Original author: @WazzCrypto, @Puuurif
Original translation: Lucy, BlockBeats
Editor’s Note:
On January 23, Ethereum scaling project AltLayer released the details of Season 1 airdrop. It is reported that AltLayer has reserved a total of 300,000,000 ALT tokens (3% of the total supply) for this Season 1 airdrop event, which will be distributed to its NFT holders (OG Badge and Oh Ottie! series), "Altitude" event participants, EigenLayer re-staking participants, EigenLayer ecosystem partners and Celestia pledgers and others.
However, regarding the results of the airdrop, @WazzCrypto and @Puuurif analyzed the chain and pointed out that insiders of AltLayer were suspected of participating in the airdrop manipulation. BlockBeats compiled the tweets as follows:
This airdrop may be rigged
There are so many "super brains" in this small space, and they even predicted the future. The guys mentioned in the picture just guessed the ALT airdrop standard 2 years in advance.
OG’s airdrop was mentioned in an article two years ago, and Imajin has been acting like an irrelevant on social platforms, not putting in the minimum effort required to succeed in this field.
Imajin did nothing else for two years but buy these NFTs from multiple wallets and received the first, second, and third largest airdrop allocations on day one.
0xB3405: A smart market actor
To illustrate this point, 0xB3405 is a typical example.
About 18 days ago, on January 7 (about 10 days before the snapshot was taken), the wallet holder had an idea and spent about 40eth to purchase AltLayer's OG NFT.
On January 17, the snapshot was taken at 12:00 (UTC) and the results were publicly announced about 12 hours later. The tweet announcing the snapshot was published at 11:55 AM UTC.
0xB3405 destroyed the just-acquired NFT with an OS bid just 5 minutes before the announcement, and it fell into the hands of a less-informed user.
Now, if you look at the erc20 transactions for this address, you will notice that the ALT tokens are sent to another address starting with 0x1e53ab.
As shown in the figure above, the address starting with 0x1e53ab also received some ALT tokens from another address starting with 0x5ed0723.
If you look at the transaction history of 0x5ed0723, you will notice that it purchased the OG badge on the same day as 0xB3405. A few minutes after the tweet was published, the OG badge was transferred to the blur bid.
If you look at the first address (0xB3405), there is a very interesting behavior, it first buys 4 NFTs and then immediately dumps 3, as if he realized that buying too many at once from a single wallet would be a bummer.
He then switched to buying with other wallets, a really smart market actor.
All tokens were then sent to Binance. This is a whopping 6-figure trading revenue for such a highly profitable trading strategy. Of course, there are other very suspicious wallet activities surrounding this, but this is the most obvious one.
There are a lot of weird things about this airdrop, which is actually quite fun.
The spike in oh otties and OG badge activity 15-20 minutes before the tweet suggests that the snapshot announcement may have been leaked on an otherwise quiet day, but not the snapshot time itself.
I believe this was a fake snapshot leak deliberately spread by an insider in order to gain some exit liquidity by leading people into a frenzy of buying their NFT listings.
This is just pure conjecture on my part, I have no real evidence to back it up.
But this is another example of how the vast majority of airdrops are just another way for teams and insiders to make money by manipulating their own snapshots, but the farmers are the real culprits.
Points program or liquidity mining?
Furthermore, this is certainly the worst way to airdrop for NFT holders, allowing exactly this kind of shady behavior by insiders. This is probably by design, understandably so.
A better approach would be to redeem or destroy the NFT upon claiming it, rather than letting the bid be cleared, causing the NFT value to drop by 90%.
Altlayer growth manager or involved
The “Head of Growth” from altlayer responded, “Shouldn’t have done this without knowing the snapshot time. The 8 ETH bid is too expensive. Where were they when the OG badge was initially 0.3 ETH and was around 2 ETH most of the time afterwards?”
The Twitter account uses the avatar DigiDaigaku Genesis #1913, and its address resolves to the "doro.eth" ENS. Less than 15 minutes after the Twitter announcement, the address sold an OG badge via OS bid, which was the first thing I noticed about the Altlayer NFT.
Nothing dramatic here, just not a great image for a growth executive, but that’s just my opinion. More importantly it’s connected to an address starting with 0x421105 via an Oh Ottie transfer.
This address is interesting because its activity is very similar to the one I covered previously. It got an OG badge on December 24th and has been holding another badge for a long time, and also has some Oh Otties.
Then it was snapshot time. The recently acquired OG badge sold for 7.77 ETH 10 minutes before the public snapshot announcement, netting the clever (and tongue in cheek, of course) trader a net profit of 2 ETH, plus a $100,000 ALT airdrop.
The poor guy who bought this lost $10k on it, but if you don’t have inside information you shouldn’t bid on it. Other OG badges and Oh otties were sold in a similar fashion within 3 minutes of the public announcement.
In total, these transactions received over $200,000 worth of ALT airdrops on two addresses, as well as some Ethereum. All ALT tokens were sent to Binance immediately after being claimed.
