Spammers Stop Stellar From Giving Away 2B XLM Tokens On Keybase

Spammers stop stellar from making the giant airdrop on the encryption app by Keybase soon after Stellar made the announcement. Luckily, they went away as soon as the word was sent out that the free money era was done, so let’s find out more in our Stellar news today.

The CEO of Keybase Max Krohn explained that there has been a discussion lately about the serious uptick in spam on the chat features on Keybase. The explanation for that simply lies in the partnership of Keybase with Stellar Development Foundation to airdrop about 2 billion XLM to the users of the app over a period of 20 months:

“It was really an interesting experiment. In the end, it definitely achieved the goal of getting more numbers onto Keybase and more people onto Stellar.”

The trouble is that sometimes the costs outweigh the benefits as Keybase admitted when they announced the program was coming to an end. The final XLM airdrop started yesterday on December 13. What seemed to be a 2 billion XLM giveaway will not be a lot less.  The airdrop occurs when a protocol or a company starts distributing tokens to some internet users that it believes will advance the brand.

Talking about the partnership with Stellar, the Keybase users could receive thousands of dollars in XLM with each airdrop and the Spammers stop the activity once they saw it accelerating according to Krohn. Eventually, the airdrop on Keybase attracted so many spammers that it was no longer worth trying to continue. The founder of Stellar Jed McCaleb noted:

“These airdrops are very hard to get right and in a way that is not overcome by fraud.’’

As Krohn put it, the amount of crypto offered was too low for someone to start bothering with tit but for users that have the ability to write scripts to run a bot farm, it could have been very lucrative. Once scammers could get thousands of bots through Keybase’s checks for similar to human behavior, it can certainly become worth their while. CEO of the Stellar Development Foundation Denelle Dixon explained:

“They had developed a lot of interesting activities for users. We were really excited about it because we liked what Keybase stands for.”