Airdrop autopsy

Recently Splits ran a crypto art campaign called Structure, which I billed as “an experiment in consumer composability.” This was the hypothesis:

Consumer access to practical “money legos” has opened a new frontier in composability. While utmost customization will always require writing code, today you can do a lot by cleverly linking various services, tying things together with asset identities (usually contract addresses) and wallet addresses.

This proved true, with the asterisk that the “dev” experience was pretty janky. I used Base airdropping service Infector.fun as the glue between Rodeo, Clanker, and Manifold. While Infector was indispensable, I didn’t fully understand its limitations beforehand — which is on me, honestly — and thus ran into surprise snafus.

(Main issue: I planned to reward the first collectors of a given NFT, but Infector is designed for the top collectors. I got around this with BaseScan’s CSV export tool, then copy-pasting wallet addresses into Infector.)

I wouldn’t describe myself as “technical” per se. But if I were any less technical, without a rudimentary understanding of smart contracts as the substrate of crypto assets, this whole process would have been very stressful. On the bright side, allow me to emphasize that my understanding of smart contracts is truly rudimentary, like we could even call it remedial. And I cobbled things together on the fly without too much trouble.

For love or money#

The Structure project was also an experiment in incentives, given its mechanism design:

• Collectors who minted NFT 1 were eligible for airdrop 1.
• Collectors who received airdrop 1, plus anyone who purchased an equivalent amount of the same token, were eligible to mint NFT 2.
• Collectors who minted NFT 2 were eligible for airdrop 2, this last one being the most valuable (though still only about $15 per wallet), limited to a total of 55 collectors.

I wanted to know, would people progress not just from step A to B, but all the way through to step D, in this semi-complex chain of actions? Yes… though again with some caveats (see next section).

On a financial level, Structure outperformed my expectations. I was able to expand every airdrop — the precommitments were relatively stingy, because I had no idea how expensive things might become in the unlikely-but-possible event that we went viral, or how the revenue-generating aspects of the project might perform. Purely in terms of metrics, I was surprised by the level of traction:

• 9.8k mints on Rodeo, amounting to a nice extra payday for the artist (0.49 ETH)
• $1+ million in volume on the project token $interlock
  • Leading to approximately $4k in creator rewards
• 155 mints of the final NFT by 55 collectors

Those 55 collectors were each airdropped 3,333 $higher, the final payoff for their participation. Originally the limit was 33 collectors, but Proxy Studio spontaneously contributed, and we also allocated some of the $interlock creator rewards to enlarging the pool.

Suspiciously, the final NFT was minted by exactly 55 wallets, the limit on the final airdrop. This gave me pause because the Manifold page displayed the number of extant editions rather than the quantity of collectors. You had to go out of your way to find the latter number. It might be that someone sybil-attacked to claim the remaining slots after I pointed them out.

Or it might be that nobody wanted to burn 100k $interlock + 0.0005 ETH (Manifold mint fee) purely for the NFT, even though that’s less than a dollar. Too much hassle? Maybe we had already saturated the interested population of $interlock holders by the time minting slowed down organically. Quite possibly the rest of the collectors came along just for the airdrop, once I advertised that slots were still available. Which leads back to the sybil-attack theory.

And that leads to my next topic…

Can’t buy me love#

Money wasn’t really the point for Splits, so that’s not the only level on which to evaluate the project. For lack of a better term, what about the vibes? I’ll be honest, the vibes disappointed me, though perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. And my perspective might be skewed.

We did hear some positive feedback on the “coolness” of the overall experiment, which was gratifying. Nonetheless… I got the feeling that most participants were drawn in by payday potential.

The volume on Rodeo and $interlock was definitely driven by speculation. Duh, this is crypto. But that speculation came from erroneous assumptions. The Structure airdrops were not designed to be farmed; nonetheless people saw “airdrop” and went straight to farming. (In particular, minting many editions of the first NFT, thinking they’d get more tokens.)

Once the farmers realized how Structure actually worked, they were mad that the airdrop was designed to reward individual collectors rather than top spenders. Even though I spelled that out explicitly in the original blog post! Evergreen rule of the internet: it might seem like people read, but actually they don’t.

When you set up an airdrop, what you want is for the money to attract good-faith participants who otherwise wouldn’t have heard of your product, or those who might not have dedicated time to diving deeper without the promise of a reward. What you get is a minuscule number of those people, then mostly participants who couldn’t care less as long as they extract as much value as possible. We’ve discussed this previously on TWiF, and my experience running Structure reinforced that disappointing conclusion.

Hear me out#

One other thing that struck me: it was challenging to clearly communicate the stages of the project as it rolled forward. I tried to share all the pertinent information in parallel across @0xSplits on X, @weekinfarcaster.eth on Farcaster, and my personal Farcaster account. Relevant details included the link to the blog rundown, screenshots of the most important details, mint links, the $interlock contract address, BaseScan links, etc.

That scramble probably isn’t avoidable, since social media is where people are and thus where you can reach them. But it didn’t feel optimal either. I could see a dedicated mini app being useful for the Farcaster side of things. If this were a bigger project, a landing page to centralize all the updates would have come in handy (maybe I should have done this on the blog).

Structural improvements#

All complaints aside, I would do it again. Not exactly the same way, but I want to keep tinkering with onchain distribution. Splits is an onchain startup that caters to other onchain startups — understanding this stuff is important, and hopefully we’ll muddle into some best practices that will be useful for everyone.

Have you run an airdrop? If so, how did it go?