$BRDG airdrop post mortem

Airdrops are always a messy topic for most crypto projects. The best airdrops are the ones that are totally unplanned and are just given to loyal users of the main product. Example: The Uniswap airdrop: no one had a clue it was coming. The Ape coin airdrop. The SOS airdrop. The LOOKS airdrop, etc.

Even at that, there were still persons who argued they did not receive enough. With airdrops, it is impossible to please everyone.

Bridge Network launched its airdrop that was meant to incentivize real, active users who are aligned with seeing its products come to fruition. With the amount of airdrop farming & hunting communities, the number of participants skyrocketed in an attempt to get some free tokens. We collected over 140,000 wallet addresses despite only having 32,000 twitter followers at the time of the airdrop period. (A requirement for participating was following us on twitter). To cut out the bots and spammers, we had to deploy some measures to filter out wallets.

Further suggestions came through our community to implement a KYC upon claiming. Although KYC is frowned upon in web 3, this seemed to be the best approach since more than 70% of submissions were not individual users.

On claim day, we deployed our kyc and claiming strategy. Everything was going fine until we realized that the airdrop contracts were being looted by spammers. The spammers even went as far as bragging about it in telegram chats.

Basically, by going directly to the smart contracts, the users were able to use one KYC’d email address to claim as many airdrops for ‘eligible’ wallets — which defeats the purpose of KYC.

Noticing this, we quickly paused the Airdrop smart contract which meant no one could claim their Airdrops. We extended the period of airdrop claiming while requesting the spammers to stop bypassing KYC. However, they continued to bypass KYC which resulted in us having to keep the Airdrop smart contract paused and then eventually deactivating it.

Many genuine users were affected by such spammers which was devastating for us since they have been active & supportive of the project. We went through our telegram chats and reached out to most of the users who were active & supportive to ensure they received their airdrop, and if not, we manually sent them tokens. For discord, we created a private chat for users with the “Bridgor” badge and also manually distributed tokens to them. For twitter, we went through complaints one-by-one and manually distributed tokens to those who actively & positively engaged in our twitter conversations in the past. Overall, we deployed manual efforts to ensure those that were part of the community, engaged & supported were rewarded.

Now what?

We decided not to relaunch the entire airdrop claiming process since the team has received threats, hateful & disgusting messages from airdrop hunters and they have proceeded to spam all our channels. These are not individuals we want as part of our community.

Instead of relaunching the airdrop, the remaining undistributed tokens will go back to our marketing pool and will be used to randomly tip & reward positively, engaged & active users from time to time who were eligible to claim but could not. If you were part of the genuine users who didn’t get to claim, be sure to stick around! We will not be rewarding users who are simply there for free tokens or are constantly asking about the airdrop.

All this being said, we do apologise to the genuine & supportive users who were affected due to spammers ruining the entire airdrop for everyone. We trust that individuals who care about the project will hang around.

Onwards & upwards. 🚀

Connect with us to stay updated
Website: https://www.bridgenetwork.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/BridgeNetwork0x
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bridgenetwork0x
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/PGHnWapB8u