LayerZero is proving the power of “incentivization” in creating a balanced playing field for value distribution and it is quite awesome to witness.
In all fairness, there's a lot being proven in LayerZero’s recent developments and a few I can touch right now includes: the immediate value of “public blockchains”, the impact “incentives” have in enabling honesty and fair value distribution, and how “community” can be leveraged to improve ecosystem growth.
The Immediate Value Of Public Blockchains
Society suffers grave multifaceted distrust buried deep in its establishments. The prevalence of fraud, misinformation, and competitive environments fosters a climate of heavily challenged human connections, in turn hindering proper scale up of systems or sectors.
The immediate value of blockchain is eradicating the “need” for trust to exist within systems from the most basic to complex structures. Achieving this merely requires the employment of “distributed and public” ledger-powered databases as a fundamental building layer for value structures such as businesses and governance systems.
Given that data moved through blockchains are stored in mostly widely distributed number of computers identified as “nodes” and said data are readily available on public domains to anyone to access and assess, businesses and individuals no longer have to build or rely on trust to scale systems, rather, verifiable data serves as a backbone for operations within each ecosystem leveraging said tech.
In the abundance of explored value of blockchain, LayerZero leveraged said knowledge to carry out an operation that could serve as blueprint for future projects looking to honor and reward honest work on the blockchain.
The Impact “Incentives” Have In Enabling Honesty And Fair Value Distribution
LayerZero, a protocol enabling connections between incompatible blockchains, has given sybil airdrop farmers an opportunity to self-report their addresses by May 17 in exchange for a reduced token allocation.
According to LayerZero, those who decide to come forward will receive 15% of their intended allocation, while those who do not are at risk of receiving “nothing” from the planned token airdrop.
Sybil airdrop farming refers to an ostensibly deceptive practice where individuals engage in Sybil attacks by creating multiple fake identities or accounts to exploit airdrop programs
A Sybil attack is enacted when an individual creates numerous false accounts to gain an unfair advantage, such as receiving more airdrop tokens than legitimately entitled. This behavior has been deemed unethical for undermining the perceived fairness and security of airdrop programs, although many in the space still use it as a method.
This is an old report published on May 3, 2024 by Cryptobriefing.com
Initially, over 2 million addresses were identified as potential sybils but as explained on a recent X post, this number has since been narrowed to 803k+ following stricter criteria to minimize false positives.
It is important to note that of said 803k+ addresses includes self-reported addresses, highlighting the impact “incentives” has on ensuring that individuals play honest and improve the ecosystem in the process - in the case of LayerZero, offering 15% for self-reporting puts the ecosystem in an interesting light.
Of a surety, some honest individuals may have their addresses flagged, it's not expected that the analysis will be 100% flawless, just as many actual sybils could be missed.
And this is where, community comes in.
How “Community” Can Be Leveraged To Improve Ecosystem Growth
Open source? Has to be the best technology and ecosystem that will be!
This is why blockchain is so powerful, it is open source and capitalizes on the abundant value of a great “community” to grow.
In the X post, LayerZero clarified that the initial analysis aimed to identify industrial sybil clusters, and the list seeks to remove large clusters from bounty hunting eligibility. However, it should not be considered definitive until the final report is published, as addresses may be removed from the sybil list as calculations are refined.
The sybil bounty hunting process begins today, May 18, at 2:00 pm UTC and will continue until May 31, 11:59 pm UTC. Participants must report at least 20 addresses with a clear methodology to be eligible for a reward of 10% of sybil’s intended token allocation. All bounties will go to the first eligible reporter of a given address.
Crowdsourcing the identification of sybil addresses allows LayerZero to tap into the collective knowledge and vigilance of its community, something that is largely under-leveraged in various ecosystems.
What LayerZero has done is bound to result in either or both of these two things:
More honesty amongst airdrop participants as such a list could become a blacklist for airdrops from other current and future crypto projects.
Smart farming tools being developed to bypass easy identification from sybil trackers which could include “anonymity protocols” for certain transactions.
Either way, it's a win for crypto at the end of the day.
Interesting times we live in, crypto and blockchain technology is onto some great revolutionization of value distribution.