The largest witch-hunting operation in history came to an end: LayerZero's fancy anti-witchcraft performance staged the prisoner's dilemma.

Author: Nancy, PANews

On May 30th, LayerZero's weeks-long witch-hunt officially came to an end. Although witch-hunting has become a routine part of airdrops in various projects, LayerZero's elaborate anti-witch campaign played out as a cryptographic version of the "prisoner's dilemma".

"In the story of the Prisoner's Dilemma, two suspects are separately interrogated in different rooms after committing a crime. Due to insufficient evidence, the police provide several choices: if both individuals resist, they will be sentenced to 3 years each due to lack of evidence; if both individuals confess, they will be sentenced to 5 years each; if one confesses while the other resists, the confessor will be sentenced to 2 years and the resistor will be sentenced to 7 years."

Now, the most classic case in this game theory is the true portrayal of the LayerZero airdrop. As a highly valued leading project, LayerZero naturally became the focus of many users' ambushes after its launch. However, the community did not wait for the "big hair" but instead encountered rigorous anti-witch scrutiny.

Witch-hunting in Reverse: From Self-Reporting to Mutual Accusations

This month, LayerZero announced the launch of a 14-day voluntary reporting program for witch activities. As a reward, users who self-report will receive an expected allocation of 15%, but this list will not be disclosed. Users identified by LayerZero as witch users who do not self-report will not receive any token distribution.

In order to appease users and demonstrate fairness, LayerZero later stated that the "witch self-reporting" was not targeting individual users, but rather targeting large-scale witches. LayerZero employees are also prohibited from participating in airdrop applications, and violators will be fired.

Self-reporting actions have been widely participated by many LayerZero users. In the eyes of many users/studios who have many accounts, instead of gaining nothing after being identified by LayerZero, self-reporting can retain some of the earnings. According to the data released by LayerZero Labs, there have been over 338,000 addresses self-reported during the witch self-reporting phase, and over 803,000 addresses have been preliminarily identified as potential witches. Each eligible address that meets the requirements will receive 15% of its expected token allocation, and the remaining 85% will be returned to qualified users.

But surrendering is just a "starter" for LayerZero's anti-witch activity, and "bounty reporting" has made this cleansing activity even more internalized.

From May 18th to May 31st, it is the bounty hunting time for LayerZero. According to the LayerZero submission page, a total of 3550 reports have been submitted.

However, this hunting activity was full of twists and turns, and it opened up a battleground that tested human nature. According to the rules of the Witch Hunt bounty program by LayerZero, informants need to provide at least 20 addresses that clearly indicate witch operations. The bounty hunter who successfully reports the witch will receive 10% of the expected token allocation for the witch, and the remaining 90% will be returned to eligible addresses. However, if the witch's address was originally supposed to receive 0 tokens, then the bounty hunter will also receive 0 tokens. In the case of reporting the same address, the bounty will be awarded to the first informant. Of course, to avoid users being "wrongfully killed", LayerZero allows addresses mistakenly reported as witches to appeal by filling out a form.

After the launch of the event, the community immediately received numerous reports. According to LayerZero CEO Bryan Pellegrino, within a few hours of the start of the bounty program, they received over 3,000 reports of witches and 30,000 appeals. Moreover, due to a large amount of spam, many GitHub accounts were banned. LayerZero had to announce a suspension of the witch hunt bounty program two days after its launch, and Bryan Pellegrino stated that they would introduce a margin mechanism, requiring reporters to stake 0.02 ETH to submit a report.

On May 28th, LayerZero Labs announced the reopening of the Witch Bounty Report submission and increased the margin to 0.5 ETH. The event will end within 48 hours (8:00 am Beijing time on May 30th). This means that only addresses providing margin are eligible to submit reports, and the margin will be refunded after TGE if the report is submitted honestly or successfully. If the report involves stealing the achievements of others, any form of fraud, lack of methodology, spam, etc., the margin will not be refunded and will be destroyed. According to the Ethereum browser data, LayerZero received over 240 ETH within 2 days of restarting the event, which is approximately 480 reports.

And driven by economic interests, various report dramas continue to unfold. For example, employees of a hair-pulling studio choose to resign and report internal accounts, the address of a large investor in a certain project's airdrop is reported, and there are even user reports targeting large investors/hair-pulling KOLs. There are also rumors in the market that Trusta, a security organization, has submitted 470,000 suspected witch addresses to Layerzero in one go. The organization denies this and states that it will never report any addresses.

Image source: Community

But this reporting mechanism has also led to many users being "mistakenly injured". Bryan Pellegrino has responded that anyone can put anything they want into a report, but not every report is valid, and the standard of "conclusive" is actually very difficult to reach.

The analysis of the LayerZero witch report released by @vga.eth points out several key points, including: 1. Clusters that have tens, hundreds, or thousands of addresses participating in interactions, with obvious traces of funds, such as one-to-many transfers and many-to-one consolidation; 2. To increase the interaction of a chain, the cross-chain amount is $0.01 or less; 3. A large number of worthless NFTs are minted to increase the number of cross-chain interactions, while a small amount is fine; 4. Use popular witch interaction programs such as L2Pass. Meanwhile, the witch hunter report has the following points: 1. Transactions in the same cross-chain direction; 2. Addresses with consistent contract calls; 3. All contract interaction habits and sequences are consistent; usually withdrawn through the same centralized exchange account, with similar amounts and times; 4. The minimum number of mainnet interactions and EVM chain balance is less than $200.

Currently, the final list of witches is yet to be determined and will be officially announced after the official review by LayerZero. However, according to Bryan Pellegrino's previous statement, it is expected that only 6.67%-13.33% of the 6 million addresses will be eligible for the airdrop. In response to user inquiries, he stated, "90%-95% of the reports must be valid, or even more. Of course, false reports are quickly 'discarded.' Nothing is perfect."

The witch hunt is over, and the users involved in LayerZero are waiting for a "fate trial".