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

Author: Biteye

Once, airdrops in the crypto world were the exhilarating “myth of instant wealth,” a short-lived but real “honeymoon” period during Uniswap, ENS, Arbitrum eras, where early users and project teams mutually achieved, evangelists and builders shared the dividends, forming a fleeting yet genuine “golden honeymoon.”

However, shifting the clock from 2023 to 2026, the influx of massive capital, the extreme internal competition among professional studios, the project teams’ insatiable appetite, the airdrop track has completely soured.

“Interaction brings blessings” has degenerated into a “cyber harvest field,” with grabbing tokens turning from early dividends 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 final outcome is often not rewards but being wiped out, diluted, or even outright eliminated.

In this article, we review 12 landmark “anti-grab” projects in airdrop history, retracing how trust was gradually consumed.

1. Hop Protocol (HOP): Opening the “Witch” era.

● Anti-grab process: Cross-chain bridge star HOP pioneered the chilling “community reporting witch (Sybil)” mechanism. The rules are extremely seductive: reporters can share in the reported address’s share. It’s as if the merchant Shang Yang, who once used collective punishment for treachery thousands of years ago, has traveled to Web3.

● Anti-grab features: Underlying mutual harm among群众. The project team 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, checking for witches became the “politically correct” for all token projects. On-chain interaction shifted from “experience decentralized products” to an extreme game of internal strife. Combating witches is necessary, but completely shifting the review responsibility to the community, or even encouraging mutual harm, severely damages community ecology.

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

● Anti-grab 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-grab features: Capital pyramid and blind box gambling. Users are swept up in endless FOMO, becoming free ATMs for project TVL data.

● Far-reaching impact: Since Blast, “point-wrapping” has become industry standard. The original intention was for users to participate long-term, but frequent rule changes and severely unbalanced returns led to a loss of trust. Web3 token grabbers 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-grab process: 18 months of cross-chain interaction burned huge amounts of Gas fees. Just before token issuance, the project launched the harshest witch review in history, even requiring users to “self-report” to retain some shares, or face direct zeroing. Many real active users and small studios were wiped out.

● Anti-grab features: Extreme presumption of guilt. The project team drained the enormous 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 volume checks are necessary, but the brutal execution of “presumption of guilt + self-report mechanism” further accelerated trust collapse. Since then, the infamous “stinker” has been forever stigmatized, and “anti-grab” has become a Damocles sword hanging over all token grabbers. Retail investors realize: in the face of absolute interpretive power, their efforts are worthless.

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

● Anti-grab 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 weakening the weight of transaction count and activity, instead focusing on “funds retained at a specific time” as the core threshold. This left long-term interaction users who accompanied project growth empty-handed, while internal “rats” and new accounts rushing to deposit reaped huge shares.

● Anti-grab features: Using “activity” to deceive Gas, then using “fund size” to kick out users.

● Far-reaching impact: zkSync’s extremely ugly appearance made the entire market despair of L2 airdrops. Controlling witches and volume-faking armies is necessary, but the opaque rules left early contributors cold. 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-grab 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 plummeted, and the project had to repeatedly patch rules amid scorn.

● Anti-grab features: 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 “NFT + points for public sale,” earning the community endless questions for the project team.

6. Linea: The word “slave” begins with Linea

● Anti-grab process: PUA art pushed to an appalling extreme: launching a two-year, ridiculously long Galxe Odyssey task. Users had to answer questions, cross-chain, swap, mint illiquid NFTs nonstop, and were forced to do tedious KYC.

● Anti-grab features: Infinite fatigue war. Always doing tasks, always accumulating LXP points, always 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, also marking the complete collapse of the OAT (on-chain achievement token) narrative.

7. Grass: DePIN’s free power generator

● Anti-grab process: As a star in the DePIN track, encouraging users to run idle bandwidth. Countless people kept their computers running 24/7, even buying overseas pure IPs at their own expense to farm tokens. But at token issuance, the project kept most shares for itself or allocated to VCs, while retail miners who worked for months couldn’t even cover their electricity and proxy IP costs when selling.

● Anti-grab features: Free-riding on others’ resources. Under the guise of Web3 infrastructure, brazenly freeloading on Web2 users’ physical resources.

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

8. Monad: The terminator of L1 airdrops

● Anti-grab process: As a highly anticipated high-performance L1 project, Monad attracted community long-term testnet interaction. In October 2025, it launched the MON airdrop, opening to 230k addresses, but only about 3.3% were allocated overall. Many real testnet users were strictly witch-checked and wiped out or received tiny shares, while KOLs and some early related parties received large quotas.

● Anti-grab features: High expectations met with extremely low allocation and strict review. The project used technical narratives to attract many testnet users, then handed out tokens mainly to KOLs.

● Far-reaching impact: The Monad incident further lowered community expectations for new L1 airdrops. Although early testnet participation was not officially counted, the process was unrestrained, and no tokens were distributed at TGE, making early contributors feel betrayed. Subsequently, interest in similar high-performance L1s sharply declined, accelerating the shift from “a hundred flowers bloom” to “cautious observation.”

9. Babylon: The misfit and mimicry in Bitcoin ecology

● Anti-grab process: Tried to transplant Ethereum’s staking gameplay onto Bitcoin. During mainnet activity, due to BTC chain 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, after six months, that the airdrop returns were even less than trading or investing in financial products.

● Anti-grab features: 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: poured a cold water on the overheated BTC L2 track. The bloody lesson proved that copying Ethereum’s PUA model on Bitcoin is fundamentally infeasible, severely damaging the trust and patience of Bitcoin veterans toward emerging ecosystems.

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

● Anti-grab process: Raising $37 million, Backpack launched “trading volume = points,” 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 wipes. Survivors also suffered: a big holder faked $15 billion volume, spent $300k in fees, only to get $150k worth of tokens (a 50% loss), turning real money into project profits.

● Anti-grab features: Simple brute-force “reverse siphoning.” While strict review is needed for volume faking, doing so after token issuance is blatant profiteering under the guise of airdrops. The token BP plummeted 68% in the first week, quietly draining users’ funds through endless faking.

● Far-reaching impact: The image of Chinese entrepreneurs collapsed. The “Chinese project = anti-grab” stereotype deeply ingrained in the community, causing subsequent Chinese-led Web3 projects to face unprecedented trust crises at launch.

11. EdgeX: The decline of Perp DEX

● Anti-grab process: After the L2 explosion, Perp DEX, which required real money for trading fees, was seen as the last hope for airdrops by retail. Although Lighter started well, by the EdgeX TGE: veteran users paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees for less than a thousand-dollar airdrop, while over 80 “mouse warehouse” new addresses with no on-chain activity grabbed nearly $230k in shares. Later, on-chain investigators confirmed market maker connections to illicit activities, official accounts disappeared, leaving chaos.

● Anti-grab features: Front-running by “mice warehouses,” retail as data cows, project teams not even pretending.

● Far-reaching impact: The farce of EdgeX shattered the narrative of Perp DEX volume-faking, top-tier institutional backing became a synonym for high-level scams. Retail despair deepened, smart money accelerated back to CEX or native L1.

12. Genius: The last straw for token grabbers

● Anti-grab process: Seen as the last hope, Genius faced community fakes of transaction volume, then a TGE “big reversal” gift: claiming that claiming the airdrop within 7 days would destroy 70% of tokens, with a maximum of 30%; or locking for a year to get full amount. 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-grab features: Users invested real money trusting the hype, only to be told at the last moment “take a small part or stay for another year.”

● Far-reaching impact: Genius’s antics completely disenchanted the “top-tier narrative,” dubbed by the community as “the last straw for token grabbers.”

Epilogue: A decisive break, returning to fundamentals

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

But perhaps the truth is even more brutal: it’s not just a premeditated harvest, but a collective karma of speculation and greed.

For a long time, the token grabbers only cared about “issuing tokens, how to distribute airdrops,” ignoring whether the product has real PMF or sustainable revenue. The project teams precisely exploited this greed—if you chase airdrops, they chase your principal and fees.

Now, with the airdrop bubble burst, countless people are bloodied by “anti-grab.” It’s tragic, but also perhaps a forced cleanse—an act of breaking free.

The market is finally forced to return to common sense: 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-box tactics will be voted out by users; those truly committed to community co-creation and returning to value will win more trust amid the ruins.

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