My experience with airdrop hunting

In the past few days, the events surrounding zkSync have been brewing online. I've seen many Twitter users even directly pressuring X and OK, hoping for a statement from these two exchanges.

Additionally, the zkSync Chinese community has publicly expressed its stance, revealing a tone of helplessness and sadness, and stated that they will disclose more details and information about the entire process later on—relatively speaking, I am looking forward to seeing the community's follow-up statements.

From the overall development of the event, it seems that there is very limited room for redemption. Therefore, for the vast number of participants, it is more important to take appropriate measures and not to make similar mistakes in future activities.

However, I still see many Twitter users expressing that after suffering heavy losses on zkSync, they should abandon their fantasies and fully commit to the next opportunity to earn rewards—after these experiences, if they still resolutely adopt this "go all out" and "spare no effort" approach, then I can only wish them good luck.

I consciously started to earn rewards after Arbitrum.

At that time, a friend suggested to me: why don't we form a team, create a bunch of accounts, and specialize in this?

But due to my inherently lazy nature, this idea never materialized. However, this suggestion reminded me that it was indeed necessary to do something: on one hand, it would allow me to familiarize myself with the latest applications, and on the other hand, I could also earn some rewards.

So I decided to casually participate.

My overall situation is limited time, limited energy, and limited financial resources.

Based on this situation, I set the following strategy for myself:

Focus on three accounts, select key applications, primarily deposit funds, and occasionally interact with newly launched applications.

The so-called "focus on three accounts" means:

I used three Argent X accounts and three MetaMask accounts to participate in every well-known Ethereum Layer 2 expansion after Arbitrum.

The so-called "select key applications" means:

In each Layer 2 expansion, I primarily selected two types of projects: DeFi and NFT.

In DeFi, I focused on the top three DEXs and lending applications on each chain.

The so-called "primarily deposit funds" means:

For each DEX, I mainly provided three types of liquidity and rarely engaged in token trading:

Initially, I provided the trading pair between WBTC and ETH;

Later, after a large number of ETH derivative assets emerged (such as stETH, ezETH, …), I replaced WBTC and ETH with trading pairs of ETH derivative assets and ETH (such as stETH-ETH, ezETH-ETH, …);

Finally, I focused on trading pairs between stablecoins (such as DAI-USDC).

I chose these trading pairs mainly to avoid impermanent loss.

For each lending application, my interaction frequency was also not high, primarily providing two types of collateral assets: one type is ETH derivative assets (such as stETH, ezETH, etc.) or ETH, and the other type is stablecoins.

The so-called "occasionally interact with newly launched applications" means: mainly participating in new NFT launches.

These new NFTs are projects I saw on Twitter. In fact, 99% of these projects are meaningless, purely created for participants to earn rewards. But their advantage is that the fees are extremely low, almost negligible.

This is how I participated in these Ethereum Layer 2 expansions.

However, during the participation process, I was too lazy to do the following two types of operations:

One type is to bind personal Twitter and Discord accounts. For this type of interaction, I am very lazy and really don't want to operate a bunch of zombie accounts just to earn rewards.

The other type is personality verification, a typical example being Linea's POH. Even in the crypto ecosystem, why still engage in such things? It's really annoying. Ever since Linea introduced this POH, I have been too lazy to participate in any related interactions, unless there are some particularly fun or interesting interactions.

Apart from these operations, I did not follow the advice of many users online to interact at least once a week or to ensure that operations between different accounts are spaced 24 hours apart to avoid being flagged…

I interact casually whenever I see or think of something, and I manually complete interactions for all three accounts at once, but I never use any scripts for automation.

The results of my operations are as follows:

For the Starknet airdrop, all three of my Argent X accounts were wiped out.

But to my surprise, my GitHub account received a relatively generous reward. I estimate this might be because I participated in the development of several projects in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Looking back, my participation in these projects was completely unintentional, purely driven by interest and the fun of being led by seniors in the circle. In that era, the crypto ecosystem didn't even have airdrops; Uniswap had just emerged not long ago.

Even though my wallet accounts were wiped out in the Starknet airdrop, I didn't summarize any lessons or improve my anti-flagging skills like many people online. I still operate as I used to, and I will continue to do so.

When it came to the zkSync airdrop, all three of my MetaMask accounts received airdrops, and the amounts exceeded my expectations, but my GitHub account received nothing.

For the remaining Ethereum Layer 2 expansions, my operations will remain unchanged, and the results will be entirely left to chance. I will definitely not waste too many unnecessary resources and energy on these.

As for the airdrops I received earlier, I will not sell them for the time being, and I will also keep the trading pairs and collateral assets I have left in those chains, as these airdrops and assets may help me receive future project airdrops.

I hope my experiences can be of some help to everyone.

Finally, I want to emphasize again: when doing these things, let's try to be less utilitarian and more curious and exploratory; luck will come our way. Even if we are unlucky this time, we may be lucky next time.