Airdrop farmers have started spamming GitHub repositories about projects that may initiate token airdrops in the future, much to the frustration of developers.
“Don’t submit GitHub issues solely for agricultural purposes,” said a researcher at Scroll known as Pseudo. “The Scroll core team is stretched thin as is, so don’t make our lives any harder.”
Airdrop farming is not new. Since some large projects suddenly gave away governance tokens to early users in 2020, people have been trying to game the system by doing things to other projects that they think will qualify them for future airdrops. Typically, this has focused on on-chain activities, such as transactions on a blockchain network.
However, with recent airdrops like Celestia and Starknet, the distribution criteria have changed. Celestia gave away 6% of its supply as an airdrop, with a third of that going primarily to contributors on GitHub.
The Starknet Foundation has allocated approximately 7% of the airdrop to contributing developers, with claims set to begin on February 20th. Starknet developers comprised 2% of the 700 million token airdrop, while 5% was allocated to open source developers outside of Ethereum and web3.
1 qualified contributor who performed a simple spell check received A single comment that wasn’t even merged resulted in 1,800 Starknet tokens. This may be because eligible Starknet developers include those who contributed at least three commits to the repositories included in Starknet’s Electric Capital report before November 15, 2023. At current pre-release prices, this could be worth $3,200.
Naturally, since this is an inclusion criterion, airdrop hunters are targeting GitHub repositories of projects that don’t yet have tokens.
One airdrop strategist cited the Starknet airdrop as follows: justify contribution Join Scroll GitHub for additional stakes in potential airdrops. “Open source contributions play a critical role in the digital age,” they said.
Spam GitHub comments
FALSE famous The Scroll GitHub repository received more than 1,000 comments over the weekend, most of which came from airdrop farmers. If you look at one of the main zkSync repositories, you’ll see an increase in comments, with people making basic requests that the project be integrated with other protocols.
“Airdrop farmers are also part of the cryptocurrency community, but it is important for people to contribute based on their strengths rather than following trends. Outside of GitHub, we are seeing healthy ecosystem growth as the fastest growing rollup based on L2beat. Scroll has always put community first and there is a place for everyone,” Pseudo told The Block.
There are several ways your project can prevent spam on GitHub. For example, Pseudo said it had introduced a temporary limit on submissions for one week. However, while it’s easy to block newly created accounts, the problem gets trickier if the airdrop farmer has a GitHub account that they’ve been using for a while and has made multiple comments. This is because it is harder to distinguish them from actual contributors.
But the easiest way to fix it is to look for spelling errors, so maybe your comment isn’t all bad. or as Synthetix Spartan Council member Millie Put“The hope with the new airdrop farming meta is that all cryptocurrency github repositories will at least have perfect syntax now.”
Update: Doctors have confirmed temporary restrictions have been implemented.
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