Why did the free airdrop of 2 billion XLM tokens in collaboration with Keybase fail?

We have already talked about in a previous thread Arab bitcoin site Around:

Details of the distribution of more than $120 million in Stellar Coin (XLM)

Spammers started appearing on Keybase as soon as Stellar announced the free distribution of Airdrop in cooperation with Keybase.

And this act ended as soon as the announcement of the end of the free distribution!

This was stated by Max Kron, CEO of Keybase, to source.

There has been a recent discussion about the increased risk of spam on the Keybase chat app.

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The explanation lies almost entirely in Keybase’s partnership with Stellar to freely distribute nearly two billion XLM units to app users over a period of 20 months.

Max Crohn said:

It was really an interesting experience.

In the end, I definitely achieved the goal of getting more numbers on Keybase and more people on Stellar.

The problem is that at some point, the costs start to outweigh the benefits, which Keybase admitted when it announced that the program was coming to an abrupt end.

On the third of December, the launch of the free distribution of “XLM” coins began, the third and final batch.

What was advertised as a two billion XLM endowment is now much less.

From what the “Keybase” website published:

The total donation amount of 300 million XLM will be approximately 16 million USD.

An airdrop in crypto occurs when a protocol or company distributes their tokens to a group of internet users who think they will promote the brand.

Since the cryptocurrency is exchangeable and can be exchanged easily.

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There was a lot of movement in airdrop operations in early 2018 until regulatory concerns slowed the practice, particularly in the United States.

Setlar has run a few free distributions, most recently for users of blockchain wallets.

In partnership with Stellar, Keybase users can get tens of dollars in XLM with each distribution.

Crohn said the malicious use started immediately but accelerated, and by November, it was already a serious problem.

In the end, the Airdrop on Keybase attracted so many spammers that it was no longer worth continuing.

Stellar founder Jed McCaleb told CoinDesk at the Meridian Conference, a meeting in Mexico City in early November:

These eardrops are very difficult to correct and fraudulently insurmountable.

While Kron of Keybase stated:

The amount of crypto offered was too small for some, but for someone with the ability to write scripts to run a bot farm, it could be very profitable.

If a scammer can get hundreds or even thousands of bots through Keybase tests to discern human-like behavior, it surely has become worth their time.

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Ms. Denelle Dixon, CEO of the Stellar Foundation, said:

The goal of both companies is to interest new people, and that has been a huge success.

On top of that, Keybase did a good job making XLM usable in the app.

This is what Stellar looks for in its distribution partners.

Added:

They have developed a lot of interesting activities for users, such as easily sharing XLM in chat.

We were really excited about this because we loved what Keybase stands for.

Keybase offers several levels of verification before allowing accounts to join the platform.

At first, it was assumed that any account that existed before the announcement of the “airdrop” was real.

This worked well, but both Stellar and Keybase were meant to bring in new people.

Thus, a second option was opened for those wishing to join, and it was announced that any new verified account on “Hacker News” or “GitHub” would also be allowed to join the platform.

For your information, Keybase is an app that makes PGP encryption easier.

Most people use it for chatting but it also has built-in collaboration and development tools, among other things.

An encrypted connection is more reliable if the identity of users is verified, so Keybase uses various forms of social proof to increase confidence that accounts represent real people.

This works across many websites, but Keybase and Stellar chose to start with Hacker News and GitHub because they both had high-quality communities that weren’t attractive to bots.

However, this resulted in spammers impersonating these two services and looking to see if they could access the dormant accounts.

Bot farms have access to millions of user IDs and passwords that have been hacked over the years.

And it’s easy to write a script to check a site to see if any of the accounts are up and running.

In short, if a bot farmer can activate a long-forgotten GitHub account, they can pass the Keybase test.

This has increased pressure on the operational resources of the “Keybase” service.

the final level:

For Airdrop, and in November, Keybase decided to use a combination of SMS verification and its own filters to distinguish human users.

Crone said about 150,000 new subscribers have succeeded.

One additional challenge was the Stellar effect. Kron said:

They have a lot of initiatives going on in Latin America and Nigeria, but these are also some of the toughest countries in which to fight bot subscriptions.

The limited Internet infrastructure in these places provides fewer distinct signals with which to analyze the behavior of new accounts.

Kron added:

They are still in touch with Stellar but at some point the benefits are no longer growing faster than the losses.

This is why the Airdrop has been discontinued.

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