Kaito's Predicament: When the final allocation rights of airdrops are given to the project party, what trust can be maintained?

Author: KarenZ, Foresight News

As Kaito of the InfoFi platform, driven by the AI-powered Yap points mechanism, incentivizes high-quality content creation and builds a virtuous content and attention ecosystem. However, recent controversies surrounding the airdrops of the collaborative projects Eclipse and Humanity, coupled with Kaito's deep-seated dilemmas regarding transparency, fairness, and community trust, have pushed Kaito into the spotlight. This not only raised questions about the rationality of Kaito's mechanisms within the community but also reflected the profound contradictions in the entire cryptocurrency field regarding user incentives and community building.

Kaito's Collaborative Project Airdrop Controversy and Response

Eclipse's "Death Note" and Self-Built Rankings

The airdrop released this month by the Ethereum SVM L2 network Eclipse for Kaito users has sparked controversy among KOLs and the community. Many community users reported that those who are truly active in the community and dare to speak out did not receive the airdrop, raising doubts about the validity of Kaito's data.

In response to the controversy, Eclipse community leader Alucard stated on July 8 that the logic behind the airdrop distribution was revealed: Eclipse created its own private X ranking using Kaito data. Other projects are expected to follow suit and adopt the same approach. They hope more projects can manually remove haters, users farming multiple projects, and airdrop accounts from the list. "Every project will emulate our Death Note model."

Kaito founder Yu Hu added, "Every project will receive the complete social data analysis provided by Kaito at the time of the snapshot, including each user's contributions over customizable time periods, sentiment analysis, volume analysis, historical behavior and reputation analysis, regional information, loyalty analysis, and more. Each project will make the final distribution based on the data, their own project preferences, and Kaito's recommendations. For example, some projects may give additional bonuses to early users, some may reward loyalty, some may reward based on region, and some may not mind black fans, etc. This is all highly customizable. The same applies to Eclipse."

This means that the data provided by Kaito serves only as a basic reference, with the final distribution power entirely in the hands of the project parties.

Previously, according to Eclipse OG @Yangsolana, Eclipse had stated in an AMA that they created a "Death Note" blacklist, excluding about 50,000 wallets from the airdrop. Additionally, the top 1,000 wallets were manually reviewed by the Eclipse team.

In fact, Eclipse team members had repeatedly stated their position before the airdrop, hinting that they would reward true community members. For instance, Eclipse community leader Alucard sharply expressed the following views:

"Kaito is just a tool and does not have the ability to identify user beliefs or loyalty."

"True community members actively participate, contribute, hold beliefs, and grow with the ecosystem. They want to win together with others. If you are farming 30 projects at the same time, waiting to sell tokens and disappear, then you are not a community member at all."

"Eclipse is cooking for the community, not for KOLs."

"If you are just farming and selling, then you are a parasite that is killing cryptocurrency. We need a community with true beliefs."

This stance, while gaining recognition from some long-term supporters, has also sparked controversy over fairness due to the subjectivity of "manual screening." The community questions: if Kaito's data is merely a reference, will users' efforts be arbitrarily dismissed by the project parties?

Humanity Increases Palm Print Verification Requirements

Coincidentally, the airdrop of the identity verification network Humanity also fell into the responsibilities of "betraying users" and "extreme anti-farming." The project added biometric requirements such as palm print verification on top of the existing Kaito points, resulting in many users losing their eligibility to receive rewards.

Yu Hu explained that in Humanity's case, the project party did indeed state at the very beginning of the official announcement that everyone needed to complete steps like fingerprint collection, but due to a lack of continuous reminders and the short time frame, many people failed to complete it for various reasons. Some accounts, despite being Yappers/Stakers, did not receive any distribution for the following reasons:

• Everyone must complete palm print verification on the Humanity website before using the airdrop checker.
• For stakers, they also need to have a wallet associated with holding sKAITO/YT-sKAITO.
• For yappers, they need to input their receiving wallet after the airdrop checker is released and before the claiming starts.
• The Humanity team also added a strict anti-witch mechanism in the final distribution, mainly based on the quality of recommendations.

Humanity stated before the airdrop, "Airdrops should reward early users and build a strong community, but in reality, airdrops have been hijacked by bots, witches, and farmers, failing to reward real users and wasting project resources. Therefore, Humanity verifies real users through Fairdrop, determining whether they are real users based on the number of social credentials associated with their human identity, whether they have used the application or scanned their palms in any global promotional activities, and whether they have contributed as real humans in the community."

The Deep-Seated Contradictions of the Kaito Mechanism

Lack of Transparency and the Vicious Cycle of Ranking Manipulation

Kaito has long been questioned for its lack of transparency, especially regarding data processing, weighting algorithms, and token distribution.

Whether it is Kaito or the projects collaborating with it, whether it is Kaito's ranking or the self-built rankings of the project parties, there is a lack of transparency. As a result, the logic of point distribution has become a "black box."

Currently, a large amount of homogenized content generated by AI floods X, while truly high-quality creators may be marginalized. More seriously, this ecosystem is forming a vicious cycle: speculators profit from ranking manipulation; real users gradually leave due to the disproportionate effort and reward; project parties, in order to filter effective users, have to resort to manual reviews and additional verifications, further increasing the participation cost for ordinary users. If the algorithm were completely transparent, it would be more easily abused, making it a challenge to balance transparency and anti-manipulation. The "high-quality content ecosystem" that Kaito attempts to build may be turning into a playground for rank manipulators.

The Positioning Dilemma of Data Providers

In the face of controversies arising from collaborative projects, Kaito founder Yu Hu's response reveals its core dilemma: not participating in the final decisions of project parties, yet having to bear the questioning of the decision results. This could lead users to invest time and effort based on Kaito's rankings and point system, only to potentially receive nothing due to the subjective screening by project parties.

Therefore, Yu Hu stated, "Kaito, as a platform that has only been around for 6 months, currently has a single entry scenario, but soon Kaito will enter capital and various scenarios, so its constraints and influence will continue to increase."

Behind the Controversy: Common Challenges in Crypto Community Building

Kaito's predicament is a common issue faced by the entire cryptocurrency field in community building. In the context of extreme volatility in the cryptocurrency market and rampant short-term speculation, project parties hope to attract users through airdrops while fearing being abandoned by farmers after being "sheared," creating a contradiction that has led to various stringent screening mechanisms.

However, manual intervention and subjective judgment also carry risks. Eclipse's "Death Note," while aimed at eliminating speculators, may inadvertently exclude genuine critics due to the team's subjective preferences; Humanity's palm print verification, while filtering out bots, may also reject some privacy-sensitive users. This approach of "sacrificing fairness for fairness" highlights the industry's technical and mechanical limitations in identifying "real contributions" and "long-term beliefs."

Kaito's Achievements and Plans

According to Dune data, Kaito AI has distributed tokens worth $106 million to various communities (excluding Kaito's own airdrops), with over 200,000 active Yappers each month. As of the first quarter of 2025, Kaito's annual revenue is $33 million.

Kaito founder Yu Hu mentioned, "In the past 6 months, the platform has assisted in distributing $100 million in rewards, and the vast majority of projects have a strong sense of contractual spirit, with many projects even exceeding their reward distributions, which reflects the coexistence concept of Web3 projects and users."

This achievement indicates that the InfoFi model still holds value, but the frequent controversies also serve as a warning: if issues such as transparency and trust continue to go unresolved, the trust of users who farm will gradually erode.

According to Yu Hu and Kaito's official disclosures, recent plans or suggestions include:

• Token Distribution: Kaito strongly recommends that all teams let Kaito handle the final distribution for Yappers and the Kaito ecosystem.
• Signal > Noise, focus on high-quality content, improve the identification of real quality content, and enhance ecological sustainability.
• Algorithm Improvement: Ensure that real, high-quality discussions are prioritized.
• Reputation: Considering the addition of an on-chain reputation mechanism to help further filter out AI garbage and reward high-quality "real" users.
• Combining Real Use: Not only rewarding Yapping but also integrating real use and ownership.
• Cultural Building: Promoting the community to shift from "score farming culture" to long-term value co-creation.

Additionally, Kaito founder Yu Hu stated earlier this month that a capital launchpad and gkaito will be launched in the third quarter, introducing a new Kaito Connect mechanism.

Conclusion

The recent controversies surrounding Kaito reflect the complexity of the relationship between data platforms and project parties within the Web3 ecosystem. Eclipse's "Death Note" and Humanity's additional requirements expose the limitations of the Kaito mechanism, while historical transparency issues exacerbate community dissatisfaction. Although the responses from Kaito's founder clarified some misunderstandings and showcased Kaito's achievements in reward distribution, the contradictions of autonomy and transparency in the distribution process still need to be resolved.

In terms of the collaboration model with project parties, Kaito may need to explore a more reasonable division of responsibilities and rights. Perhaps a standardized data screening framework can be established, clarifying which dimensions are objectively assessed by the platform and which fall within the customizable scope of the project parties, while also introducing third-party auditing mechanisms to ensure fairness in the distribution process.

For project parties, the means of filtering real users also need to be more humane. Finding a balance between anti-witch attacks and protecting the rights of ordinary users is essential to avoid rejecting potential community members due to overly stringent rules.

Kaito's controversies are both a crisis and an opportunity to rebuild trust. Only by confronting issues and actively reforming can the InfoFi model return to its original intention, genuinely incentivizing valuable content creation and community building, and injecting momentum into the long-term development of the cryptocurrency industry.