Why Airdrop Strategies Must Account for Plural Identity

Legacy airdrop models reward wallet activity, not human users. This creates perverse incentives for bot farms, diluting real user rewards and wasting ~$1B+ in cumulative token value on empty addresses.

• Key Consequence: Real user acquisition cost skyrockets as value leaks to Sybils.
• Key Consequence: Community trust erodes when rewards are gamed by sophisticated actors.

Worldcoin's World ID uses zero-knowledge proofs and biometric orbs to issue a global, privacy-preserving proof of unique humanness. It's the foundational Sybil-resistance primitive.

• Key Benefit: Enables per-person airdrop allocations, not per-wallet.
• Key Benefit: ~5M+ verified humans creates a portable, reusable identity layer for any protocol.

A composable, non-biometric identity aggregator. Users collect 'stamps' from Web2 (Github, Twitter) and Web3 (ENS, POAP) to build a decentralized identity score, proving reputation without a single point of failure.

• Key Benefit: Pluralistic scoring allows protocols to customize airdrop criteria (e.g., weight developer stamps higher).
• Key Benefit: ~500k+ active passports provide a rich, opt-in data graph for targeted rewards.

The Ethereum Name Service provides the crucial human-readable username for the plural identity stack. It's the persistent, user-owned handle that ties together a person's disparate on-chain actions and assets.

• Key Benefit: ~2.8M+ .eth names create a durable, user-controlled identity anchor.
• Key Benefit: Enables personalized airdrops (e.g., 'alice.eth') and builds lasting user-protoocol relationships.

Sismo uses zero-knowledge proofs to let users aggregate credentials from multiple sources (e.g., Gitcoin Passport, DAO membership) into a single, private 'ZK Badge' without revealing underlying data.

• Key Benefit: Selective disclosure allows users to prove traits (e.g., 'Top 100 Gitcoin donor') for airdrop eligibility without doxxing their entire history.
• Key Benefit: ~250k+ attestations enable privacy-preserving, granular user segmentation.

The end-state is a stack where World ID provides Sybil-resistance, Passport/ Sismo provide reputation, and ENS provides the front-end. Airdrops evolve into targeted incentive programs.

• Key Benefit: 90%+ efficiency gain in user acquisition cost by rewarding real humans with relevant histories.
• Key Benefit: Protocols can design loyalty gradients (e.g., higher rewards for long-term contributors vs. new users).

Treating each wallet as a unique user creates a massive incentive for farming. Sophisticated actors deploy thousands of wallets, diluting real users and siphoning ~30% of airdrop value on average. This directly funds parasitic, not productive, ecosystem activity.

• Key Benefit 1: Target capital, not wallet counts, to align incentives.
• Key Benefit 2: Use on-chain clustering (e.g., Nansen, Arkham) to de-duplicate before the drop.

A real user is not one wallet. They are a DeFi degen wallet, a cold storage vault, and a gaming NFT bag all controlled by one entity. Naive airdrop snapshots punish this behavior, fragmenting their contribution and missing their true value.

• Key Benefit 1: Implement identity graphs (e.g., ENS, Proof of Personhood) to unify activity.
• Key Benefit 2: Reward consistent engagement across multiple addresses, not one-off interactions.

Move beyond simple transaction volume. Build a reputation graph using EigenLayer, Karak, or GaiaNet that scores wallets based on longevity, diversity of interactions, and capital-at-risk. Allocate airdrops based on this reputation score, not raw gas spent.

• Key Benefit 1: Incentivizes long-term, high-quality participation.
• Key Benefit 2: Makes sybil farming economically non-viable by raising the cost of reputation.

The ultimate defense is cryptographic proof of unique humanity without exposing identity. Protocols like Worldcoin, Polygon ID, and zkPass enable verification that a user is real and singular behind their wallet cluster, enabling fair distribution without KYC.

• Key Benefit 1: Enables true 1-person-1-vote/airdrop mechanics at scale.
• Key Benefit 2: Preserves privacy while solving the sybil problem at its root.

Retroactive drops (e.g., Uniswap, Arbitrum) are inherently gamable. Shift to proactive, programmatic rewards (e.g., Jito, EigenLayer) that distribute tokens continuously for ongoing work like staking or providing liquidity. This turns airdrops into a salary, not a lottery.

• Key Benefit 1: Aligns rewards with real-time value creation.
• Key Benefit 2: Dramatically reduces snapshot-gaming and mercenary capital.

LayerZero's airdrop required an on-chain attestation to claim, creating a sybil-filtering moment. This simple mechanism forced farmers to consolidate claims onto fewer wallets, exposing their graphs. Future designs must bake in attestation and clustering checks at the protocol level.

• Key Benefit 1: Creates a costly, on-chain proof-of-work for farmers.
• Key Benefit 2: Generates public data to refine future identity graphs.