Mobile Farming Revealed: The Undercurrents Behind Crypto Airdrops

In a well-air-conditioned metal shed on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Mirai Labs CEO Corey Wilton witnessed for the first time the astonishing scale of cryptocurrency airdrop abuse. This room, roughly the size of a one-bedroom apartment, was astonishingly piled with an estimated 30,000 smartphones.

For the past four years, Wilton has wanted to personally understand the behind-the-scenes operations that impacted his NFT horse racing game Pegaxy in 2021. At that time, Pegaxy had a peak of 500,000 daily active users, but soon there were numerous reports of "bot farms." These bots could control hundreds of accounts simultaneously, quickly purchasing high-win-rate horses and repeatedly participating in races to convert game tokens into cash. Wilton recalled: "You could often see people posting screenshots on social media, with dozens of programs running on one screen."

Pegaxy is an automated system racing game where 15 horses compete against each other. Wilton stated that the robot farm has transformed the game from "who can win" to "who can extract value faster," altering the game atmosphere and accelerating the project's decline.

In May of this year, with the assistance of a former Pegaxy player, Wilton finally had the opportunity to exclusively tour a "highly specialized mobile farm" in Vietnam. This farm is located in a remote area, with extremely low internal air conditioning temperatures. The metal shed is filled with metal racks, each densely populated with thousands of smartphones, resembling a "shanzhai" encryption mining farm.

According to Wilton, this farm provides device rental services, with each mobile phone equipped with an independent SIM card and device fingerprint, capable of disguising the IP geographical location, making it difficult to detect. An operator controls a "master phone" through a computer, which then connects to over 500 "slave phones" to synchronize and replicate operations.

In addition to leasing, the core business of the farm is "manufacturing". They purchase used smartphones at low prices, refurbish them, and package them as "self-service mobile farm" equipment for sale overseas. They can produce over 1000 farm phones each week, with each set containing about 20 devices.

This practice often leads to farm users immediately selling their tokens after receiving them, impacting market prices and making it harder for real users to obtain Airdrops. Many projects exhibit a large amount of false activity before the Airdrop, and after the Airdrop is completed, the number of users and the token price quickly decline.

In June last year, the Ethereum Layer 2 project ZKsync's Airdrop faced significant controversy due to a large number of bot attacks. "Airdrop hunters" claimed over 3 million tokens through 85 wallet addresses, worth $753,000. Some users even publicly bragged about profiting nearly $800,000 through "witch attacks."

A certain trading platform pointed out during the overhaul of its points program that AI-driven robots are on the rise, which can highly simulate human behavior, increasing the difficulty of identification. The platform is intensifying its efforts against bots and developing new tools to identify abnormal operations, such as address entity association analysis.

The data scientists at a16z Crypto believe that as infrastructure optimization occurs and operating costs are significantly reduced, it will change the landscape of the offense-defense game. The company’s CTO emphasized the importance of building a "human-proof" mechanism, stating that the most advanced bot farms are almost impossible to reliably identify.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin pointed out that "one person, one ID" is not a perfect solution and may pose the risk of binding all historical actions to a single attack point.

Despite the controversy, some viewpoints believe that Airdrop still has significance. It can help achieve decentralized project governance, disperse control, and create topic buzz. Wilton believes that the key is to ensure that users are real people and are willing to stay long-term.

A certain trading platform stated that, in certain scenarios, if used properly and transparently, automated robots can actually play a positive role, such as providing liquidity, executing strategies, or conducting stress test simulations.