Approximately 40% of the Celestia platform TIA tokens distributed during the airdrop were received by bounty hunters, researchers from X-explore found.
The team timed the coin distribution to the launch of the main network called Lemon Mint, which took place on October 31.
Receiving a TIA in total invited 138,981 addresses out of 191,391 that were eligible. The announced volume of distribution was 44.4 million tokens — 74% of the planned 60 million TIA.
However, the number of wallets that carried out the so-called Sibyl airdrop attack turned out to be practically equivalent to the number of ordinary participants, experts emphasized.
They identified several categories of hunters, classifying them depending on the controlled addresses. The largest amount of 17.05 million TIA (38.2% of the total production) was received by 51,494 purses of hunters who were not part of the association.
The share of large-scale groups that concentrated more than 20 addresses each accounted for 5.22 million TIAs (20.1%). Other categories of airdrop hunters received approximately the same amount of assets.
The researchers noted that the project team failed to effectively filter out the attackers distributing the address, despite the presence of specific characteristics.
The top performing group of hunters owned a total of 300 wallets and earned 77,391 TIAs. Coins came in equal transactions of up to 258 tokens, which was hard not to notice, according to analysts.
They noted that, in general, groups of attackers provided a surge in on-chain activity at the initial stage due to large-scale operations. Already in the fourth block, the number of transactions reached 149, including 101 related to the activities of hunters.
"This happened long before the spike in trading after the opening of deposits by exchanges like Binance, about 95 blocks later," the experts emphasized.
The most profitable sybil group, holding a total of 300 airdrop addresses and receiving a total of 77,391 TIA. We also found many other sybil groups with 200+ airdrop addresses. You can find them in our mirror article.
A certain sybil group was the first user to do large-scale transactions on Celestia. Their txs happened on block 4 before many CEXs support deposits. This indicates that some sybil groups have advanced technical skills.
In their opinion, serious activity for listing TIA on centralized platforms, as well as a number of other signs, indicate that drophunters have "advanced technical skills."
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