What Happened With Our First Airdrop? A Recap (and an Apology)
Our first ever Airdrop offering didn’t exactly go as planned. Here’s what happened — and what we’re doing about it.
On Thursday, March 17 2022, we eagerly announced our first ever Airdrop campaign to celebrate the approaching public sale of our token, ZEKE. With graphics at the ready, entry requirements in place, and CMs standing by to welcome our new members, we excitedly tweeted out the announcement and waited nervously to see the reactions of our new community.
And so the responses started to trickle in — a “hello!” here and there with a gleam of excitement. Unfortunately, these real-life members were accompanied by the occasional generic “Airdrop hunter” account (a throwaway nametag), with a “hello sir” along with them. Of course, we expected to see some of these robot intruders, so we prepared ourselves with an entry form to deter them and avoid inauthentic interactions.
At least, that was the plan…
Then, things got out of hand
It didn’t take long before the thread devolved into complete mayhem. The drip of pictureless accounts and generic messages quickly became a flood, overwhelming our Telegram and Twitter channels. In the end, thousands upon thousands of fake bots came out of nowhere and clogged the token offering, while our real community didn’t even get a chance to enter.
After temporarily closing our Telegram to assess the situation, we realized that our Airdrop campaign was hijacked by several groups dedicated to promoting these initiatives, who transformed our attempt to engage with the community into a full-scale free-for-all.
We closed the Airdrop with over 14,000 entries in our Google form (which had a 10,000-person entry limit), 12,000 new Twitter followers, and an important lesson in the volatility of Airdrop promotions.
Sometimes good intentions just don’t cut it
To our community members, new and established — we are completely, unequivocally sorry.
We understand first-hand the confusion this mass following caused, and we hope you accept that our intentions were good (albeit executed rather clumsily).
We want you to know that we take this matter incredibly seriously, and that we’re doing everything in our power to ensure something like this doesn’t happen again. While this experience has certainly been a humbling one, as a company we’re just as passionate as we’ve always been about our mission, our product, and our community. We’re working hard to make things right — and keep them that way.
Where we go from here
We’re still honouring the entries from this Airdrop, although removing spam accounts and bots. Moving forward with future activities, we will work with heightened security to prevent an influx of bots and spam accounts. We’re working with Dripdropz.io to ensure smooth distribution of the Airdrop tokens in the months following our public sale of ZEKE. We’ll also send out a newsletter on how to claim (or Drip) your ZEKE — if you haven’t yet, make sure to subscribe to it via our website.
Moving forward, we will ensure that we not only prevent these types of incidents, but reward our members for their continued support and interest in our project. That is the Profila way.
As always, community members are welcome to send us their suggestions for what they’d like to see from us in the future. Our CMs will be on standby on the Profila Telegram and Discord channels, and will be happy to listen to your questions or concerns and discuss them with you in detail.
From every one of us here at Profila, we thank you for your patience and your trust.
Time to regroup and unwind now. Stay tuned for better tidings next week!
Update, 26th March 2024:
At Profila we’ve endured some setbacks, team members coming and going, and have been at the mercy of the market over the past two years. Now as things seem more stable, we are ready to launch our token $ZEKE publicly and will be doing so within the next two months (details to follow).
Of course, with the public launch approaching, we are again going to address the airdrop we ran and how people will be able to claim their tokens. Make sure that you’re following us on X so you can find out how this is going to work!
