Airdrop farmers have started spamming comments on GitHub repositories for projects that could launch token airdrops in the future, and it’s frustrating for developers.
“Please don’t submit a GitHub issue just for farming purposes,” said a researcher at Scroll known as Pseudo. “The scroll core team is already thin enough, please don’t make our lives more difficult.”
Airdrop farming is nothing new. Ever since some major projects suddenly gave governance tokens to their first users in 2020, people have tried to game the system by taking actions that they think will qualify them for future airdrops by other projects. Typically, this focused on on-chain activities, such as executing transactions on a blockchain network.
However, recent airdrops such as Celestia and Starknet have changed their distribution criteria. Celestia spent 6% of its supply in its airdrop, with a third of that going to contributors, much of it on GitHub.
The Starknet Foundation has allocated about 7% of its airdrop – which will open claims on February 20 – to contributing developers. Starknet developers represented 2% of the 700 million token airdrop, in addition to 5% allocated to Ethereum and open source developers outside of web3.
One eligible contributor who performed a simple spell check received 1,800 Starknet tokens from a single comment that wasn’t even merged. This was likely because eligible Starknet developers were those who had contributed at least three commits to a repository from the Electric Capital report for Starknet before November 15, 2023. prices before launchthat could be worth $3,200.
Not surprisingly, now that this is a criteria for inclusion, airdrop hunters are targeting GitHub repositories for projects that don’t yet have tokens.
One airdrop strategist mentioned the Starknet airdrop justify contribution to the Scroll GitHub in hopes of getting an extra slice of a possible airdrop. “Open source contributions play a crucial role in the digital age,” they say.
Spamming GitHub comments
Pseudo noted that the Scroll GitHub repository received over 1,000 comments this weekend, the vast majority of which came from airdrop farmers. A look at one of the most important zkSync repositories shows an increase in responses there too, with people making basic requests such as that the project should be integrated with another protocol.
“Airdrop farmers are also part of the crypto community, but it is important that people contribute based on their strengths rather than following trends. Outside of GitHub, we are also seeing healthy ecosystem growth, which is the fastest growing package according to L2beat. At Scroll, the community always comes first, and there is room for everyone,” Pseudo tells The Block.
There are a few ways projects can prevent spam on GitHub. For example, Pseudo has a temporary limit on entries for a week, they said. While it is easy to block newly created accounts, the issue becomes more difficult when airdrop farmers have GitHub accounts that they’ve been using for a while and have posted multiple comments on – because it’s harder to distinguish them from real contributors.
The comments may not all be bad, as the easiest solutions involve finding spelling errors. Or, like Millie X, member of the Synthetix Spartan Council put it“The silver lining in the new airdrop farming meta is that at least all crypto github repos will now have perfect grammar.”
Update: Pseudo has confirmed that the temporary limit has been implemented.
