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

Please dont 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 dont 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. However, 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 overall 700 million token airdrop, alongside 5% allocated to Ethereum and open-source developers outside web3.

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.

One eligible contributor who did a simple spell check received 1,800 Starknet tokens from a single comment that wasnt even merged. 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 dont 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 its 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 largest growing rollup as per L2beat. Scroll has always been community first, and theres room for everyone, Pseudo told The Block.

There are some ways for projects to prevent spam on GitHub. For instance, Pseudo has already pushed to introduce a limit on activity in the Scroll repository, although it hasnt been implemented yet. However, while its easy to block newly created accounts, the issue becomes trickier when airdrop farmers have GitHub accounts that theyve used for a while and have made multiple comments with since its 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.

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