Cryptocurrency airdrops have been known to provide billions of dollars in value to those active in the ecosystem, but they are by no means perfect.
Over the years, more and more people have tried to gamify the system, using multiple wallets to “farm” airdrops in advance (often a successful speculative game). This has forced projects doing airdrops to be more strict about their distribution. On-chain analytics has been used to weed out these airdrop farmers, but this has often come at the expense of real users. As a result, airdrops have become more controversial, and bad airdrops risk damaging a project’s reputation.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin thinks he has a solution.“Airdrops are an exciting early use case for our ZK/blockchain-based identity/credentials/proof framework,” Buterin wrote on X today, referencing zero-knowledge proofs technology that provides the ability to enhance privacy using cryptographic proofs.
Buterin said the goal of the airdrop is to distribute tokens to actual community members rather than farmers, rewarding them for their contributions to the project, and achieving reasonable equality.
“These are accurately Properties of the Identity/Credentials/Proof Framework “That’s what we’re trying to do,” he said. “So it makes perfect sense for anyone building these frameworks to use token issuance as an initial use case to beta test and improve their work in a hostile environment.”
When asked about the biggest hurdle to this approach, he added, “I don’t think there’s a single solution. I think there are a number of factors that have to evolve over time. It’s an inherently hard problem, but it’s a very rewarding problem, because if you solve it, you can naturally export that solution and make all sorts of things that aren’t currently rewarded in our economy much better across humanity.”
Buterin also said that tokens do not have to be given away for free. Discounted sales are also an option. For example, the contributions that community members make to the project could help determine how many tokens can be purchased at a discounted price.
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