A Brief History of Web3 Airdrops: A Look at Twelve Landmark Projects That Turned the Tables

Original Author: Biteye

Once upon a time, airdrops in the crypto world were thrilling "rags-to-riches" legends, reminiscent of the Uniswap, ENS, and Arbitrum eras. Early users and project teams mutually benefited, evangelists and builders shared the rewards, constituting a brief yet genuinely existing "golden honeymoon" period.

However, as the clock moved past 2023 into 2026, the influx of massive capital, the extreme internal competition among professional studios, and the insatiable appetite of project teams have completely altered the airdrop landscape.

"Interaction brings blessings" has degenerated into a "cyber harvesting field." Airdrop farming has transformed from an early-stage benefit into a systematic reverse harvest.

Retail investors have been redefined: free beta testers, cheap liquidity providers, and an endless stream of data producers.

In an environment of long-term opaque rules and constantly rewritten expectations, what often arrives in the end is not a reward, but being zeroed out, diluted, or even directly eliminated.

In this article, we review 12 landmark "reverse-farming" projects in airdrop history, examining how trust was gradually exhausted step by step.

1. Hop Protocol (HOP): Ushering in the "Sybil" Era.

• Reverse-Farming Process: The cross-chain bridge star HOP pioneered a chilling "community reporting of Sybil" mechanism. The rules were extremely manipulative: reporters could take a share of the reported addresses' allocations. For a moment, it felt as if Shang Yang, who implemented collective punishment and denunciation systems millennia ago, had time-traveled to Web3.
• Reverse-Farming Characteristics: Pitting the masses against each other in a bottom-tier mutual harm. The project team offloaded the dirty work of on-chain address correlation review onto users, exploiting human greed to incite community infighting, even uploading the reported list to GitHub for the entire industry to "reuse."
• Far-Reaching Impact: After HOP, Sybil hunting became the "political correctness" for all token-distributing projects. On-chain interaction shifted from "experiencing decentralized products" to an extremely draining cat-and-mouse game. Combating Sybil attacks is necessary, but completely outsourcing the review responsibility to the community, even encouraging mutual harm, severely damaged the community ecosystem.

2. Blast: The Father of the Infamous "Points System"

• Reverse-Farming Process: Blast, backed by Paradigm's top-tier halo, abandoned traditional interaction models, requiring users to lock ETH or stablecoins to earn "points." Rules were changed multiple times overnight. Whales and top NFT players reaped substantial profits, while ordinary users, after locking funds for months, found their token returns couldn't even beat risk-free interest rates during the same period.
• Reverse-Farming Characteristics: Ponzi-fication and blind box gambling. Users, swept up in endless FOMO, became free ATMs for the project's TVL data.
• Far-Reaching Impact: Starting with Blast, "points nesting dolls" became an industry standard. The points system was intended to encourage long-term user participation, but frequent rule adjustments and severe profit imbalances ultimately eroded user trust in projects. Web3 airdrop farmers were reduced to Web2 laborers, and the decentralized spirit Web3 prided itself on died completely under capital's calculations.

3. LayerZero (ZRO): The Critical Point of Trust Collapse

• Reverse-Farming Process: After 18 months of cross-chain interactions that cost users massive Gas fees, the project team introduced the strictest Sybil review in history just before the token launch, even demanding users "voluntarily confess" to retain a partial allocation, otherwise face a complete wipeout. A large number of genuinely active users and small studios were zeroed out.
• Reverse-Farming Characteristics: Extremely arrogant "presumption of guilt." The project team milked users for their exorbitant fee contributions, then turned around to treat them like thieves, subjecting them to suspicion and humiliation.
• Far-Reaching Impact: LayerZero single-handedly destroyed the grand narrative of "multi-chain interaction." Sybil farming needs review, but the crude execution of "presumption of guilt + confession mechanism" further accelerated the collapse of trust. From then on, the "stinky penguin" became infamous for eternity, and "reverse-farming" became the Sword of Damocles hanging over every airdrop farmer's head. Retail investors fully understood: in the face of absolute interpretive power, your efforts are worthless.

4. zkSync (ZK): The Complete End of the L2 Interaction Airdrop Era

• Reverse-Farming Process: As one of the former four major L2 kings, zkSync kept the community on edge for years. After absorbing hundreds of millions of dollars in Gas fee contributions, its airdrop rules performed a shocking black box operation: drastically reducing the weight of transaction count and activity, instead using "fund retention at specific times" as the core threshold. This resulted in massive numbers of long-term interactive users who grew with the project receiving nothing, while internal insider wallets and new accounts that deposited money at the last minute received huge allocations.
• Reverse-Farming Characteristics: Luring Gas fees with "activity," then kicking people out with "capital amount."
• Far-Reaching Impact: zkSync's extremely ugly greed plunged the entire market into utter despair over L2 airdrops. Controlling Sybil and farming armies is necessary, but black box rules disheartened genuine early contributors. Subsequently launched new L2s directly faced the dilemma of "no one cares," with no retail investors willing to be free on-chain laborers anymore.

5. Infinex: The Public Sale Mechanism Collapse

• Reverse-Farming Process: As a cross-chain DeFi aggregation platform endorsed by Synthetix founder Kain Warwick, Infinex was once seen as a "legitimate" representative in the community's eyes. It lured users into investing significant capital and effort through Patron NFTs and months-long points campaigns. However, when the public sale opened in January 2026, the community was met with an extremely high FDV valuation, an outrageously unreasonable "mandatory one-year lock-up," and chaotic distribution logic. Participation on the first day of the public sale suffered a Waterloo-like defeat, forcing the project team to urgently "patch" and modify the rules multiple times amidst a storm of criticism.
• Reverse-Farming Characteristics: A "public sale reversal" under high expectations. This tactic of first painting a picture with NFT narratives and then changing the public sale rules at the last minute turned long-term supporters' investments into instantly locked-in sunk costs.
• Far-Reaching Impact: The Infinex incident fully exposed the risks of the "NFT + points for public sale" model, earning the project team endless "greetings" to their families from the community.

6. Linea: The Origin of the Term "Digital Slave"

• Reverse-Farming Process: Took the art of PUA to an outrageous level: launched an absurdly long, multi-episode Galxe Odyssey campaign lasting two years. Users needed to constantly answer questions, perform cross-chain swaps, trade, and mint illiquid junk NFTs like digital slaves, and were finally forced to complete extremely cumbersome KYC.
• Reverse-Farming Characteristics: An indefinitely extended war of attrition. Forever doing tasks, forever accumulating LXP points, forever being PUA'd, with the mainnet token launch perpetually out of reach.
• Far-Reaching Impact: Linea turned "completing tasks for airdrops" into a full-time job with extremely low hourly wages and immense mental torture. A large number of users, exhausted, directly left the space, also declaring the complete bankruptcy of the OAT (On-chain Achievement Token) narrative.

7. Grass: DePIN's Free Power Generator

• Reverse-Farming Process: As a star in the DePIN sector, it encouraged users to contribute idle bandwidth by keeping their devices online. Countless people ran their computers 24/7 to farm points, even paying out of pocket for overseas clean IPs. When the token launched, the project team kept the vast majority of the allocation for themselves or distributed it to VCs. The tokens that retail investors painstakingly mined for months, when sold, couldn't even cover the cost of electricity and proxy IPs.
• Reverse-Farming Characteristics: Getting something for nothing. Under the guise of Web3 construction, blatantly freeloading on Web2 users' physical resources.
• Far-Reaching Impact: Grass's reverse-farming made the market soberly realize that many so-called DePIN projects are essentially "freeloading software," directly leading to a cliff-like drop in retail participation for subsequent similar projects.

8. Monad: The L1 Airdrop Terminator

• Reverse-Farming Process: As a highly anticipated high-performance L1 project, Monad attracted the community to interact on its testnet for a long time. In October 2025, it launched the MON airdrop. Although 230,000 addresses were eligible to claim, the overall community allocation ratio was only about 3.3%. A large number of genuine testnet users were zeroed out by strict Sybil review or received meager shares, while KOLs and some early insiders received large allocations.
• Reverse-Farming Characteristics: Extremely low allocation and harsh review after high expectations. The project team used technical narratives to attract a large number of testnet users, then distributed most tokens to KOLs.
• Far-Reaching Impact: The Monad incident further lowered the community's expectations for airdrops from new L1 projects. Although it was announced early that the testnet wouldn't count, the lack of intervention during the process, followed by receiving nothing at TGE, made genuine early contributors feel betrayed. Subsequently, enthusiasm for participating in similar high-performance L1 projects significantly declined, accelerating the shift of the L1赛道 from "a hundred flowers blooming" to "cautious观望."

9. Babylon: The Square Peg in a Round Hole and Clumsy Imitation in the Bitcoin Ecosystem

• Reverse-Farming Process: Attempted to forcibly transplant Ethereum's staking玩法 onto the Bitcoin network. During the mainnet campaign, due to BTC链's capacity limitations and extreme network congestion, a large number of retail investors paid exorbitant miner fees but still failed to stake, directly causing real financial losses. Those who managed to stake successfully found, after locking for half a year, that the airdrop收益 was far inferior to simply trading on exchanges or buying理财产品.
• Reverse-Farming Characteristics: Extremely high trial-and-error costs. Forcibly制造 FOMO sentiment on the BTC chain, which doesn't support smart contracts,最终让散户被高昂的 Gas费无情反噬.
• Far-Reaching Impact: Poured a bucket of ice-cold water on the overheated BTC L2赛道. It proved with a bloody lesson: simply copying Ethereum's PUA model根本行不通 in the Bitcoin ecosystem. This severely消耗了 Bitcoin老玩家对新兴生态的信任与耐心.

10. Backpack: The Backlash of疯狂刷量 and the Trust Crisis of "Chinese-led Projects"

• Reverse-Farming Process: Backpack, which raised $37 million, launched a "trading volume = points" campaign, PUA-ing the community for two years. Just before TGE, it突袭 with strict KYC and a black-box "one device, one IP" Sybil hunt, wiping out大批 accounts. The survivors fared惨烈: a whale刷量 $15 billion, spending $300,000 in fees, only to receive $150,000 worth of tokens (a net loss of 50%). Users' real money directly转化为 the project's profit.
• Reverse-Farming Characteristics: Simple and粗暴的 "reverse抽水."刷量确实需要严格审查, but conducting the review only after the token launch is a blatant scheme to earn fees under the guise of an airdrop. Furthermore, the token BP plummeted 68% in its first week of listing, quietly draining users dry amidst endless刷量.
• Far-Reaching Impact: The image of Chinese entrepreneurs彻底坍塌. The Chinese region became the hardest hit, deeply imprinting the stereotype "Chinese-led project = reverse-farming" in the community's mind, causing subsequent Web3 projects led by Chinese founders to face unprecedented trust crises during冷启动.

11. EdgeX: The Decline of Perp DEXes

• Reverse-Farming Process: After the L2暴雷, Perp DEXes requiring real money for fees were seen by散户 as the last harbor for airdrops. Although Lighter started well, by the time edgeX TGE arrived: old users spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees only to receive airdrops worth less than a thousand dollars, while over 80 new "insider wallet" addresses with no interaction history狂揽 nearly $100 million in allocations. Subsequently, on-chain detectives exposed its market maker's connections to black/gray industries, and the official account直接关评失联, leaving a mess behind.
• Reverse-Farming Characteristics: Insider wallets明目张胆地抢,散户充当 data奶牛, and the project team didn't even bother pretending.
• Far-Reaching Impact: EdgeX's闹剧彻底崩盘 the刷量 narrative for Perp DEXes, turning顶级机构背书 into a代名词 for高级收割.散户彻底绝望,聪明钱加速回流 to CEXes or native L1s.

12. Genius: The Last Straw That Broke the Airdrop Farmers' Back

• Reverse-Farming Process: Genius was seen as the last hope. However, after the community疯狂刷交易量, TGE brought a reversal大礼包: claiming the airdrop within 7 days would automatically burn 70% of the tokens, allowing a maximum of 30%; or choose to lock for one year to receive the full amount. Under汹涌的舆论压力, the project team then紧急推出 a "refund" option - within 48 hours after TGE, users could choose to 100%销毁 their airdrop allocation in exchange for a refund of the fees Genius had collected.
• Reverse-Farming Characteristics: Users投入真金白银 based on trust溢价, only to be notified at the last moment: "either take the scraps and leave, or陪 the project team耗 another year."
• Far-Reaching Impact: Genius's骚操作彻底祛魅 the "top-tier endorsement narrative." It was called by the community "the last straw that broke the airdrop farmers' back."

Conclusion: Cutting Off the Arm to Save the Body, Returning to the Source

From HOP's Sybil hunt list, to Blast's points nesting dolls, to LayerZero's confession massacre... these twelve project teams共同书写了一部荒诞