Airdrop farmers are now spamming GitHub in light of Starknet, Celestia distributions

Airdrop farmers have started spamming comments on GitHub repositories for projects that might launch token airdrops in the future, and it’s frustrating developers.

“Please don’t submit a GitHub issue just for farming purposes,” said a researcher at Scroll known as Pseudo. “The scroll core team is stretched thin enough as it is, please don’t make our lives harder.”

Airdrop farming is nothing new. Since some big projects suddenly gave governance tokens to their early users in 2020, people have been trying to game the system by performing actions that they think will make them eligible for future airdrops by other projects. Typically this was focused on on-chain activity, such as making transactions on a blockchain network.

However, recent airdrops, such as Celestia and Starknet, have switched up their distribution criteria. Celestia gave out 6% of its supply in its airdrop, with a third of that going to contributors, largely on GitHub.

The Starknet Foundation has allocated roughly 7% of its airdrop — set to open claims on Feb. 20 — to contributing developers. Starknet developers constituted 2% of the 700 million token airdrop, alongside 5% allocated to Ethereum and open-source developers outside web3. 

One eligible contributor who did a simple spell check received 1,800 Starknet tokens from a single comment that wasn’t even merged. This was likely because eligible Starknet developers included those who contributed at least three commits to a repository featured in the Electric Capital report for Starknet prior to Nov. 15, 2023. At current pre-launch prices, that could be worth $3,200.

Unsurprisingly, now that this is a criterion for inclusion, airdrop hunters are targeting GitHub repositories for projects that don’t have tokens yet.

One airdrop strategist cited the Starknet airdrop to justify contributing to the Scroll GitHub in the hope of getting an extra share of any potential airdrop. “Open-source contributions play a vital role in the digital age,” they said.

Spamming GitHub comments

Pseudo noted that the Scroll GitHub repository received more than 1,000 comments over the weekend, the vast majority coming from airdrop farmers. A look at one of the main zkSync repositories shows an increase in comments there too, with people making basic requests such as that the project should integrate with another protocol. 

“Airdrop farmers are part of the crypto community too, but it’s important for people to contribute based on their strengths rather than following trends. Outside of GitHub, we are seeing healthy ecosystem growth as well, being the fastest growing rollup as per L2beat. Scroll has always been community first, and there’s room for everyone,” Pseudo told The Block.

There are some ways for projects to prevent spam on GitHub. For instance, Pseudo has introduced a temporary limit on submissions for a week, they said. However, while it’s easy to block newly created accounts, the issue becomes trickier when airdrop farmers have GitHub accounts that they’ve used for a while and have made multiple comments with — since it’s harder to distinguish them from genuine contributors.

The comments might not be all bad, though, as the easiest fixes involve finding spelling mistakes. Or, as Synthetix Spartan Council member Millie X put it, “the silver lining in the new airdrop farming meta is that all crypto github repos will have perfect grammar now at least.”

Update: Pseudo confirmed that the temporary limit has been implemented.