Recently, the well-known cross-chain project Layerzero released a piece of news, encouraging users who consider themselves "witches" to "surrender" and also encouraging the reporting of other "witch" users.

This news has caused a great stir in the industry.

Since 2020, many projects in the crypto ecosystem have adopted the method of airdropping tokens to encourage user participation and interaction in the project in order to attract seed users and establish an initial community, following the lead of DeFi projects such as Uniswap.

The earliest DeFi projects like Uniswap set very low standards for airdrops, for example, Uniswap only required one transaction on the platform to receive 400 tokens.

Once these airdropped tokens are listed, their prices almost always skyrocket due to speculation.

This has led many users in the crypto ecosystem to see the opportunity to "earn extra income" through airdrops.

As a result, people started increasing their interaction frequency from the beginning, then using multiple accounts for interaction, and later developing into the establishment of studios specifically for scripting and using a large number of accounts for automated batch trading.

People refer to this operation as "wool shearing" or "airdrop farming".

One of the most exaggerated examples I can recall in the past two years is the airdrop of Aptos, with several teams reportedly becoming overnight millionaires by farming this project.

Such stories have further fueled the rush of "wool shearing" enthusiasts.

However, are these batch accounts participating in trading really loyal users of the project? Obviously, most of them are not, yet these users have gradually become the main beneficiaries of the project's airdrops.

This completely contradicts the original intention of the project teams and is not conducive to developing genuine loyal users. Therefore, project teams have started using various methods to distinguish between "genuine" and "fake" users.

These users considered "fake" by the project teams are referred to as "witches" - just like the witches described in the Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto, who enter the system not for the healthy development of the system, but for personal gain, potentially causing harm to the system.

The identification of witches by project teams has evolved from initially distinguishing "witch" accounts through on-chain interactions, to later collaborating with data analysis teams in the crypto ecosystem (such as Nansen), and now to Layerzero not only using various tools and collaborating with relevant teams, but also initiating the method of reporting and exposing.

I believe that events like Layerzero's are foreseeable from a trend perspective.

From the perspective of project teams, as the startup costs continue to rise, they will undoubtedly become more cautious with token airdrops. As time goes on, the qualification criteria for airdrops will also become more stringent.

From the perspective of users, whether they are professional wool shearers or ordinary retail investors, the profits obtained from wool shearing will become increasingly meager, and eventually may reach a point where the income is very close to the cost of investment.

The era of getting rich overnight through airdrops will definitely become history.

I agree with the project teams cracking down on "witches," but I strongly oppose the method of reporting and exposing "witches."

This method exploits and amplifies human weaknesses, deliberately creating distrust between people by inciting conflicts, ultimately creating a situation of "the snipe and the clam fight, and the fisherman benefits."

To the best of my knowledge, this approach has been used in certain regrettable periods of human history.

But now, it is being imitated by crypto projects, and this project has received funding from numerous top-tier venture capitalists, which is truly regrettable for this industry.

This can only indicate that the project teams are not only incompetent in cracking down on "witches," but also have serious issues in their way of thinking.

I have not specifically spent time and effort on this project because I have always been skeptical of projects like this that involve cross-blockchain main chains. So, fortunately, I have not wasted time and effort on such projects.

In the future, even if I have to cross chains, I probably will not use such projects.

This Saturday (May 11th), we will be holding an online discussion on Twitter. For details, please see the link below:

https://x.com/DaosViews/status/1787331370689446081

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