Web3 Anonymous Identification As Means of Sybil Resistance for Airdrops: Unika Use Case
Airdrops became very popular in the crypto world starting in 2017 and 2018 when all of us were witnessing the initial coin offering (ICO) hysteria. If we compare a crypto project to a cafe or a restaurant then Airdrop is similar to coupons being spread by a cafe offering one free drink for first-time customers. Cafe and restaurant owners do it hoping to win the hearts of people, motivate them to spread the word, and eventually make them become long-time customers. Very similar logic is used for Airdrops. Though being formed in a nascent environment of blockchain, Airdrops are still evolving and different types of them set different purposes but we can still highlight the general goal which is to boost awareness of the project, either the existing one or the upcoming one. It’s a marketing strategy of giving tokens to crypto traders in exchange for some minimum promotion work on the project (‘like’ or ‘reshare’) or for free.
At first sight, Airdrops are a win-win situation for everyone. Users are happy to get some crypto they can trade later and companies are engaging people who could wind up either becoming investors or at least advertising for the company. Often easy money attracts malicious Web3 users who know a trick or two and manage to get more tokens in their hands.
Usually, companies organizing an Airdrop do not worry much about fake users’ wallets mostly because the sum dropped is not substantial, but sometimes the problem of multi-accounts during an Airdrop could become more serious than it seems.
NFT Airdrop Multi-account Threat
One of the examples could be a recent ApeCoin drop when one of the largest NFT collection platform decided to airdrop coins worthy of $80–200K to the holders of their NFT. The claim was open for 90 days and the tokens were distributed to everyone as the company didn’t use a snapshot mechanism for the reward claimers. To get free money the attackers started to perform instant flash loan attacks on NFTs that haven’t been claimed in the first days of the Airdrop. This multi-account attack caused the company the loss of millions of dollars, sunk in ApeCoin price, and a damaged reputation.
Governance Token Airdrop Multi-account Threat
Governance tokens are a new trend in the world of Web3 and it comes along with the DeFi development. These tokens go beyond being simply stores of value, they empower the holders with the voting right regarding the decisions of the project bringing more democracy. These types of Airdrops are becoming commonplace as more and more projects bring decentralization of governance as their overall vision. In addition to it, users who are more engaged with the project are building a solid foundation for its success story.
But what if some users’ crypto wallets have been generated just before the Airdrop, and the number of these fake account wallets is so impressive that in the future it could result in the Sybil attack which could harm the project and wash away the funds? Then the wrongly deposited governance tokens can cost the project its life. In such conditions knowing to whom you are giving your governance tokens for free is crucial and it means you need somehow to identify who the cryptowallets belong to.
Luckily, you have us — a decentralized anonymous identification protocol Unika. Our system can identify users behind blockchain addresses without revealing their identities.
Unika Integration with AirDrop Service Providers
Of course, not only governance token Airdrops could benefit from partnering with Unika but any other type of Airdrops (standard, bounty, exclusive, etc) could make sure that the free tokens deposited are only distributed among real users.
How Can an Airdrop Service Use Unika?
Unika is a blockchain agnostic decentralized protocol that can be easily integrated with any other solution on any blockchain. It has a built-in facial recognition module and due to its multimodality nature, it can work with any other type of biometric data, or even combine several modalities. Let’s discuss step-by-step operations requested to let Unika bring value to an Airdrop organizing company.
1. Airdrop Service Asks Users to Sent a Request for Identification with Unika
Airdrop participants send to Unika smart contract requests for identification. They are placed in a queue and assigned to uNodes (Unika nodes) which will be performing the identification procedure. uNodes are represented by Unika validators who are attested for this kind of operation. Their hardware and software are checked for compliance with the Unika system and only then the validators-to-be are identified by Unika. Moreover, another validator’s responsibility is to validate and get validated by other members of the network.
2. Users Perform Identification Stage
As soon as validators receive a request for identification, they ask users to perform a set of simple actions in front of their camera, no longer than 10–15 seconds. These could be turning a head from right to left, smiling, saying random numbers, etc. During the identification procedure validators assure users that the Unika software on their side is running in TEE and their legitimacy is proved. When the session is over the resulting data is sent to the smart contract, the biometric data and the address which was used to request the identification procedure are placed in encrypted decentralized storage.
3. Airdrop Service Shares with Unika the List of Airdrop Members
When Unika receives the list of participants the validators could start the validation. To do that, an Airdrop service should provide participants with the address to apply for validation, the address for the check result, and the temporary session identifier sent to the service in the resulting transaction. Then users sent requests for validation to the Unika smart contract.
4. Users Are Validated by uNodes
The request for validation sent by the user is assigned to 11 uNodes. First of all, validators check if the sender’s address is in the Unika system. If not, it means that the user hasn’t gone through the identification stage, the operation is aborted and the user is suggested to go through the identification stage. If yes and the sender’s address is registered with Unika then, as the second step, validators check whether the address of a sender is among the list of participants provided by the service and whether this address is eligible for a ‘drop’ or not. If a user has already received a ‘drop’ to another address listed, this resulting data is sent to the smart contract and the Airdrop platform is informed that the user is not eligible for any more ‘drops’. If validators don’t see any other addresses except the one used to send a request for the validation, then the same procedure is applied: the resulting data is sent to the smart contract and the Airdrop platform is informed that this user is eligible for a ‘drop’.
Summing Up
One can say that Airdrops are merely marketing actions to spot some light on the emerging projects or attract publicity to the existing ones but several threats are coming alongside this side of marketing. One of them is the problem of fake airdrops and the way they manipulate users to give access to their cryptowallets and get their funds stolen, which unfortunately for now Unika is not able to fight. The other problem of multi-accounts during an Airdrop, on the contrary, lies fully within the domain of Unika problem-solving skills.
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