Reputation is a superpower.

Build it, and the best airdrops will find you.

I used to think grinding tasks would guarantee airdrops.

But task-based airdrops are slowly dying out, no thanks to Sybils that dilute the system.

Projects are getting smarter, and the old strategies no longer work.

After reading Vitalik’s tweet again, here’s what I learnt about the future of airdrops:

Vitalik outlined the key aims of every airdrop:

• Reward alignment with the project (i.e. true community members)

• Recognise contributors (users, developers, or yappers)

• Distribute tokens as fairly as possible

• Resist Sybil attacks and extractive farming that dilute the airdrop

Ultimately, I see airdrops as a transfer of value:

To get airdrops, we have to first give value to the project to prove we are deserving of the airdrop.

Gone are the days when we can spam transactions on a network like Arbitrum and get an airdrop.

Sybils have ruined that game for us, and it’s getting harder and harder to earn an airdrop.

Especially if we’re doing the exact same tasks that can be easily replicated by thousands of bot farms.

Projects that want to distribute their airdrop to the ‘right’ people will give it to those who contribute meaningfully to them.

But if every wallet looks the same, we have to use other ways of filtering out Sybils.

And they can’t just rely on KYC alone:

Many protocols use Proof of Humanity to prove that a wallet comes from a real human before they could claim an airdrop.

Here’s an example of the PoH used for Caldera:

A huge weightage was placed towards KYC, or you could just spend $4 to mint an NFT to pass the PoH check (without connecting any accounts).

We have seen how KYC can be easily gamed through other campaigns like Binance Alpha:

Many use the credentials of our family members to create another account for rewards.

KYC credentials can be bought for extremely cheap, especially from less developed countries where that ‘small’ fee is worth a lot to them.

KYC or Proof of Humanity alone is no longer a good enough indicator that an individual is deserving of an airdrop.

They only tell you that a person is unique, but it doesn’t tell you who the person is and what they’ve done.

Instead, there are other factors that have to be considered too:

Our onchain and social reputations will be the new Sybil filter.

Airdrops are all about alignment, and we need proof that the individual is aligned with the project.

Our identity goes beyond just KYC, and we need multiple signals to create a strong profile of that individual.

We have seen how Kaito started to use this multi-factor approach to determine alignment.

Onchain and social reputation go beyond just interacting with the project, and I see these factors playing an important role in identifying a high-quality profile:

• Recipient of previous reputable airdrops (a bonus if you’re a UNI recipient)

• A wallet that receives delegations from others (shows that you have a reputation that others trust with their governance tokens)

• Backing what you post by holding tokens of projects you talk about (like @cookiedotfun’s ACM)

• Holders of blue-chip NFTs (like ZRO airdropping to Pudgy Penguin holders)

• Being a consistent user of certain L2s (e.g. Arbitrum and Optimism)

• Time Weighted Average Balance in a protocol (shows alignment and rewards those with limited capital who deposited early)

Kaito will be implementing a reputation threshold to rank on their leaderboards

Both onchain and social history are publicly available for projects to analyse and identify these high-quality individuals.

Linking all of them together creates a strong reputation profile that proves you are a high-value individual deserving of an airdrop.

This is why I’ve stopped doing multi-wallet farming, because it’s just too time-consuming and hard to manage multiple accounts:

I see owning one account with a strong reputation will be more powerful than multiple accounts with relatively low transaction counts.

Building in public has never been more beneficial than today.

Once you’re constantly putting in the reps and giving value to others, good things will happen.

Reputation is built by trust, and trust is built by consistently providing value to someone.

By giving value freely, we gather social capital by helping others, and they will help us in return (not just monetarily).

And I find the best way to give away value is by doing cool things onchain and sharing what you did on Twitter.

There’s no doubt over what you say because you have the evidence to back it.

I shared more about this strategy here.