Digital Economic Warfare 2024 and Beyond
Level 3 - Virgin DeFi Analyst
Welcome Avatar! This is a combo free/paid post. If you’re new to all this crypto stuff then you’ll need to read this quickly to understand the basics. The second part is related to gaming even more of the Manta drop and the other rewards.
Part 1: What Is All This
All the airdrops (requiring real money) are simple. They need users.
We’ll explain this with an example.
Back when the internet was released, people said it was not possible to scale because you could use the fax machine to send photos. The internet could never handle that capacity.
Now we have people streaming TikToks and other degenerate behavior live.
The Difference: We’re talking about real money here. To make this understandable we’ll use ETH as an example.
ETH: This has been around for nearly a decade and sending $1,000,000 worth of ETH can be done rapidly and wouldn’t cost all that much (just assume a hundred bucks to be safe, massively cheaper than any international wire transfer).
What is an L2: An L2 is basically the same thing except they bundle transactions. Wait for 1,000 people to send $1000 each from USA to France and simply put it as a single $1,000,000 transaction with a $100 fee. Huge win!
Sound Familiar? It should. If you wanted to send a bunch of files but didn’t have the storage capacity you have to use something called a zip file. The Zip file compresses it all into a smaller sized item to send via the internet. Ta Da!
The catch? When you use these L2s you’re talking about sending REAL MONEY not 100 old photos of scoring 4 touchdowns in one game.
The L2 is worth nothing if no one uses it since you need users to bundle transactions.
Part 2: Incentives
Naturally, since people have to risk real money (ETH), they need to be incentivized to take this risk. If you can get 2-3% yield by simply staking ETH and running a node, no one in their right mind would ever go onto an L2 for free. It simply isn’t worth the risk for real amounts of money (for the majority $75,000 is real money)
Correct Incentive: No one knows. We have an opinion but we’ve learned that the majority won’t listen to us anyway. Instead, the majority are creating simple yield games to get more users.
Example: Raise a bunch of money, make sure you have enough yield to guarantee say 10% for any user who gets on early. This is probably enticing enough for many in a short time frame.
People put money in. Say $1M. They know they can get $1.1M out by the end of the month/quarter if things go as expected.
The money partially comes from the raise and of course them staking the ETH
Then you can collect fees as people use the network via random dapps (DEX, NFTs, DeFi on the L2 etc.)
In the end distribute this to people and typically the $0.1M is in the form of a token (part ownership of the L2)
Does this do a good enough job of aligning incentives? We’ll see!
Part 3: What You Need to Participate
This is going to be extremely basic. We’re going to assume you have zero dollars, zero crypto and zero wallets. Literally nothing.
Get a Laptop (ideally an Apple for security) and download metamask.
Create a wallet (you will only need one)
Go look for new chains that are starting such as DOP or Fuel
Go open up wallets and interact with all new chains ASAP
That’s it. Stop and wait.
Congrats. By doing this you should secure a small amount of crypto for simply helping test new networks/chains.
More Advanced
At this point you have taken quite literally no risk in terms of money. You’re simply learning the ropes and opened up wallets at zero cost to you. You’ll probably get a few hundred bucks worth of tokens simply doing this.
Now you know how it works so we move on.
Within Metamask you will now open a second wallet (address) using the + add account function
This is where you will begin depositing real money say 1-3 ETH and $1,000-3,000 of stable coins etc
You will use only this wallet because of Sybil detection. The more active your wallet is, the more likely it gets tagged as real and valuable since it is an active address with real money moving through
Like everything in life more money in, more upside but also more risk
Start looking for projects building on chain such as the L2 example we mentioned (reminder summary for paid subs)
Congrats! By doing this you are now taking risk call it $3,000-$10,000 at minimum. And you will likely receive airdrops from various projects. Expected yield of probably 10% per month or so (yes it is extreme because as mentioned all these projects need users).
Even More Advanced
If you have big money, you can do this with multiple computers a VPN and multiple wallets. Since the systems are all designed to pay you to find new users, you can just make new wallets from new computers in new locations. The tricky part is each address need s to remain active
Buy say five computers
Each one has thee different browsers and a different IP address
Each one will have a few wallets and *each wallet is active*
Since you need to be active you’d probably need around 100 ETH to make this worth your time. Perhaps more depending on how rich you are and how valuable your time is
Do the same steps under “more advanced” for every single chain you can find.
Congrats! You’re essentially a Turbo Autist at this point and you’ll be running up significant monthly returns any time there are airdrops to be farmed.
There is More
Naturally this is just a free post so we’ve given out the basics. If you’re smart you’re going to figure out how to game each airdrop. If Chain 1 raised $10M and Chain 2 raised $500M, you’d be a fool to chase the chain 1 airdrop. This is because the chances are much higher you earn more on chain 2 assuming equal entry time and equal money put in.
On that note….