Mark Fielding
Was it Linea? Scroll? Wormhole? Sanctum? The chains are fuzzy, the details a blur. Thousands of tasks, hundreds of hours, all whizzing around my contorted brain like out of control quarks in a horrible science experiment.
Is it even important anymore?
Juggling chains, collecting points, counting transactions and bridging protocols has worn me down...And almost spat me out. Physically, emotionally - and this is the saddest, dear reader - creatively… I’m a shell of the person who started - unbeknown to me at the time - airdrop farming in the peaceful, tranquil waters of 2022.
But the fallout from the current airdrop meta scales beyond the personal, the impact spreads like shock waves in the Marshall Islands. When I look around at all the hope and misplaced dreams; when I think about a summer of leaderboards, KOLS and shiny shiny eyeballs clicking buttons on dull screens; when I see a damaged, brittle, divided community collecting bounties, clamouring for dust, screaming for an extra one percent on their community allocations when the TGE eventually rolls into town, I fear not just for the future of crypto, but the collective mental wellbeing of almost everyone in it.
This is only season one.
Snapshot one. Week one. Round one.
You haven’t even met the real antagonist.
Test nets, phishing nets… please use my referral code.
My name is Mark, and I’m an airdrop farmer in recovery. It’s been ten seconds since my last transaction.
It’s early April, 2024. A milky sun casts weak shadows across my home office. The day starts with a GM on 18 Discord channels, then I jump through hoops for, in no particular order - I really should keep a spreadsheet, but any fun has been sucked from the space without adding a layer of CRM to the shitshow - Ether-Fi, Owlto, Renzo, Zerolend, Mint, Berrachain, Mantle, Uprock, Orbiter, Zeta, Ambient, Jumper, deBridge, Portal, Mayan, Bob, Hyperlane, Celo, Scroll, ZKSync, Base, Zora, Merlin, Squid, Stargate, Rhino, Bebop, Redstone, Mayan, Drip, Jup, Margin Fi, Kamino, Marinade, Drift, Parcl and… am I too late for Mode?
At 8.34 a.m. I open Twitter and a now-too-familiar feeling of anxiety crushes my heart in its vice-like grip. Twenty-seven new blockchains, bridges, perp decks and test nets have popped up overnight. That's like a billion free dollars. If only I qualify for all of the airdrops. Galaxe, Intract, Mercle and Layer3 have launched tasks upon tasks upon tasks like some kind of hellish point driven Fall Of The House Of Usher… but that’s the wrong Poe. This is the torment of The Pit And The Pendulum.
Welcome aboard Pilot Fest - where the sky's the limit!
Embark on a thrilling 4-week journey filled with diverse themes and engaging activities each week.
Brace yourself for surprises, weekly rewards, and a tight-knit community waiting to take flight with you.
The excitement that was so prevalent in the wake of Arbitrum has gone. Clicking buttons? It used to feel special. We were explorers. A rare breed. Adventurous cross-chain alchemists. Now it's A Descent Into The Maelstrom, rewards eviscerated by the wallets of rampant industrial farmers, bored whales and the monotonous shrill of Twitter updates. If this is a numbers game, we’re using their maths now. Line upon line of worker bees clicking ‘sign transaction’ for pocket change.
As the coffee burns on the stove, I manage Chrome extensions. Rainbow, Metamask, Rabby, Timeless, Trust, Coinbase, Potem, Aptos, Argent X, Backpack, Bitget, Leo, Keplr, MagicEden…Solflare. Where I store my passwords is no longer important. They may as well be buried on the surface of Mars. Who cares?
Welcome to community building in a permissionless world. Participation is rewarded, but the price is your focus, attention, curiosity and creativity. This is not free money. Far from it. You win points for supplying liquidity. You’re incentivised to borrow, share, and lend. Transactions aren’t optional. They’re your bread and butter. You’re looping so many LPs across so many platforms you’re swallowing your own tail to infinity.
You try this without a spreadsheet.
500 METIS firing up APY for all pools in Shoebill Finance! 
It’s voting season on Taffy and Snapshot; my mind races. Have I even voted? Did I mint the OAT NFT? What level am I in Discord? What roles do I have? OMG. Anxiety, fear, cortisol and dopamine swirl like ancient forces shaping the solar system of my mind.
Hours vanish. At 11.37, I check Defillama. Another €18 billion has been found down the back of the VC sofa. The promise of a five-figure airdrop reaches escape velocity.
…Or terminal velocity.
What’s the difference?
It's not Requiem For A Dream, but Airdrop farming is an addiction, we’re slaves to transactions on the blockchain, to the promise of high returns.
Money for nothing and your clicks for free.
Your time in exchange for their TVL.
I’s not a fair swap.
Whatever your slippage.
Out of interest, how much did you get from Uprock, Kamino, Eigenlayer, Hava, Nyan, Parcl, Kim, Param or Ionic? Wormhole, Jupiter, Jito, Optimism, the aforementioned Arbitrum, these are the exceptions. Not the rule anymore.
Adjusting Total Supply of $KRO from 50M to 1B
Amplifying Community Airdrop Allocation to 17%
Allocating more $KRO rewards for Ecosystem Contributors
Rescheduling TGE to Mid Q3 for Thorough Implementation
Forget the gwei. How many hours have you lost?
You’ve made a pact with the devil.
Only the devil saw you coming and had a suite of psychological marketing tools to throw in your face. Sitting ducks.
Creating on-chain activity, TVL and massaged DAUs has become a billion dollar science, but it wasn’t orchestrated. It was born from accident. Serendipitous manipulation. The not-so-subtle interplay of psychology, nudges and behavioural design emerging from tried-and-tested web2 marketing extraction techniques.
The exploitation of your need for financial security gained momentum when the results started to look good on paper. More capital flowed in. More rounds closed. It’s not easy to put a date on when the tides shifted. Perhaps Autumn of 2023... Give or take a few months.
All I know is that by February seasons were increasing as the percentage you were fighting over was decreasing.
You’re collateral damage.
Prefrontal cortex damage.
You’re being psychologically manipulated. Every tweet, season, task and collaboration is designed to captivate your attention, spur your participation… keep you coming back.
Again, and again and again.
Your happiness, fear, anxiety, anger and ambition are all being used against you. Scarcity, the promise of rewards, act now, think later, priming, reciprocity, social proof. Airdrop farmers have become the farmed. Your dopamine reward circuitry is being activated, your behaviours reinforced. Add in competition, your old friend FOMO and a thousand influences promising €5000 for ten minutes work, and you have a perfect hormonal storm deep within you. You are not in control.
And that’s the whole damn point.
It's called behavioural design because your behaviour can be designed.
They're even using pie-charts against you.
A creeping shadow of uncertainty - when is the airdrop? Do I qualify? Could this change my life? - shrouds your decisions and triggers stress, sending cortisol curdling through your veins. Unchecked. Unconscious. In response, dopamine floods your body, which causes the release of more cortisol, which now acts as a regulator helping to manage your reaction and maintain balance.
You’re looping LP on Ether-Fi, your body is looping dopamine and cortisol. And it gets worse for you because the fight-or-flight response is designed to be transient, a brief surge created in the crib of evolution to evade danger. You’re not designed to be under constant stress. But they don’t tell you when the snapshot will be, so you are.
It's the not knowing that kills you.
Slowly.
It would be easy to change the strategy. To really ‘put community first’. To be open, transparent, honest and truthful - oh the irony of the blockchain - but if you know the timeline, you stop clicking buttons, your compulsion to interact wanes. TVL dips. Transactions slips. Most of them will go to zero. You’re lining the wrong pockets.
“We’ll keep the snapshot date and any criteria we’re using under wraps, thank you very much.”
Find me an airdrop farmer whose sleep hasn’t suffered, whose focus isn’t compromised, whose creativity isn’t weakened.
Dopamine works on - amongst other places - the prefrontal cortex. That’s the same area of the brain that plans, thinks and moderates your social behaviour. You’re more anxious, depressed… and you still ain’t fucking rich.
Just the sum of your habits.
And that’s why I quit. Not because I'm better. Not because I'm immune to their design... and certainly not because I've made my fortune.
I just don't like being told what to fucking do.
I want my mind back. I want my creativity back. I don't want to click buttons for other people.
Maybe ZKSync will save us all. Perhaps Scroll will cook and Layer Zero got it right. Perhaps one of the 55 active layer 2s or one of the 44 that are coming might drop 70% to the community, they might even make a difference.
But I won’t be there to find out.
Enough is enough.
I’m done.
Down.
But not out.
Are you going to join me?
1,458
this was one of the best writings i have come across.... sounds just like me in my world right now! I needed to find this... and i did!!! thank you fren!
Airdrop farming robs you of time, money and, most importantly - for me at least - creativity. I wrote something about my addiction, in the hope that it can perhaps help others - https://paragraph.xyz/@markmywords/airdrop-farming-addiction-dopamine-and-billions-of-dollars
Great article. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Felt very similarly burned out a few months ago and knew something had to change. The good thing is $zk and $L0 June kinda feels like a natural stopping point for many. Airdrop farming simply isn’t lucrative anymore. Time to focus on things that actually matter.
To paraphrase George Carlin: "It's a big racket and you're better off not in it." <grin> btw - have you checked out /slowcore-hq ?
I wrote some words about my addiction to blockchain transactions. Not the best, but that's the point. https://paragraph.xyz/@markmywords/airdrop-farming-addiction-dopamine-and-billions-of-dollars
I felt this! Really compelling writing. Actively engaging with crypto via speculation takes a huge toll mentally given the hyper financialization of it all, and I'm glad you were able to regain control over your time and energy. ✨
Thanks. I imagine it's way more prevalent than we think. A lot of people out there are suffering.
Airdrop farming has been a wild, addictive ride. But I'm out. Can't do it anymore. I want my brain back. I want my focus and creativity back. ZKSync is my endgame. Mint the proof. https://paragraph.xyz/@markmywords/airdrop-farming-addiction-dopamine-and-billions-of-dollars
I feel you. https://warpcast.com/higherhighs/0x901e3119
Actually, the title is intriguing. Probably will read it today before sleep and maybe even will mint it.