Airdrop hunters have begun spamming comments on GitHub repositories of projects anticipated to distribute tokens in the future, reports The Block.
“Please do not submit GitHub issues just for farming. The development team is already overwhelmed, don’t make our lives harder,” wrote a researcher from the L2 project Scroll, known as Pseudo.
recently some airdrop hunting accounts shared the scroll github repos with a “farming guide”.
please don’t submit a GitHub issue just for farming purposes.
overnight, we have received 600+ low quality submissions that we have to divert resources to parse through.
the scroll… pic.twitter.com/b5bnWmmBpj
— pseudo (on farcaster) ??? (@pseudotheos) February 18, 2024
According to him, they received over 600 “low-quality submissions” in one night, which diverted resources for review.
The rise in airdrop popularity has led to a category of users attempting to game the system by performing actions that qualify them for token distribution. Typically, criteria involved on-chain activities like transactions.
However, recent airdrops by Celestia and StarkNet have altered asset distribution parameters.
Celestia distributed 6% of its token supply via airdrop, with a third allocated to developers, primarily on GitHub.
The Starknet Foundation allocated 7% of the distributed tokens for these purposes. The majority—5%—was intended for developers from the Ethereum ecosystem and open-source projects beyond Web3.
For instance, one authorized participant in this airdrop received 1800 STRK for a single commit that involved correcting a spelling mistake.
this single commit earned me 1,800 STRK pic.twitter.com/RVLVirM4yw
— tk (@tomkysar) February 14, 2024
Based on token futures quotes, the amount exceeded $3600 at the time of writing.
A user under the pseudonym CHASE, who positions himself as an airdrop strategist, offered advice on submitting proposals to the Scroll repository on GitHub to participate in the distribution. He cited the StarkNet token distribution as an example, where such amounts reached “tens of thousands of dollars.”
How to Contribute to Scroll’s Open-source Github repository.
Open-source contributions play a vital role in the digital age. Take $STRK as the latest example: a single contribution to their Github made individuals eligible for a 4-5 figure airdrop.
What’s holding you back from… https://t.co/tB3xPrHTQl pic.twitter.com/K5QuS7so9H
— CHASE? (@Abrahamchase09) February 18, 2024
“What’s stopping you from sharing ideas with Scroll and seeing them come to life if they’re good? You can’t expect anything in return yet, but you won’t lose anything, not even gas fees,” CHASE emphasized.
He suggested studying issues of interest to project developers, such as integration with other tools and libraries, and proposing one’s own ideas.
The Block also noted a surge in comments on the zkSync repository on GitHub. Alongside Scroll, CoinGecko experts included this project in the list of most promising token distributions expected in 2024.
“Airdrop farmers are also part of the crypto community. But it’s more important when people contribute based on their strengths rather than following a trend. Beyond GitHub, we also see healthy ecosystem growth […]. For Scroll, the community always comes first, and there’s room for everyone,” Pseudo commented for the publication.
He added that to prevent spam in the repository, the team introduced a temporary limit for submissions. However, this does not completely solve the problem, as some hunters have active accounts with several commits, making it difficult to distinguish them from real developers.
One commentator noted that the new form of airdrop farming has at least one positive aspect:
“Now all crypto repositories on GitHub will at least have perfect grammar.”
the silver lining in the new airdrop farming meta is that all crypto github repos will have perfect grammar now at least
— ℳiLLiΞ X (@llamaonthebrink) February 18, 2024
According to researchers from X-explore, up to 40% of the Celestia airdrop volume went to airdrop hunters.