“In our mind, we thought it would be advantageous to all partners,” Krohn said. Both GitHub and Hacker News contacted Keybase to say the onslaught “was causing immense operational strain,” according to Krohn. In short, if bot farms could activate a long-forgotten GitHub account, then they could pass Keybase’s filter. It’s a simple matter to write a script to check a site to see if any of those credentials work for old, unused accounts. Bot farms have access to the millions of user IDs and passwords that have been compromised over the years. However, this led to spammers pouncing on these two services and looking to see if they could access dormant accounts. This works across many websites, but Keybase and Stellar chose to start with Hacker News and GitHub because they both have high-quality communities that were not attractive to bots. Encrypted communication is more reliable if the identity of users is verified, so Keybase uses various forms of social proofs to increase confidence that accounts represent the people they claim to be.įor example, Keybase has users cryptographically sign statements on other services to prove to Keybase that they are real. Most people use it for chat but it also has collaboration and developer tools built in, among other things. Stepping back, Keybase is an app that makes encryption via PGP easier. The partners said that any new account verified on Hacker News or GitHub would also be permitted to join the airdrop. So the next pass opened it slightly further. This worked well, but the whole purpose for both Stellar and Keybase was to bring new people in. On the first pass, any account that existed before the airdrop was announced was assumed to be real. Keybase went through several levels of checks before allowing accounts to join the airdrop. “We were really excited about it because we liked what Keybase stands for.” ‘Immense operational strain’ “They had developed a lot of interesting activities for users,” she said, such as easily sharing XLM within a chat. Further, Keybase did a good job making XLM useable in the app, she said, which Stellar looks for in distribution partners. Stellar Development Foundation CEO Denelle Dixon told CoinDesk that the goal for both companies was to interest new people, and it did that well. If a scammer could get hundreds or even thousands of bots through Keybase’s checks for human-like behavior, it certainly became worth their while. “These airdrops are very hard to get right and in a way that is not overcome by fraud,” Jed McCaleb, Stellar’s founder, told CoinDesk at the Meridian Conference, a Mexico City gathering in early November.Īs Keybase’s Krohn put it, the amount of crypto offered was too little for some to bother with, but for someone with the ability to write scripts to run a bot farm, it was potentially very lucrative. Eventually, the airdrop on Keybase attracted so many spammers that it was no longer worth trying to continue. Malicious usage started right away but it accelerated, Krohn said, and by the November airdrop it was already a serious problem. Stellar has run a few airdrops, most recently to users of Blockchain wallets.įor the partnership with Stellar, Keybase users could receive tens of dollars in XLM with each airdrop.

Related: Franklin Templeton Taps Wallet Service Provider to Support Tokenized Shares There was a big move into airdrops in early 2018 until regulatory concerns slowed the practice, especially in the U.S.

Since cryptocurrency is fungible and easily exchangeable, this is effectively the same thing as handing out money. “The total giveaway amount will have been 300 million Lumens (approximately $16,000,000 USD),” Keybase wrote.Īn airdrop in crypto occurs when a protocol or company distributes its tokens to some set of internet users that it believes will advance the brand. What was advertised to be a 2 billion XLM giveaway will now be much less.

The third and final XLM airdrop began today, Dec. The trouble is, at a certain point the costs started to outweigh the benefits, as Keybase admitted when it announced the program was coming to an abrupt end. “In the end, it definitely achieved the goal of getting more numbers onto Keybase and more people onto Stellar.” “It was really an interesting experiment,” Krohn said.

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