Original | Odaily Planet Daily

Author | Azuma

On May 2nd, the cross-chain interoperability protocol LayerZero officially announced that the first snapshot (Snapshot #1) has been completed and more information will be announced soon. As one of the most anticipated potential airdrop projects in the community, LayerZero's brief official announcement has been interpreted by the community as "the airdrop snapshot has been completed, and something big is coming."

On May 3rd, Layer Zero officially teased that an important announcement would be made that evening to "demonstrate continued trust in community members." However, just as the community speculated whether LayerZero was about to announce detailed airdrop rules, the announcement released by LayerZero turned out to be a heavy blow to all users — tokens are indeed going to be distributed, but multiple rounds of witch screening activities need to be conducted first.

Airdrop Background: Six Million Users

According to the official documentation, when formulating the token distribution plan, LayerZero needs to consider a key factor in determining the most optimal user cluster. In LayerZero's view, the most optimal users should be the most "persistent" users, and "persistence" is defined as those who are most likely to continue using LayerZero in the future or continue their past usage habits.

On the evening of May 2nd, LayerZero co-founder Bryan Pellegrino replied to the community on X, stating that, considering all networks covered by LayerZero, the actual total user base of the protocol is approximately 5.8 million addresses. The official announcement last night revealed that the current user base of LayerZero is close to 6 million addresses.

Considering past airdrop cases in the industry, over a million addresses can be considered a large scale. Therefore, for LayerZero, it is necessary to reduce the scope of the airdrop through mechanism design or witch screening to distribute tokens in a way that better aligns with the project's expectations to potential users.

Witch Judgment Rules

In the official materials released by LayerZero, specific screening rules have not been provided (possibly to prevent witches from self-inspection, which may affect the effectiveness of the "self-exposure" stage mentioned below). Instead, several examples of interaction records that may be considered witch behavior are listed, and Bryan also provided some additional explanations on certain examples on his personal X account.

In summary, interaction behaviors that may lead to an address being identified as a witch include:

• Acting as a single person or entity, but conducting batch interactions using dozens, hundreds, or thousands of addresses;

• For the purpose of cross-chain transfer of NFTs between different chains, minting a "worthless" NFT;

• Using common "witch brushing" applications such as Merkly, L2Pass, L2Marathon;

• Leaving interaction records across multiple networks by transferring extremely small amounts (e.g., 0.01 USD) between different chains;

• If you think you are a witch, then you probably are a witch.

Regarding the judgment of using tools such as Merkly, some users questioned that this may lead to a large-scale "false positive." Bryan responded by stating, "If you are a genuine user who has used Merkly to reduce gas costs, you may not be identified as a witch. However, if you are only using Merkly to transfer assets back and forth, then you may be a witch."

Witch Screening Rounds

According to LayerZero's official disclosure, the witch cleansing activity will be conducted in three rounds.

The first round is the "self-exposure" stage, which will last for 14 days. Users who suspect themselves of being witches can "self-expose" through the window provided by LayerZero in this stage to retain 15% of the airdrop allocation. It is worth mentioning that, to facilitate "self-exposure," LayerZero also "thoughtfully" provides an API tool for mass address submission.

The second stage is the "trial" stage, during which the official will conduct witch screening based on its own scale. The screening results will be announced on May 18th, and addresses identified in this stage will not receive any airdrop allocation.

The third stage is the "accusation" stage, which will continue from May 18th to May 31st. LayerZero encourages community users to report witch behaviors against each other, and successful accusers can receive 10% of the airdrop allocation of the accused address.

The largest witch cleansing activity in history?

Considering the schedule disclosed by LayerZero, it is likely that the governance token of the protocol will be officially issued after the "accusation" stage ends on May 31st, so the expected token issuance date should be in June.

For users eagerly anticipating the LayerZero airdrop, they will need to endure a full month of witch cleansing activity before receiving the final reward. Considering the enormous user base of LayerZero itself, coupled with the reusability of the witch label in different projects, what LayerZero is initiating may not only be the largest witch cleansing activity in history, but its screening results may also have a profound impact on potential airdrops of other projects in the future.

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