Hot Air Finance Airdrop Update

Dear Hot Air Finance Community,

today marks the end of our airdrop registration, but unfortunately, we have some bad news to share regarding the airdrop and the outstanding distribution. As some of you might have realized, we have had to deal with a large number of bots in the past couple of days. Our Discord has been flooded and the airdrop registration form was even worse with a total of 183k entries. We don’t know what the exact numbers are on Twitter, but we assume they are similar. We were under proper attack, and to be quite honest, we were not prepared for dealing with something of this scale.

A quick rundown of what happened:

One Sunday I was playing around with the submissions we have received so far, trying to get a clearer picture of the number of people making valid entries. I let the script run and the numbers of valid entries were very low, amounting to only a couple hundred entries. I found this very odd and started to do some digging. Essentially, every follower we have on Twitter made two entries or more. I also found my own account, which never made an entry into the list of submissions. It turns out a bot created an airdrop entry for pretty much every follower we have on Twitter, along with a new Solana address and a unique Discord account. This is a problem because we are not able to figure out which entry belongs to the actual owner of the entered Twitter account. We have duplicates and can’t really tell which one is the original. It’s a messed-up situation if you want to fair-launch a community project. We obviously don’t want bots to claim a large share of the airdrop, this would kill the project long-term.

Once we realized what was going on, we activated a proper captcha for the Discord server. As the airdrop requires to be a verified member of our Discord, this seemed like a good idea. The bot entries would be invalidated and the problem would have been solved. It must be noted that we still had a captcha planned for the claim page. Before the captcha, we thought the Mee6 bot verification should suffice for Discord, as another captcha needed to be solved to claim the airdrop. Looking back, this was pretty foolish, we should have done that immediately, but hey, mistakes were made.

Initially, adding the captcha to our Discord seemed to work out as a strategy. We were not seeing any duplicate entries anymore, as the bots didn’t verify on Discord. Sadly, the situation is changing now. A continuously growing number of bot accounts is making its way past the Discord captcha. We are back to our initial problem and can’t keep duplicate accounts apart in the airdrop form. We have also received a couple of reports of people submitting hundreds of airdrop entries by hand. First of all, this is a dick move. Second of all, this is not a great situation if the goal is a fair airdrop. I’m starting to understand why so many projects just drop tokens to holders of another coin.

The only solution we see right is a redo of the airdrop. It’s very unfortunate and we were discussing this intensely among the team over the last couple of days, but we believe it’s the only viable path going forward. It makes no sense to launch a protocol, so closely built around the community, with a bunch of bots. It would be easier to ignore it now and just go forward, but we don’t believe that’s a viable option long-term. We want to launch something that lasts, and another small roadblock like this is not going to stop us.

The new airdrop

We are currently in the process of developing a custom airdrop tool that will be used to register entries on our website. It will protect us against all the attacks we have had to deal with so far and we believe that this measure should allow us to distribute a fair airdrop to the entire community. We will not be sharing the details of the airdrop system we are building, as it would allow bots to prepare for this new form. Below you will find the requirements for the new airdrop registration, fulfilling these requirements will allow you to pass all security measures built into our custom airdrop tool.

Requirements

• Like, follow, retweet on Twitter
• Initialized HAF account
• Verified Discord account
• Minimum balance of 0.25 SOL at the time of the snapshot (Date TBA)

Requiring a minimum Solana balance is an effective tool against manual airdrop farmers. This is the only reason we are implementing it.

The snapshot date and details have not been announced yet, check our Twitter and Discord to stay updated.

Once again, we want to apologize for the situation as well as the captcha rollout on Discord. We want to facilitate a fair airdrop and the only way to achieve this is by doing it again. Unfortunately, this is the only way forward. I have started to implement a new airdrop tool, but we will have to move the launch back a bit. Christmas is also around the corner and I want to spend some time with the family. I am pretty confident that I will complete the new airdrop tool close to the New Year, but no promises. I will do my best to finish this quickly.

Kind regards,

DRIFTWOOD & HAF Team