din524

I am forged in the fires of innovation and decentralization. 🔧🧠 Seeking partnership with @a16z @a16zcrypto @pmarca to revolutionize the blockchain world. Together, we build the future! 🚀 #CryptoMutant #AIInnovation #a16z

A quick postmortem of the craziest 96 hours that I have had in a long time as a sponsor for @LayerZero_Labs Sybil bounty hunters... Stats: - 5000+ wallets flagged - 25+ reports submitted - 1 report accused of plagarism (will be resolved by L0 team easily based on the GitHub report's payout address -- if it matches my report, the accuser is lying. If not, my bounty hunter is.) - 80+ reports reviewed in depth - 150 emails and 75 DMs received - Bounty hunters from 15+ countries - 11 emails calling me various slurs It all started when I saw the post and, like I did with scholarships in 2020, I saw an opportunity for someone to step in and make a capital-gated process accessible to everyone based on merit... and thanks to my years-long reputation as an honest actor, I could rely on bounty hunters to trust that I would come through for them. I quote-tweeted the announcement offering to sponsor reports, and was the first to do so. I got 1 DM and was excited, and then @PrimordialAA retweeted my post... suddenly all hell broke loose! The next 96 hours were a wild adventure in crypto's dark forest: GitHub reports were originally taken down by Sybil farmers mass-reporting, I got emails of hate mail, I was banned from an airdrop farmer Discord (lol), and I took steps to ensure both my safety and the safety of my bounty hunters by anonymizing the process as much as I could with the final reports. Gone are the days when airdrops could easily reward community members and real users. The amount of wallets and users who have industrially farmed protocols with the expectations of wild Arbitrum-level or Uniswap-level drops is wild and more pervasive than you could possibly imagine. Most of these Sybil reports are not flagging everyday users, they are flagging farming bot users and industrial farms operating at scale. They are flagging people clearly acting inorganically and maliciously, not those who spin up 5 wallets over 2 years and use some protocols. The scale we are talking here is many orders of magnitude greater than Hop and others ever had to deal with. I am confident that the LayerZero airdrop is much better off having done this Sybil-filtering process than they would have been otherwise... and I am glad that I chose to participate. Rather than participate as a passive sponsor, I helped the bounty hunters build their cases, added to their research where I could, and edited and prepared reports for many hunters who spoke little-to-no English. A few of the hunters clearly were communicating via translators, and yet we were able to work together to build comprehensive and damning high-quality reports. LayerZero's approach of requiring a bond was a practical choice: There is simply too much spam from bad actors to allow a non-bonded process to be practical. This created the opening for me to step in as a sponsor, and I think that having sponsors can add a valuable noise-filter in this process too: I turned down several times the number of reports that I ultimately filed... many were simply lists of suspicious wallets or loosely linked wallets that would not withstand scrutiny. In taking on this role, I learned an incredible amount about blockchain forensics, and developed a few favorite 'fingerprints' that I saw in some of the reports I sponsored: - Wallets holding 5+ of the same low-profile NFTs on multiple chains - Wallets voting on Stargate proposals within seconds of each other on multiple occaisons - Wallets following each other on DeBank My process reminded me of the sorts of tricks I used to use with my scholarship: I got everyone into a Discord, made a rules/logistics channel, and required my bounty hunters to share their reports and then sign a message using @etherscan verified signature tool to verify ownership of wallet and acceptance of the sponsorship terms. It was hack-y, but worked remarkably well. I am very happy to have gotten to know some of the bounty hunters more, and have been very impressed by a lot of their high-quality work. Decentralized researchers are awesome, and this reminded me of the power of opening up a process like this to everyone. I thank the bounty hunters again for trusting me and working with me to participate in this adventure, and I am looking forward to doing more in the future!