Why Modular Airdrops Require a New Standard for Eligibility

Modular activity is invisible. A user bridging to Base via Across, swapping on Uniswap, and lending on Aave creates immense protocol value, but this fragmented journey is lost to isolated eligibility checks.

Current standards are monolithic. Projects like Arbitrum and Starknet snapshot single-chain state, a model incompatible with the cross-chain intent architectures of UniswapX and CowSwap.

The cost is misaligned incentives. Users optimize for simple, on-chain farming (e.g., perpetual NFT minting) instead of genuine protocol usage, degrading the quality of distributed governance tokens.

Merkle proofs are chain-bound. A proof for an Arbitrum user is useless on Polygon, forcing each rollup to maintain its own massive, redundant eligibility tree. This creates a data synchronization nightmare across fragmented ecosystems like Optimism Superchain and Arbitrum Orbit.

The gas cost is prohibitive. Storing a single proof on-chain for millions of users, as seen in early Uniswap and Arbitrum airdrops, consumes millions in gas and permanently bloats state. This model fails at the scale of modular, multi-chain user bases.

Proof aggregation is the solution. Protocols like EigenLayer and Avail demonstrate that verifiable data availability (DA) and validity proofs enable trust-minimized state attestations. An eligibility standard must use these to prove user history without moving the raw data.

The new standard is a state attestation. Instead of a Merkle proof, a user presents a compact validity proof that their address satisfied criteria on a source chain. This proof is verified against a canonical root stored in a shared DA layer, decoupling eligibility from execution.

Indexers are not verifiers. They query archived state, but airdrop eligibility demands a cryptographically provable claim about a user's past on-chain actions. A centralized indexer's data is an opinion, not a proof.

The Sybil attack surface is immense. Projects like LayerZero and Starknet faced massive Sybil farms because their criteria relied on indexable, gameable patterns. A standard must embed proof-of-personhood or cost-of-attack signals directly into the eligibility logic.

Compare Arbitrum's approach. Their airdrop used complex, off-chain calculations for eligibility, creating opacity and controversy. A standardized framework would mandate on-chain attestations or zero-knowledge proofs for each claim, making the process transparent and trust-minimized from the start.

Airdrop eligibility is fragmented. Each protocol defines its own on-chain criteria, creating isolated data silos. This forces users to manually bridge and interact across chains like Arbitrum and Optimism, generating redundant proof-of-work for each new airdrop campaign.

The cost is user experience and capital efficiency. Users lock liquidity in dozens of separate ecosystems to farm points, while protocols waste resources verifying the same underlying behavior. This is the antithesis of modularity's promise of shared security and specialization.

The solution is a portable eligibility standard. A standard like EIP-7007 for zk-proofs of ownership, but for on-chain actions, would allow a user's proof of liquidity provision on Uniswap to be a verifiable input for an airdrop on a new L3, without moving assets.

Evidence: The success of intent-based architectures like UniswapX and Across Protocol proves the demand for abstracted, user-centric execution. A standard for eligibility data is the logical next layer of abstraction, turning fragmented activity into a portable asset.