"Dark box operation" between the hair-raising studio and the project party.

Author: How, Odaily Planet Daily

Recently, LayerZero and various Layer 2 projects have launched a fierce attack on the hair-raising community. From the perspective of rule-making and decision-making authority, it seems that the two sides are not evenly matched. The introduction of various anti-witch policies corresponds to the suspicion of "rat warehouses" for most qualified airdrop addresses, triggering conflicts between the two groups that once had a tacit understanding.

It wasn't until Binance founder He Yi wrote about the past rise and fall of the cryptocurrency market, stating, "Today, the market has indeed changed again. The self-destructive struggle between the hair-raising studio and L2 projects has turned into a farce, and the era of hair-raising may be coming to an end." This completely shifted the focus of the crypto world to the two groups.

From an external perspective, the project's introduction of anti-witch mechanisms to restrict the hair-raising studio from brushing airdrops, while the hair-raising studio continues to increase costs to meet anti-witch standards, seems to indicate a confrontational relationship between the project party and the hair-raising studio. But is this really the case?

Odaily Planet Daily conducted an anonymous interview with the founder of the hair-raising studio, LM (alias), to reveal the fascinating stories behind the hair-raising studio and the project party that must be told.

The hair-raising studio may have originated from KOL

The term "hair-raising" actually originated a long time ago. With the entry of institutional-level capital, the project party no longer needs to conduct public token financing through methods such as IEO. Instead, institutions replace the public to invest in early projects to sustain their development, and the public participates in early project construction to qualify for airdropped tokens.

At the same time, with the rising value of UniSwap airdropped tokens, subsequent projects became enthusiastic about interacting with multiple addresses, giving rise to the behavior verb "hair-raising."

Regarding the motivation behind hair-raising, LM, the interviewee, said, "Although I also obtained airdropped tokens early on, such as UniSwap, I did not feel that it could bring in high profits. But at the end of the last bull market, the NFT sector was very hot. I got to know some well-known KOLs, who should be the earliest group to start 'hair-raising.' When they received tokens airdropped by Aptos, each of them got at least several hundred thousand USDT. For this reason, I truly realized the value of hair-raising. My first hair-raising project was Blur, because the NFT sector was very hot at the time, and the airdrop rules for Blur were based on trading on that platform. However, I didn't have relevant experience for the first hair-raising, and made some mistakes, and did not achieve high profits. The profit was around 2000 USDT."

So, what was the opportunity that led LM to truly establish a hair-raising studio? LM said, "I truly started to establish the hair-raising studio when L2 emerged. At that time, the entire network was engaging in hair-raising for L2 projects such as zk sync and Starknet. I realized the need to establish a studio to achieve scale, after all, one person's time and energy are limited, and strength comes from numbers. In fact, hair-raising studios had been established long before that."

Based on LM's response, it can be seen that the hair-raising studio probably began to gradually emerge in the later stages of the previous bull market and has matured since then. The main body of this business includes related KOLs.

Unique structure of the interviewed hair-raising studio

When discussing LM's current studio business, LM said, "Currently, my studio has about 7 full-time staff, plus interns and distributed office staff, totaling about 20 people. The business is roughly divided into three sections: KOL cultivation, community, and hair-raising studio."

LM said, "The KOL cultivation is not about making money from these people like traditional MCN companies. Instead, it provides them with a platform for communication and learning. Currently, the group of KOLs being cultivated mostly consists of blockchain-related professionals who are still in college. Firstly, they have a certain knowledge reserve in Web3, and they also want to develop in the blockchain industry in the future. I hope to provide some education to help them enter Web3-related companies after graduation, which not only provides talent for Web3 but also, for me personally, since their first stop is my studio, it can also provide me with some visibility and related benefits after they enter relevant companies."

This initiative not only brings a large number of practitioners into Web3 but also potentially brings returns for LM. It can be imagined that if these individuals enter capital, project parties, or even exchanges, the value they can bring in the future is obvious, which reminds the author of the undercover role in the movie "Infernal Affairs."

Regarding the community, LM's community is more about content precipitation services, and traffic is still the core competitive advantage at present. LM did not elaborate much on the community, but for the hair-raising studio, the community can provide project information diversity, and through community operations, the hair-raising studio can also have a certain service extension.

As for the core business—hair-raising, LM said, "Regarding the hair-raising business, we are mainly divided into purely internal hair-raising business and semi-external business. The pure hair-raising business mainly targets high-quality interactions for current coin issuance projects. We do not use scripts for large-scale interactions, but instead use a more manual approach to ensure that each address can receive the corresponding airdropped tokens. The semi-external business is more for interns and college students. Depending on their different interests, for example, some people like technical aspects and research related node setups, while others who want to purely engage in hair-raising are provided with relevant hair-raising information for mutual exchange."

In response to this, the author asked about the problems that scripted interactions could cause. LM said, "The reason we do not use scripted hair-raising is mainly because most scripts are not stable, especially when it comes to related transactions, script bots are prone to errors. Although it is a low-probability event, once it happens, it will bring irreparable losses. For example, in NFT platform transactions, scripts easily sell high-priced NFTs at extremely low prices. In addition, scripted hair-raising is suitable for zero-cost testnet interactions, but it is easy to create similarities, so when the project party compiles the airdrop list, most of the restrictions of the anti-witch rules are for scripted orders."

When asked about the daily tools and account maintenance of the hair-raising studio, LM said, "In fact, they are not much different from the tools we use in our daily lives, such as fingerprint browsers, or using AI tools like ChatGPT to improve work efficiency. As for community account maintenance, remember not to log in to multiple accounts from the same IP or have multiple people log in to the same account, to prevent the official recognition of the account as a bot account."

When asked if the hair-raising studio takes on client commissions, LM said, "We do take on such orders, but we take on relatively few of them, mainly because the profits are not high, and we ourselves do not have a large number of accounts to serve them. However, other studios are indeed engaged in related businesses, such as Starknet airdrops, and the well-known KOL's exit event, which reportedly took away 20 million tokens worth over 100 million."

According to LM, his studio's business is more diverse. In addition to hair-raising, it also engages in KOL cultivation and community operations, indicating that the business of the hair-raising studio is gradually transitioning from a single hair-raising focus to a more diverse development.

Competitive and cooperative relationship between the hair-raising studio and the project party

In this interview, the author focused more on discussing the relationship between the hair-raising studio and the project party with LM, hoping to uncover whether the project party and the hair-raising studio have mutually beneficial transactions, and the results did not disappoint. The author also expressed great appreciation for LM's very candid responses, which revealed the relationship between the project party and the hair-raising studio.

Project party's dark box operation, airdrops no longer lead to survivorship bias

When discussing the relationship between the project party and the hair-raising studio, LM vividly likened it to the Taobao platform's order brushing in Web2: "I think the relationship between the hair-raising studio and the project party is more like the product brushing on the Taobao platform. In order to have their products ranked at the top of the search results, merchants put up relevant incentives on the brushing platform to attract brushers. This is a means of attracting users at the data level."

However, while Taobao brushing involves merchants actively seeking relevant individuals for operations, the author asked at this point, whether Web3 project parties also actively seek out the hair-raising studio for airdrop interactions, and what returns it can bring to the hair-raising studio. LM said, "This depends on the size of the project. Large projects will not actively seek out the hair-raising studio for interactions, because they do not lack traffic themselves, and everyone is engaging in hair-raising. On the contrary, small projects need the cooperation of the hair-raising studio, because only with good-looking data is there a possibility of being listed on an exchange. Generally, these project parties will not provide actual incentives to the hair-raising studio, but they will inform us of the anti-witch rules in advance. With the anti-witch rules, we have already obtained the certainty of token rewards."

When asked about the details of the cooperation between the project party and the hair-raising studio, LM said, "Hair-raising is generally divided into two types, one with costs and the other without costs. Generally, when the project party approaches us, it is mostly the latter. The no-cost type is further divided by project size. Small projects often approach hair-raising studios for testnet interactions, allowing us to brush airdrops in advance knowing the anti-witch rules, as the project party wants good-looking testnet data to increase visibility. As for large projects, they rarely approach us proactively. Instead, we often approach them to obtain the anti-witch rules. However, there are also some well-known projects that, when listing on major exchanges, lack a certain amount of trading data and may commission large hair-raising studios to help increase trading volume."

When asked about the circulating rumors of the project party rewarding project tokens to the hair-raising studio, LM said, "Currently, my studio has not received such business, but colleagues around me have received similar business. In essence, this play is a problem with the project party's exit mechanism. Due to the fact that most project parties' reserved tokens require a certain release period, and the listing rules of related exchanges also explicitly require the team not to 'dump' to prevent negative impact, at this time, it may be the exchange or market maker helping to sell. Another scenario is that the project party focuses on airdrops, as the project party is the one setting the airdrop rules. So, if they include some of their own addresses in the rules, this is a very easy and normal phenomenon. And it does not necessarily require cooperation with the hair-raising studio; the project party can meet these requirements on their own, such as TVL range, interaction time, address balance, interaction frequency, and GameFi projects are easier to operate, such as level restrictions and login time. For the project party, as long as they categorize active users into the airdrop standard range and isolate those who are just for hair-raising, it will not be a loss for the project's future development. This way, they can not only gain profits but also ensure that core users are not lost. Presumably, most project parties will adopt this approach."

The project party's anti-witch rules may be a means of boasting about their "clean" data

Previously, LayerZero's anti-witch measures seemed to create a confrontational relationship between the hair-raising studio and commissioned clients, with reporting resulting in more tokens. How do you and your colleagues view this?

LM did not directly answer, but instead introduced the project's customer investment from the perspective of the project party. He divided the customer investment into three structures:

• Head investment: accounting for about 10% of the total investment. This part is contributed by a few large capital investors, whose funds are often more than the sum of the remaining 90% of funds. For example, a person may invest 100 bitcoins or 1000 ethers.

• Middle investment: accounting for about 30% of the total investment. This part of the funds comes from medium-sized investors, who are usually the core users of the project. For example, a user may stake between 0.1 and 2.2 bitcoins.

• Tail investment: This part of the funds comes from a large number of small investors. These investors may only invest 0.0001 bitcoins each.

For the project party, how to handle these different levels of investors is a key issue. The project party can choose whether to absorb all investors or only a certain number of investors. This is a strategic choice they need to make.

Generally, a project party hopes to attract as much capital as possible to enhance the overall strength and risk resistance of the project. This means they need to design mechanisms that can attract investors at different levels and ensure that these mechanisms can operate effectively to achieve the long-term healthy development of the project.

In conclusion, LM analyzed, "LayerZero's anti-witch measures are more of a marketing tactic, boasting that the project does not have the presence of a studio, and that all users are real."

It must be said that LM's analysis is quite reasonable to a certain extent. Even if the studio can report commissioned clients, it is relatively rare compared to the number of "self-hair-raising" instances for most studios.

At the same time, LM does not believe that there is a confrontational relationship between the hair-raising studio and the project party. He said, "The emergence of hair-raising studios provides these projects with effective real user data. As mentioned earlier, in the Web2 era, this phenomenon was very common, such as brushing, trading, and advertising on Taobao. There is a saying in the advertising industry, 'You never know which 70% of your money is wasted, but you never know which 70% it is.' Therefore, we can consider hair-raising as a promotional reward given by the project party to users. Every project needs this kind of promotional reward, and currently, this is the best solution. This is not only a phenomenon in our industry, but also in other industries."

"I believe that hair-raising is a long-term sustainable business. Each hair-raising studio brings in hundreds of valid users. As long as they participate in the project according to the rules, it cannot be simply viewed as hair-raising behavior, but as providing user data for the project."

"Secondly, for the initial release of project tokens, the highest priority is given to super head capital (such as a16z), followed by new mine coins from major exchanges or related Launchpools. After that comes the share for valid users, and finally the release of small capital investments. For the project party, dispersing tokens to users not only helps with promotion but also provides high ROI. Therefore, hair-raising studios can continue to develop because project parties continue to release new projects, and each project needs these users."

"Finally, a predecessor in the hair-raising business once said, 'The hair-raising business is actually a 1.5-level market between the primary and secondary markets,' meaning that hair-raising behavior does not require communication with the project. As long as the project needs to issue tokens, there will inevitably be token generation rules, and as long as the hair-raising individuals grasp these rules, there will inevitably be large-scale hair-raising activities, and even exchanges will open pre-market trading for this group of people."

LM's position is expressed from the perspective of the hair-raising studio. From a business operation logic perspective, the cooperation between the project party and the hair-raising studio is a reasonable business behavior. The project party sets the rules, and the hair-raising studio participates within the rules, both meeting their own interests while cooperating with each other. However, from the perspective of ordinary users, the cooperation between the two has damaged the expected image brought by previous airdrops. However, in the end, Web3 is also a commercial activity, and where there are benefits, there will inevitably be "rivers and lakes."

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