liquidity” equivalent--number of active users.

• Proof of Deletion: Users prove account deletion from the web2 platform, possibly through API calls or HTTP status codes, to unlock benefits on the Web3 platform.

• Tailored Incentives: Offer tokens, NFTs, or unique digital identities as rewards for migrating, providing exclusive advantages on the new platform such as enhanced governance rights, algorithmic boosting for some time period (relative to the "weight" of the account being migrated), etc.

• Reputation Transfer: Implement mechanisms to "mint" a user's web2 reputation into the Web3 ecosystem, preserving their social capital.

  • Evaluate the strength of a user's web2 account by considering:

    • Number of followers

    • Age of account

    • Engagement level of recent posts

  • Use these metrics to determine the value of the incentives offered, ensuring that those with a higher impact on the Web2 platform are adequately rewarded in the Web3 space.

• Destructive Effects on Competitors:

  As users migrate:

  • The web2 platform's user base erodes, impacting its network effects.

  • Clusters of users (communities) likely move together, eroding any incentive for community members to stay or to return to the platform

  • Advertising revenues and content interaction may decrease, forcing a reevaluation of the platform's value proposition.

  This idea is of course not limited to social networks but to any sort of web2 platform which thrives on network effects.

What is a Vampire Attack?

A strategy where a new platform drains resources — such as liquidity and users — from an established one by offering better incentives to switch.

SushiSwap famously enticed Uniswap's liquidity providers to migrate their funds by offering additional rewards in SUSHI tokens, effectively executing a vampire attack.

• Incentives: New platforms offer irresistible benefits to encourage a switch.

• Rewards: Immediate and tangible rewards for switchers, like higher yields or governance tokens.

• Effects on Competitors: The attacked platform suffers reduced liquidity, a diminished user base, and potentially a loss of confidence.

Here’s a half baked crazy idea. What if vampire attacks were used by web3 platforms to migrate users from web2 platforms. Imagine, for example, making a vampire attack on a web2 social network in an attempt to not only create new accounts and activity on a new web3 social platform but to ensure users will stay by weakening the web2 network’s “liquidity” equivalent--number of active users.

• Proof of Deletion: Users prove account deletion from the web2 platform, possibly through API calls or HTTP status codes, to unlock benefits on the Web3 platform.

• Tailored Incentives: Offer tokens, NFTs, or unique digital identities as rewards for migrating, providing exclusive advantages on the new platform such as enhanced governance rights, algorithmic boosting for some time period (relative to the "weight" of the account being migrated), etc.

• Reputation Transfer: Implement mechanisms to "mint" a user's web2 reputation into the Web3 ecosystem, preserving their social capital.

  • Evaluate the strength of a user's web2 account by considering:

    • Number of followers

    • Age of account

    • Engagement level of recent posts

  • Use these metrics to determine the value of the incentives offered, ensuring that those with a higher impact on the Web2 platform are adequately rewarded in the Web3 space.

• Destructive Effects on Competitors:

  As users migrate:

  • The web2 platform's user base erodes, impacting its network effects.

  • Clusters of users (communities) likely move together, eroding any incentive for community members to stay or to return to the platform

  • Advertising revenues and content interaction may decrease, forcing a reevaluation of the platform's value proposition.

  This idea is of course not limited to social networks but to any sort of web2 platform which thrives on network effects.