It’s time to pull back the curtain on Web3, and unmask all the projects bragging about their "hundreds of thousands" of users 😈😈😈 Before I dive in, let me say this clearly: we live in a time where anyone can be labeled a racist for anything. So to be absolutely clear: I have zero issues with the nationalities mentioned below. Much love to everyone. Last week, we were hit by a massive wave of "farmers" downloading the app mostly from the countries below, and the stats are terrifying: 🇳🇬 Nigeria - 1658 users - <1$ 🇮🇩 Indonesia - 6151 users - 489$ 🇧🇩 Bangladesh - 3831 users - 0$ 🇵🇰 Pakistan - 1515 users - 10$ 🇵🇭 The Philippines - 1271 users - 278$ We left the faucet running for two days - imagine if we’d left it on for a month or six? We could have claimed 500K users! Want to know if your favorite project has real users? Just ask them where their users are coming from 😁 Why were they here? Only to farm a "free money" quest. We were offering 5 $MASS just for completing KYC. Here’s what I did to stop the bleeding fast: 1. Blocked KYC access for those users. Every KYC attempt costs us money. 2. Updated the quest requirement from "Complete KYC" to "Trade at least $500 in stocks." Why? Because they weren’t here to use the app, they were just there to extract value. If they’re forced to actually spend, they’ll move on. I’m here to protect the company and help it grow with strong metrics and real users. I’d rather have 1,000 real users and show that number proudly, than 100k fake ones that mean nothing. I’m also here to protect our real, active and loyal users - the kind that gets crushed when airdrops are abused by bots and sybils. That’s why most airdrops have a bad rep today. They were botted. Farmed. Fake. Projects use it to pump their social stats, trading volume, or boost TVL for a few month. It helps teams raise more money, find exit liquidity in OTC, and simply grabs attention. Ego loves that. So why did @HyperliquidX or @LayerZero_Core airdrops have been a success? - HL only rewarded real users. There was no way to farm it without having skin in the game. - LZ made a serious effort to filter out sybils and bots. @paraswap (now @VeloraDEX) also did something great back in the day, but at the time, talking about sybils and bots was like saying the Earth was round in the Middle Ages. We do this industry a disservice when we pretend a fake reality is real, and selling to new builders a dream that they won't be able to live. There are probably no more than 30K real, active on-chain traders today. That’s the truth. Yes, projects like Pump, Opensea, or Uniswap may have hit 100K+ unique users at peak - but I don’t believe any other project can seriously claim that today. So now, just ignore the projects claiming they have "hundreds of thousands" of users. And VCs, please, stop being fooled. Retail is getting smarter every day. I hope this thread just reveals a few more of the rules they’ve already figured out.
