A Brief History of Web3 Airdrops: Highlighting Twelve Iconic Anti-Rug Projects

Written by: Biteye

Once, airdrops in the crypto world were the exhilarating “myth of getting rich overnight,” a short-lived but real “golden honeymoon” during the eras of Uniswap, ENS, and Arbitrum, where early users and project teams mutually achieved success, evangelists and builders shared the dividends.

However, shifting the clock to 2023 to 2026, with massive capital inflows, intense competition among professional studios, and project teams’ insatiable greed, the airdrop track has completely soured.

“Interaction brings blessings” has degenerated into a “cyber harvest field,” turning free rewards into a systematic reverse harvest.

Retail investors are redefined: as free testers, low-cost liquidity providers, and continuous data producers.

In an environment where long-term rules are opaque and expectations are repeatedly rewritten, the ultimate outcome is often not rewards but zeroing out, dilution, or outright elimination.

In this article, we review 12 landmark “anti-reward” projects in the history of airdrops, retracing how trust was gradually consumed.

1. Hop Protocol (HOP): The dawn of the “Witch” era

Anti-reward process: The cross-chain bridge star HOP pioneered a chilling “community report of witches (Sybil)” mechanism. The rules are extremely seductive: reporters can share in the reported address’s share. It’s as if the ancient Shang Yang, who used collective denunciation, has traveled to Web3.

Anti-reward feature: grassroots mutual harm—people fighting each other. Project teams delegated the dirty work of on-chain address relationship scrutiny to users, exploiting human greed to incite community infighting, even uploading the report list directly to GitHub for industry-wide “reuse.”

Far-reaching impact: After HOP, “reporting witches” became the political correctness for all token projects. On-chain interaction shifted from “experience decentralized products” to an extreme game of internal conflict. While combating witches is necessary, completely shifting the responsibility to the community and even encouraging mutual harm severely damages the community ecosystem.

2. Blast: The father of the evil “Points System”

Anti-reward process: Under the top-tier Paradigm halo, Blast abandoned traditional interaction models, requiring users to lock ETH or stablecoins to earn “points.” The rules were repeatedly changed, with large holders and top NFT players profiting handsomely, while ordinary users, after locking for months, found their token yields even less than risk-free interest rates at the same time.

Anti-reward feature: Capital Ponzi schemes and blind box gambling. Users are swept up in endless FOMO, becoming free ATMs for project TVL data.

Far-reaching impact: Since Blast, “point stacking” has become industry standard. The original intent was to encourage long-term participation, but frequent rule changes and severely unbalanced returns led to a loss of trust. Web3 “rewarders” have become Web2 workers, and the proud decentralized spirit of Web3 has been thoroughly killed under capital’s calculations.

3. LayerZero (ZRO): The trust collapse tipping point

Anti-reward process: Eighteen months of cross-chain interaction burned huge gas fees, and just before token issuance, the project launched the harshest witch audit in history, even requiring users to “confess” voluntarily to retain some shares, or face zeroing out. Many real active users and small studios were wiped out.

Anti-reward feature: Extreme presumption of guilt. The project team drained the enormous transaction fees contributed by users, then treated users like thieves, guarding and humiliating them.

Far-reaching impact: LayerZero personally destroyed the grand narrative of “multi-chain interaction.” Witch audits are necessary, but the brutal enforcement of “presumption of guilt + self-report” further accelerated trust collapse. Since then, the infamous “stinky penguin” has been forever disgraced, and “anti-reward” has become a Damocles sword hanging over all rewarders. Retail investors realize: in the face of absolute interpretive authority, their efforts are worthless.

4. zkSync (ZK): The complete end of the L2 interaction airdrop era

Anti-reward process: As one of the four major L2 giants, zkSync kept the community waiting for years. After absorbing over a billion dollars in gas fees, its airdrop rules played a shocking black box: significantly reducing the weight of transaction count and activity, replacing it with “fund retention at specific times” as the core threshold. This left long-term interaction users who grew with the project empty-handed, while internal “rats” and new accounts rushing to deposit reaped huge shares.

Anti-reward feature: Using “activity” to deceive gas, then using “fund size” to kick out users.

Far-reaching impact: zkSync’s extremely ugly approach made the entire market despair of L2 airdrops. Controlling witches and spam armies is necessary, but the opaque rules disheartened early contributors. Subsequent new L2s faced “no one cares” situations, with no retail willing to be free on-chain labor anymore.

5. Infinex: The collapse of the public sale mechanism

Anti-reward process: Backed by Synthetix founder Kain Warwick, Infinex was once seen as a “legitimate” cross-chain DeFi aggregator. It lured users with Patron NFTs and months-long points activities. However, when the January 2026 public sale launched, the community faced sky-high FDV, absurd “mandatory one-year lock-up,” and chaotic distribution logic. Participation on the first day was disastrous, and the project had to repeatedly patch rules amid scorn.

Anti-reward feature: The “public sale reversal” under high expectations. Using NFT narratives to hype, then changing the rules at the last minute, turning long-term supporters’ investments into sunk costs.

Far-reaching impact: The Infinex incident exposed the risks of the “NFT + points for public sale” model, earning the community’s endless disdain for the project team.

6. Linea: The origin of the term “slaves”

Anti-reward process: PUA art pushed to an appalling extreme: launching a two-year, ridiculously numerous Galxe Odyssey task. Users had to answer questions, cross-chain, swap, mint illiquid garbage NFTs, and even undergo tedious KYC.

Anti-reward feature: Endless fatigue war—always doing tasks, always stacking LXP points, always being PUAed, with the mainnet token issuance forever out of reach.

Far-reaching impact: Linea turned “doing tasks for airdrops” into a low-hourly, highly mentally torturous full-time job. Many users burned out and quit, marking the complete collapse of the OAT (on-chain achievement token) narrative.

7. Grass: The free power generator of DePIN

Anti-reward process: As a star in the DePIN track, encouraging users to run nodes and contribute idle bandwidth. Countless people, to boost scores, ran computers 24/7 or even bought overseas pure IPs. When tokens were issued, the project kept most for itself or allocated to VCs, while retail miners who worked for months couldn’t even cover electricity and proxy costs when selling.

Anti-reward feature: Free-riding on others’ shoulders. Under the guise of Web3 infrastructure, brazenly freeloading on Web2 users’ physical resources.

Far-reaching impact: Grass’s anti-reward made the market realize many so-called DePIN projects are just “free software freeloading,” causing a sharp drop in retail participation in similar projects afterward.

8. Monad: The terminator of L1 airdrops

Anti-reward process: As a highly anticipated high-performance L1, Monad attracted community long-term testnet interaction. In October 2025, it launched the MON airdrop, with 230k addresses eligible, but only about 3.3% received allocations. Many genuine testnet users were strictly witch-checked and zeroed out, while KOLs and some early related parties received large quotas.

Anti-reward feature: High expectations met with minimal allocation and strict scrutiny. The project used technical narratives to attract testnet users, then handed most tokens to KOLs.

Far-reaching impact: The Monad incident further lowered community expectations for new L1 airdrops. Although early testnet participation was announced, no tokens were distributed at TGE, leaving early contributors feeling betrayed. This significantly dampened enthusiasm for similar high-performance L1s, accelerating the shift from “a hundred flowers bloom” to “cautious watching.”

9. Babylon: The misfit and imitation in Bitcoin ecology

Anti-reward process: Attempting to transplant Ethereum’s staking gameplay onto Bitcoin. During mainnet activity, due to BTC’s capacity limits and high congestion, many retail users paid exorbitant miner fees but still failed to stake, suffering real financial losses. Those lucky enough to succeed found that after six months, the airdrop yields were even less than trading or investing directly.

Anti-reward feature: Extremely high trial-and-error costs. Forcibly creating FOMO on Bitcoin’s non-smart contract chain, ultimately punishing retail users with high gas fees.

Far-reaching impact: Pouring a cold water on the overheated BTC L2 track. The bloody lessons proved that copying Ethereum’s PUA model on Bitcoin is fundamentally infeasible, severely damaging Bitcoin veterans’ trust and patience for emerging ecosystems.

10. Backpack: The backlash of rampant volume-faking and the trust crisis of “Chinese projects”

Anti-reward process: Raising $37 million, Backpack launched a “trade volume = points” campaign, PUA community for two years. On the eve of TGE, strict KYC and “one device, one IP” black box witch-hunting led to mass account zeroing. Survivors also suffered: a big holder faked $15 billion volume at a cost of $300k in fees, only to get $150k in tokens (a 50% loss). Users’ real money was converted into project profits.

Anti-reward feature: Simple reverse siphoning—strict scrutiny is needed for volume faking, but issuing tokens before review is blatant profiteering under the guise of airdrops. The token BP plummeted 68% in the first week, quietly draining users’ funds in endless volume-faking.

Far-reaching impact: The image of Chinese entrepreneurs collapsed entirely. China’s community was hit hardest, with the stereotype “Chinese projects = anti-reward” deeply ingrained, leading to an unprecedented trust crisis for Chinese-led Web3 projects at launch.

11. edgeX: The decline of Perp DEX

Anti-reward process: After the L2 explosion, Perp DEX, which required real money for trading fees, was seen as the last hope for airdrops. Although Lighter started well, by the time of edgeX TGE: veteran users paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees for less than a thousand dollars worth of airdrops, while over 80 “whale” addresses with no on-chain activity grabbed nearly $100 million. Later, on-chain investigators confirmed market maker connections to illicit activities, and official accounts disappeared, leaving chaos behind.

Anti-reward feature: Front-running whales, retail as data cows, project teams doing nothing.

Far-reaching impact: The farce of edgeX shattered the narrative of Perp DEX’s volume-faking, turning top-tier institutional backing into a symbol of high-level scams. Retail investors lost hope, and smart money accelerated returning to CEX or native L1.

12. Genius: The last straw for rewarders

Anti-reward process: Seen as the last hope, Genius’s community flooded with transaction volume, but at TGE, a reversal package arrived: claiming that claiming airdrops within 7 days would destroy 70%, with a maximum of 30%; or locking for a year to get full. Under mounting pressure, the project quickly launched a “refund” option—within 48 hours after TGE, users could choose to destroy 100% of the airdrop and get a refund of the fees collected by Genius.

Anti-reward feature: Users invested real money trusting the hype, only to be told at the last moment: “Take the small amount or wait another year.”

Far-reaching impact: Genius’s antics completely disenchanted the “top-tier narrative,” earning it the title of “the last straw that broke rewarders’ backs” by the community.

Conclusion: Cutting off the head, returning to the essence

From HOP’s witch list, Blast’s point stacking, to LayerZero’s self-confession slaughter… these twelve projects collectively wrote a bizarre and brutal blood-stained history of retail investors in crypto.

But the truth may be even harsher: it’s not just a premeditated harvest, but a collective act of speculation and greed.

For a long time, rewarders only cared about “whether to issue tokens and how to distribute airdrops,” ignoring whether the product has real PMF or sustainable revenue.

Project teams precisely exploited this greed—if you want the airdrop, they want your principal and fees.

Now, with the airdrop bubble burst, countless people have been “anti-rewarded” into flesh and blood. It’s tragic, but also a forced cleanse—an act of breaking free.

The market is finally forced to return to reason: traffic attracted by airdrop expectations is ultimately illusory; only products with true PMF are worth investing time and money.

This is the end of airdrops and the rebirth of Web3. Projects built on PUA and black boxes will be voted out by users; those truly committed to community co-creation and returning to value will earn more precious trust amid the ruins.

For rewarders, this is a painful lesson and a wake-up call.