How to ensure that airdrops are not considered witch addresses?

DeFi artist Stacy Muur shared the judgment rules of the project party's witch wallet, providing some preliminary guidance for participants who want to maximize airdrops.

Note: Witch attack refers to actions using a large number of wallets to engage in specific behaviors. Here, it broadly refers to the behavior of using multiple wallet addresses to trade on chain services, using transaction records to gain more airdrop opportunities.

To maximize airdrop profits, one will definitely need to use multiple wallets for contract transactions. However, how to ensure that these wallets can pass the witch detection criteria, if identified as blacklisted, basically means not receiving airdrop rewards.

Recently, the rules for airdrops have become increasingly strict. Apart from real users, airdrop hunters need to be more conscious and skillful in ensuring that their actions are not discovered by the team. Through recent cases of Arbitrum airdrop rules, there is a better understanding of the project party's judgment criteria.

Why Airdrops Are Becoming More Strict

There are two conflicting factors in the airdrop market:

• When development teams distribute airdrops, they try to allocate them to more actual users in a fairer way to maximize their marketing benefits.

• On the other hand, airdrop hunters want to maximize their profits as much as possible, as most airdrop hunters may quickly sell the tokens after receiving rewards, indirectly extracting value from other holders and real users.

The interests of these two stakeholders are in direct conflict. Therefore, the rules for airdrops are becoming stricter.

Criteria for Determination

To ensure that airdrop rewards are distributed more fairly, most projects now use more on-chain analysis tools to assist in analyzing the aggregation relationships and associations between wallets. If a wallet meets any of the following criteria, it is highly likely to be classified as a witch address and will not receive the airdrop reward. The example provided here is the airdrop determination rules of Arbitrum:

• All transactions occur within 48 hours

• Wallet balance is less than 0.005 ETH

• Wallet is identified as a witch address in the Hop Protocol database

This is just the tip of the iceberg; the criteria used by the Arbitrum team are more complex, including tracking Ethereum transaction addresses, exchange wallet addresses, identification tools provided by Nansen's on-chain analysis, and more. For details, refer to this link.

Survival Rules

If airdrop hunters want to survive in these strict witch hunting schemes, Stacy Muur offers the following suggestions:

• Do not deposit funds from a wallet to a new address

• Send funds between wallets through centralized exchanges and use multiple exchanges as much as possible, regularly change exchange addresses to reduce wallet correlations

• All transactions should be done manually and avoid using automated programs. Suspicious behaviors include transactions occurring in the same contract, at similar times, with similar gas fees

• Wallet balance should be greater than 0.005 ETH

• Wallet should have records of using other public chains

• Wallet should have transaction records on cross-chain bridges

Finding Airdrop Projects

After setting up your wallet, the next step is to find new airdrop projects. Stacy Muur provides some airdrop hunters who are willing to share information:

@ardizor

@Defi_Warhol

@0x_gremlin

@0xFastLife

@corleonescrypto

@leshka_eth

@nobrainflip

@SparkHawkings

@MingoAirdrop