Thread by @Auri_0x

1/ Certain individuals are running operations sybilling crypto projects and netting upwards of $500k for each big airdrop.

I've talked with a whale who made millions of industrial farming airdrops

Here are the main takeaways

2/ Disclaimer I do not endorse sybilling, I actually want projects to stop fking raining money this way so I can stop feeling intense FOMO, ty

With that said, this is BY far easiest way to build insane wealth without any advanced skills.

3/ The process of Sybil attacking protocols includes four main stages:

1. Distributing required crypto assets to multiple addresses

2. On-chain preparations, "leveling" wallets

3. The state-of-art practices

4. Withdrawing tokens

5. Operations

6. Future airdrops

4/ During all four stages, the goal is to hide any connections between addresses on the chain and off-chain

5/ Distribution

6/ To fund the wallets, he uses CEXes with (1) cheap withdrawal fees and (2) ability to create sub-accounts. Realistically sending from exchanges, bridges, or any platforms that generate thousands of daily withdrawals and break the chain sender/receiver is ok but CEXs are best

7/ Choice of platform is critical: using anonymization services (hello Aztec), or god forbid dispensers for bundling transactions is a sure way to get labeled as a sybilooor. The next level is to ensure randomized amounts are sent at different time frames from high volume CEXs

8/ On-chain preparations

9/ The first order of business is to ensure that the address looks real on-chain. The whale uses an anti-detect browser and has a dedicated fingerprint and proxy for each separate address. All front-end interactions happen through a dedicated profile

10/ The parameters he recommends working on:

- Age of the wallet aka date of 1st transaction, the older the better
- high nonce (№ of transactions)
- strictly no interconnections with other wallets

11/ - diverse portfolio of tokens (including NFTs) on different chains
- relatively high net worth of an address ($100 and upwards is good). These last two mostly important for NFT raffles for example.

12/ Advanced recommendations to qualify for more drops:

- raising your Degenscore
- buying ENS
- creating and managing social networks for each address (think dedicated Twitter and Discord)

13/ Voila, you are bullet proof for sybil hunter... or are you?
For 95% of people this is more than enough but if you are running industrial airdrop farming, you tend to go the extra steps. Now we are going in state-of-art territory of pro sybilers.

14/ The whale says that after HOP and Optimism Sybil hunting it wouldn't surprise him that protocols will try to implement some form of Sybil resistance. So I've asked what is his plan

15/ State-of-art sybilling

16/ Whale now contemplates other factors such as
- interaction patterns
- frequency
- transaction volumes
- on-chain KYC

17/ Interaction patterns mean for example the latency of interaction between different addresses - you need to ensure that there is a set of other addresses’ transactions in-between yours especially if you dealing with a relatively unpopular contract

18/ And it also includes the sequence of actions/interactions and if they make sense. For example, bridging to different chains only to bridge out is a sure indicator that someone is sybilling.

19/ Or for instance, if you do a series of repetitive actions across 100s of addresses, like swap, send, and provide liquidity on a specific DEX, then you’d want to mix and randomize these actions.

20/ As for the frequency, the more, the better, but all you need is to pass the unknown minimum threshold and don’t raise suspicion. The same applies to volumes: you don’t need thousands of dollars to farm; 10-20$ dollars are okay; just refrain from dealing with cents.

21/ The whale uses @Dune dashboards to understand how he can set himself apart from 80%+ while preserving capital for maximum scale

22/ E.g., if you were to bridge 0.1 ETH to zkSync, you'd bridge more than 73% of users. And your goal is to always be in a top percentile across as many metrics as possible

23/ Speaking of on-chain KYC, the whale has recently bought 500+ Galxe ID and Binance BAB tokens that verify ID on chain. Additionally, he's looking to fill in a gitcoin passport passport.gitcoin.co and buy 500 Bright IDs.

24/ Cashing out

25/ Say you received a huge airdrop, now what?

To cash out, the best course of action would be to withdraw into UNIQUE deposit addresses on the CEXs. As it is difficult to deal with 100s of accounts on CEXs our whale prefers using the ones with 10 sub-accounts like FTX or OKex

26/ For future considerations, it may be a good idea to hold on to part of the airdrop (5-10%) so that address is not labeled as a dumper. He thinks that Optimism may use this as a criterion for 2nd airdrop

27/ Ideally, however, when you sell airdrop and you use the money to fund future operations so that nothing leaves your wallet and doesn't put you at any risk of connecting your network of addresses

28/ The way he sees it, taking time to build out beliveable on-chain addresses is the best investment to make during bear (and low gas) times.

29/ Now you may think who the hell has the time to do this? Well, he isn't doing it himself.

30/ Operations

31/ The whale has an offline office with 3 full-time workers and 1 supervisor. He's paying them a high salary relative to country, which is about $700/month. Recently they introduced safety measures such as CCTV and occasional screen recording

32/ He said they never had any incidents, working for more than a year. He didn't go into any further details regarding safety measures and employee relationships.

33/ Future airdrops

34/ He's primarily looking at high-valuation, US VC backed projects. With those, even a small piece of the pie is still huge for individual. Not much alpha here but here is the list he's currently working through:
Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync, LayerZero, Layer3 (?)

35/ To conclude, I think crypto projects ought to start taking sybil resistance more seriously and rethink their approach.

The best case of sybil protection was implemented by @GyroStable. On a larger scale, I think Optimism approach has been quite effective I'd say.