Case: Building a solid community through an airdrop campaign in the run-up to $COOKIE listing.

Challenge: To attract genuine users and exclude bots or Sybil attackers from receiving the airdrop.

Key activities undertaken:

• Design & execution of a user acquisition & community-building mechanism;
• Working with partners to cross-onboard users from established projects;
• Design of a points aggregation & wallet scoring mechanism;
• Sybis and bots exclusion through Cookie3 Airdrop Shield;
• Design and execution of the airdrop claim rules & mechanism.

Results: 

• Over 1 million wallets onboarded;
• 278,208 bots & Sybils blocked from receiving an airdrop;
• Decreased selling pressure and better rewards for engaged users.

The Case

The $COOKIE airdrop campaign was a strategic initiative and a part of the pre-Token Generation Event (TGE) marketing activities. The campaign expanded the user base and fostered genuine community engagement within the Cookie Ecosystem. By offering $COOKIE tokens as a reward for participation, the campaign also aimed to incentivize user acquisition, retention, and active involvement in the Cookie Ecosystem activities.   

The Challenge

Rewarding actual community members instead of bots or Sybils

The biggest challenge with airdrops is ensuring they go to people who play fair.

Recent findings revealed that in the zkSync ecosystem, 21,887 wallets were controlled by a single entity (source). Additionally, our internal Cookie3 research conducted among Cookie3 partners and clients revealed that 70% of wallets eligible for airdrops belong to bots, airdrop hunters, or Sybil attackers.

When it came to the $COOKIE airdrop, the objective was clear: to attract quality community members who play fair and believe in the project while excluding bots and Sybils from receiving the rewards.

To ensure the campaign's success, the Cookie DAO addressed Cookie3 to help design a successful campaign that will attract many quality users.

To achieve this, we needed to implement measures to prevent these attacks and ensure that the $COOKIE tokens were distributed fairly and equitably among the most engaged and deserving community members by creating a balance between attracting new users and protecting the ecosystem from malicious actors.

Desired Outcomes

The Cookie DAOs specified their desired airdrop campaign outcomes as:

• User Acquisition: Increase the number of wallets connected. 
• Community Engagement: Foster a robust, active, and genuine community through various engagement activities.
• Fair Distribution: Ensure that the $COOKIE airdrop is distributed fairly to genuine users and not to malicious actors/bots.
• Long-Term Retention: Encourage long-term user retention and participation in the Cookie Ecosystem.

Campaign Execution & Activities 

We took a multi-faceted approach to ensure the campaign’s success. It began with onboarding users through the Cookie Community Hub, where they engaged in activities to earn points and climb the leaderboard. 

Once bots were filtered out, the airdrop was distributed to the top-ranked users.

Overall, the $COOKIE Airdrop campaign activities focused on these critical domains: 

1. Building a strong community
2. Eliminating bots and Sybil attackers with our Airdrop Shield
3. Ensuring fair scoring and $COOKIE distribution

The next section provides a detailed overview of how the above was executed to achieve the desired results.

Community Building & Attracting Quality Users

The first part of the $COOKIE airdrop campaign was attracting users and participants.

To achieve this, we have helped Cookie DAO launch a hub for the airdrop. The Cookie Community page became the go-to place for information about the $COOKIE token, community links, and ongoing campaigns, allowing users to earn more points and climb the $COOKIE airdrop leaderboard. 

The cookie.community streamlined interface made it easier for users to navigate the $COOKIE Airdrop campaign and track their progress.

It consisted of three sources, each allowing users to earn points in a slightly different way: the Cookie Bakery Quest Hub, Referrals, and the Cookie Ecosystem Campaign.

1. Cookie Bakery: Quest Hub

The Cookie Bakery was the most labor-intensive part of the airdrop, allowing users to farm points on a quest basis. It was designed to bring in a large volume of users, who will dominate the space by:

a) joining the community & following Cookie DAO’s & Cookie3’s social pages from quests through one-time onboarding quests

b) resharing and providing engagement support on relevant social media posts through daily quests

c) overflowing crypto Twitter with posts about $COOKIE through social farming tasks

Bonus: being early pays off!

Early community members who participated in quests and tasks that took place before the airdrop, such as the Great Cookie Bake Off campaign, where the Cookie3 community could learn more about Cookie3 partner projects through AMAs and Galxe quests with USDT rewards and Discord roles that gave them extra points in the $COOKIE airdrop for being early!

2. Growing the $COOKIE Circle: Referrals

Referrals were another way users could earn points and climb up the leaderboard. We designed this solution to be attractive for KOLs and people well-connected in the Web3 industry who could climb up to the top of the leaderboard by inviting their communities to join the $COOKIE airdrop.

The second goal of referrals was to allow regular users to earn extra points by referring their Web3 friends, which granted more quality and engaged users entering the $COOKIE airdrop. At the same time, the referred friends kept themselves going and hyping each other up for the airdrop, which was meant to boost sentiment.

3. Ecosystem Campaign: Onboarding Quality Users from our Partners

This campaign onboarded and rewarded active Web3 users through a unique engagement mechanism. 

By collaborating with Cookie3 partners, Cookie DAO offered additional points (and sometimes guaranteed airdrop spot) to quality users of Cookie3 partner projects. Every partner has determined on-chain factors that characterize a quality user for them, such as smart contract interactions and NFT or token holdings. Users who met the criteria for each partner project could get extra $COOKIE airdrop points by connecting the wallet they use to interact with the partner project. After the users collected their points, they got bonus points by sharing their win on Twitter and spreading the word about the $COOKIE airdrop to people in their communities.

Over 40 projects participated in the Cookie Ecosystem Campaign, including Linea, Mantle, WOO, Polkastarter, Trader Joe, and Redstone.

The result? A significant boost in website traffic and wallet connections, as illustrated in the graph. 

Bonus? They were all existing quality Web3 users.

Points Aggregation

The next phase of the $COOKIE airdrop focused on point aggregation. 

With nearly 1 million wallets/users participating in the $COOKIE airdrop, it was crucial to establish an aggregated points leaderboard to recognize genuine, long-term engagement with the ecosystem. 

Points from every campaign were weighted differently to ensure fairness, requiring community members to invest similar efforts across all sources.

Wallets that accumulated over 1,000 points advanced to the next stage of the airdrop, where all participants were evaluated with the Cookie3 airdrop shield to exclude bots Sybils or users who weren’t providing true quality in the social engagement farming.

Excluding Bots & Sybill Attackers 

Nearly 1 million wallets joined the $COOKIE airdrop, and it was clear that not all of them were real users. It was crucial to ensure that the $COOKIE airdrop only reached genuine participants, not malicious actors. That’s when we deployed the Cookie3 Airdrop Shield technology. 

Our tool is designed to detect bots, Sybil attackers, and airdrop hunters by creating detailed user profiles using data from multiple sources such as referral patterns, website sessions, on-chain history, and Twitter activity. 

For the $COOKIE airdrop, we focused on three key areas that allowed us to exclude non-quality users from getting the airdrop:

1. Referral Program Patterns 

The referral program used the existing community to attract new members, which created a snowball effect. However, it also opened the door for exploitation. 

Malicious users could use a single wallet to invite hundreds of others, earning points for each, but none of the referred wallets would continue the chain. This is a common Sybil attack technique, and such behavior suggests that the same entity likely controls the central wallet and its referrals.

To find that, we have run the Cookie3 Airdrop Shield mechanism on all $COOKIE airdrop participants. Indeed, some wallets referred a lot of users who never referred or interacted with anyone else.

The finding from the $COOKIE airdrop is presented in the graph below. It’s easy to spot the two clusters on the central left-hand side that have a central wallet with many single dead-end connections. Such users were flagged as Sybil attackers and excluded from users eligible for the $COOKIE airdrop.

2)  Website Sessions 

Website sessions refer to the period of time a user actively interacts with a website. A session begins when a user lands on the website and ends after a set amount of inactivity (usually 30 minutes) or when the user leaves the site. Website sessions tracked through the Cookie3 Analytics Script, offered valuable insights into user behavior. One concerning metric was the number of wallets connected by a single entity. 

Some Sybil attackers were found to have connected over 5,000 wallets, an inhuman pattern. These wallets were flagged as bots or Sybil attackers and were subsequently excluded from the $COOKIE airdrop.

3) Twitter Content Quality Check 

One of the key requirements for the $COOKIE airdrop was onboarding quality users who care about the project and understand its long-term vision and mission. The quality of posts made by users for the Twitter farming tasks was a good indicator of whether a user is a true supporter.

In the Cookie Bakery’s Twitter farming posts users were encouraged to create tweets about the Cookie ecosystem through the Cookie Bakery quests, leading to a wave of organic content. Thanks to this, professional content creators also jumped on the trend and began highlighting Cookie3.

To handle the influx of tweets and make sure we reward only the quality users, we implemented an AI-powered Twitter Content Quality Check on the $COOKIE tweets.

Cookie3 data scientists designed advanced filters and utilized the Twitter API to identify relevant content, focusing on posts that engaged with Cookie3. Tweets deemed spammy, unrelated to Web3, or promoting other tokens had their wallet point scores reduced. Conversely, tweets featuring media, tagging @Cookie3_com, and offering insightful or educational content earned additional bonus points.

This is true; engaged users who understood and promoted the project were rewarded the most.

Distribution 

The final step of the airdrop campaign was the claim process. To manage selling pressure and encourage users to explore the staking portal, we suggested the Cookie DAO offers the recipients two options:

Option 1: Stake Full $COOKIE AirdropRecipients could stake their entire $COOKIE airdrop allocation, locked in the staking pool for 4 months.

Option 2: Claim Instant $COOKIE AirdropRecipients could claim 25% of their airdrop directly into their wallet, with the remaining 75% going into the 'unclaimed airdrop pool.' This option allowed immediate access to part of the airdrop while the rest was reallocated to the $COOKIE airdrop pool.

Option 1 helped align with the token’s performance by reducing selling pressure and maximizing financial benefits for recipients. Consequently, 92% of recipients opted to stake their full $COOKIE airdrop. The airdrop claim process was smoothly executed, supported by a comprehensive guide available here.

Outcome/Conclusion 

The $COOKIE airdrop campaign was a huge success, exceeding expectations regarding user acquisition, community growth, and token performance. 

Nearly 1 million new wallets signed up, expanding the user base significantly. 

The community also flourished, with 400,000 new Twitter followers, 150,000 Discord members, and 65 business partners joining. 

Sybil attacks were effectively mitigated, with 278,208 bots and airdrop hunters excluded. This ensured that the airdrop benefits were distributed fairly to genuine users. The project's strong market interest and confidence were evident as $COOKIE achieved a $52 million trading volume within 24 hours of listing on top CEXs.  

Additional Insights & Key Learnings

• Strategic Planning: A well-planned and executed airdrop campaign requires careful consideration of goals, target audience, and potential challenges.

• Reward Structure: A well-designed reward structure can incentivize user participation and encourage long-term retention. This was proven when 92% of recipients opted to stake their full $COOKIE airdrop. 

• Continuous Improvement: Monitoring and refining the campaign's strategy and tactics is essential for ongoing success. During the airdrop campaign, we constantly iterated to optimize the campaign further, an excellent example of this would be implementing the “Twitter Content Quality Check” to handle the large influx of tweets.
  

How can you leverage Cookie3 Airdrop Shield tech and know-how?

The Cookie3 team leveraged its expertise, connections, and technology to develop the Airdrop Acceleration Program, designed to help Web3 projects launch successful airdrop campaigns. Companies such as Stride, Abyss Protocol, and Fullhouse are already benefiting from this program, which includes: 

1. Advisory: Weekly one-hour calls, consulting on eligibility requirements, and introductions to KOLs, VCs, and market leaders.
2. Cookie3 Airdrop Shield: A tool to exclude bots from your airdrop campaign, reducing selling pressure and preventing community concerns over low rewards.
3. Twitter Social Farming Technology: A tool for running social farming campaigns with content evaluation, enhancing the impact of social media interactions related to your airdrop.
4. Co-Marketing Support: Collaborative marketing efforts to boost visibility and engagement. 

To explore how the Airdrop Acceleration Program can benefit your project, schedule a free 30-minute consultation with our BD Manager, Michał Stec.
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