Imagine avoiding the pitfalls of falling TVL and declining users trust by strengthening your projects, which are well-positioned in the market or funded by your foundation, so that they are resistant to sibyls and withstand the post-airdrop phase. This proactive approach is the key to maintaining the success of your project and protecting against potential setbacks. And Nomis can help you with this.

TL;DR

• Airdrops in web3 marketing are essential for distributing tokens, promoting projects, and rewarding early adopters.

• Preventing Sybil attacks is critical to the success of airdrops; effective countermeasures lead to greater engagement and success. Airdrops attract Sybil attacks, leading to token devaluation and financial stress for projects.

• Projects use different methods for fair distribution (ranging from KYC verifications to biometric tools, each with its own pros and cons); some fail against Sybil attacks, while others like HOP and Arbitrum succeed.

• Nomis offers a robust solution that uses statistical methods and machine learning to accurately score wallet addresses – an advanced anti-Sybil tool that uses onchain data and AI modeling to protect airdrops and ensure fair distribution.

We are living in the Sybil era

The cryptocurrency landscape has evolved from such easily profitable areas as NFT flipping and ICOs to more complex ways of making a profit. Despite increased efforts to achieve profits, the temptation to make quick money remains strong in the crypto community, which is especially noticeable in the ongoing trend of airdrops.

Airdrops, which appeared long before the distribution from Aptos, Arbitrum, and even Uniswap, continue to attract users, especially those who remember the more profitable early days of cryptocurrency.

To benefit even more from airdrops, users resort to the well-known method of creating multiple accounts. These users are known as Sybils. Thus, they strive to get as much money as possible but thereby create real challenges for projects. Sybils exploit the airdrops, concentrating token ownership through major sell-offs, causing rapid token devaluation.

This exploitation has severe consequences, including financial stress for projects, eroded contributor trust, and declining TVL that impacts the entire blockchain ecosystem. In response, many projects have instituted stringent measures like KYC verification, necessitating the submission of IDs and Passports, to ensure equitable fund distribution.

Airdrops in web3 marketing: a revolution in project promotion

Airdrops have emerged as a crucial marketing strategy in the web3 landscape. They offer a direct method of distributing tokens to potential users and supporters, making them a hallmark of web3 project marketing.

This approach serves a dual purpose: promoting the project and rewarding early adopters. Therefore, it is vital to elevate the promotion of this profitable interaction for both projects and users to a new level.

The success of airdrops largely hinges on several factors, with the ability to prevent a Sybil attack being particularly important. Key case studies demonstrate that projects effectively countering Sybil attacks enjoy greater success and user engagement. Conversely, those unable to address this issue experience reduced profits and a damaged reputation.

The new era produces both winners and losers

Despite the fact that the success of airdrop depends on the ways to identify real users, some projects do not show vigilance and do not resort to Sybil recognition and preventing Sybil attacks.

Aptos is a prime example of the lack of anti-sibylline policies during its aerial landings. A significant number of tokens for $APT were in demand by airdrop hunters, which led to an overestimation of token prices during the listing, only to plummet with a huge drop. Research shows that a shocking 40% of the tokens uploaded to exchanges were received from Sybil addresses. This highlights the importance of remaining vigilant against Sybil attacks to ensure a sustainable blockchain ecosystem.

However, there are cases of token distribution within the crypto space that have been executed well, utilizing various methods to ensure proper allocation. And these methods are far from KYC and Passports:

• HOP and Optimism involve the community in identifying Sybils, thereby decentralizing the responsibility. They analyze users' onchain activities, examining address connections through fund transfers and transactions. This method evaluates onchain behaviors such as smart contract interactions, transaction timings, intervals, and active periods to identify patterns. However, excessively rigorous screening may inadvertently penalize genuine users. Delegating the authority for Sybil checks to the community could also harm interpersonal trust and exacerbate conflicts among members.

• Arbitrum stands out for its innovative approach to token distribution, which is based on onchain activity and community discovery algorithms like Louvain for Sybil cluster discovery.

• Celestia’s airdrop, the second largest in 2023, distributed $0.73 billion worth of $TIA. Unlike typical airdrops, it excluded 'farming' methods and instead focused on developers, researchers in public goods and protocol infrastructure, active Ethereum rollup users, and stakers and IBC relayers in Cosmos Hub and Osmosis. However, by limiting users' ability to participate in close quarters, the project runs the risk of diminishing loyalty, which can be crucial for future marketing campaigns.

How Nomis provides a Sybil-Resistance to projects

But there are isolated cases when projects used their own methods of fair distribution of tokens, and such methods depend on the goals and structure of the project itself. Not all the projects have the opportunity and time to implement their own way to determine Sybils.

Consequently, many resort to using KYC and social media verifications, necessitating Passports and IDs. However, this approach harbors risks of doxxing user identities and amassing sensitive personal information. Social media verification, in particular, emerges as time-consuming form of potential identity exposure. Recall the backlash against Uniswap's proposed optional KYC policy? This move sparked apprehensions about a gradual shift towards obligatory KYC and alignment with the SEC. Also, this kind of all this approach doesn't offer 100% protection against Sybils. This data can be still manipulated, forged, or used to frame others.

More sophisticated, yet complex, alternatives include biometric verification and AI-driven tools. Although these methods excel in identifying Sybil entities, their efficacy does not necessarily translate to user benefits. For instance, Worldcoin’s iris recognition and Sei’s facial scanning have ignited controversies. They underscore the privacy dilemmas and legal implications of collecting biometric data across various legal systems.

Even the esteemed figure in cryptocurrency, Vitalik Buterin, voices concerns. While acknowledging the promise of initiatives like Proof-of-Humanity, BrightID, and Worldcoin, Buterin remains cautious about their security and privacy ramifications. He underscores the critical need to strike an equilibrium between protecting personal information and ensuring precise individual identification.

As we can see, there are numerous methods to run a marketing campaign successfully and effectively, each with its own pros and cons. However, here's the catch: the fewer and less frequent projects shave Sybils, the faster their numbers grow.

This increases the likelihood of unfair distribution and poses a risk of failure for the entire marketing campaign, potentially wasting the project's budget.

On the other hand, the better projects are at identifying Sybils, the more sophisticated they become in distinguishing them from real users. That's why it's crucial to have a solution that can accurately recognize Sybils. Nomis is precisely such a solution.

Nomis proposes your blockchain ecosystem to protect your higher TVL growth rates while mitigating the risk of its dramatic drops and loss of community trust by hiring Sybil Slayer, the market's #1 Anti-Sybil solution, as your ecosystem-wide Sybil resistance tool to help the projects built on your network grow faster by leveraging the airdrop GTM without the risk of being drained and graved by bots. No need to hire a team of analysts and mathematicians.

How Nomis’ Sybil Slayer slays Sybils

Nomis has launched an Anti-Sybil solution, Sybil Slayer, that enables web3 projects to protect their airdrops from bots and make distributions ROI-efficient.

The solution leverages 50+ onchain data points around a wallet and AI-powered mathematical modeling technologies, and sits on an infrastructure connected to 45+ top TVL blockchains and more than 30 data sources, including block explorers, Chainanlysis, HAPI, Greysafe, Snapshot, etc.

1. Data collection and enrichment: by gathering extensive onchain data and enriching it with third-party sources, Sybil Slayer establishes a comprehensive profile of each wallet. This step helps identify patterns indicative of Sybil behavior, like the age of the wallet and its interactions.

2. Expert assessment: statistical analysis of this data helps to flag wallets with unusual activities or minimal transaction values, common traits of Sybil accounts.

3. Neural network integration: the neural network models complex relationships in the data, enhancing the ability to distinguish between legitimate and bot-like patterns in wallet behavior.

4. Deep neural network application: utilizing advanced neural networks like RNNs and LSTMs, Sybil Slayer can analyze temporal patterns and transaction sequences, crucial for detecting sophisticated Sybil strategies that evolve over time.

Sybil Slayer's process fine-tunes its ability to distinguish between real user actions and Sybil tricks at each step. Each step is like a puzzle piece, gathering data and utilizing AI to improve its ability to identify fakes.

Let’s survive the Sybil era together!

Stay tuned for an upcoming article on how Sybil Resistance led to higher ROI! A detailed analysis of Rubic Exchange's case study shows Nomis Solutions' effectiveness in identifying target users and improving engagement strategies.

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