Recently, I came across a pretty interesting topic about "profit grabbing." Previously, LayerZero and various Layer 2 projects clashed with anti-witch policies, confronting profit-grabbing studios, and even a senior executive from a major exchange suggested that the era of profit grabbing might be coming to an end. But is that really the case? I spoke in-depth with an industry practitioner and found that the entire ecosystem is far more complex than it appears on the surface.

Speaking of the origins of "profit grabbing," it is actually related to KOLs. Early projects like UniSwap and Aptos airdrops made some well-known KOLs hundreds of thousands of dollars, which made everyone realize the value of profit grabbing. Later, with the rise of Layer 2 projects, zkSync, Starknet, and others became main targets for profit grabbing. Since one person’s energy is limited, studio-style operations naturally emerged.

Now, these profit-grabbing studios operate quite strategically. They don’t rely on scripts for automation but use manual interaction, mainly because scripts are prone to errors, especially during transactions. Once an NFT is mistakenly sold at a very low price, it’s irreversible. Some studios focus on high-quality profit grabbing internally, while maintaining semi-open services externally, using fingerprint browsers and AI tools to improve efficiency, while strictly controlling login IPs to prevent detection as bots. This approach indeed results in higher success rates compared to scripts.

What’s most interesting is the relationship between profit-grabbing studios and project teams. From the interviewee’s description, it’s more like the order-faking model on Taobao. Small projects need attractive data to get listed on exchanges, so they proactively tell profit-grabbing studios about anti-witch rules—essentially revealing the secret to passing the checks in advance. Larger projects don’t lack traffic; instead, profit-grabbing studios seek them out to learn the rules. During this process, project teams don’t need to give extra incentives to profit-grabbing studios because their interests are already aligned.

A deeper issue is that project teams, as rule makers, can fully incorporate their own addresses into the airdrop rules when designing them. For example, setting conditions like TVL thresholds, interaction counts, or account balances—projects can meet these themselves. This way, they can earn rewards while isolating genuine profit grabbers, retaining core users. So, the so-called anti-witch policies are, to some extent, just project teams showcasing how clean their data is—essentially a marketing tactic.

From a macro perspective, profit-grabbing studios provide valuable user data for projects, which has long been a common practice in Web2. There’s a saying in advertising: you’ll never know that 70% of the money spent was wasted, but you’ll never know which 70%. In a sense, profit grabbing is a form of promotional reward from the project to its users. As long as projects need to issue tokens, such mechanisms are necessary. From this angle, profit grabbing is a level 1.5 market—between primary and secondary markets. As long as there are new projects, profit-grabbing studios will find a way to survive.

However, the interviewee also admitted that the current environment for profit grabbing is becoming more strict. The era of easy money in the early days is over; now, higher participation costs and more refined operations are required. But as long as projects continue to issue tokens, profit-grabbing studios will persist. The form may change, but the logic won’t. This is the reality within the crypto ecosystem.