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Why Teams Need to Optimize for More Than Just Metrics
Yahav Sal
Jul 28, 2025
·
3 min read
Early last year we were talking with a Web3 gaming project CEO who was beyond excited to TGE. “We have everything lined up for maximum distribution.” they said, “We’re getting quests on Mon Protocol, YGG, Galxe…”, the list went on.
Then, to his and his whole team’s surprise, the project acquired a largely botched community and ran out of money before the TGE.
You may not want to hear this, but launching token rewards by tapping into today’s leading distribution channels won’t drive sustainable growth for your business. Today’s top questing platforms are bot farms; they provide fake users and drive unsustainable metrics.
Background
Airdrops exist to help communities grow user distribution by incentivizing early supporters via token rewards. However, as user quality declines driven by sybil activity, incentives are wasted. As a result, projects end up paying for incentives that don't drive business growth.
To account for bot activity, projects need to implement guardrails around their reward allocation strategy to reward high quality users with real engagement only. Nevertheless, the industry is focused on user distribution to meet unrealistic CEX listing applications or funding requirements. Web3 growth platforms like Galxe, Zealy, and Layer3 are top partners to provide user distribution by rewarding users (or bots) regardless of their contribution's value. The result is a huge user base with low to no value.
Today’s questing platforms are optimized to grow metrics by making quests easy for bots to complete. This includes supporting only social and super basic onchain activities while also rewarding quests without verifying completion. These quests are easily completed by bots and don’t drive onchain KPIs. To attribute social user contributions to users, these platforms ask projects to bring their own X API, which most projects can’t afford, instead opting to not verify task completion.
Solving Sybils in Action
A partner ran campaigns across 4-5 traffic platforms to kickstart their campaign and drive traffic to their site. Realizing they had a bot problem, we worked with them to remove clearly fraudulent users to hone in on a core community of ~150k after multiple rounds of sybil removals.
When analyzing their users from historic campaigns, we weren’t surprised to see that >95% of users were bots. To build a high quality user base, we:
Cleaned up their program by removing fake users via our proprietary Anti-Sybil model that leverages both first-party and onchain data to drive recommendations.
Built meaningful quest logic aligned with their growth goals
Put mechanics in place to acquire and retain real users.
The below graph shows our partners' bot activity from before they started working with us through the end of our campaign. Sybil activity was reduced from 98% to 10%.
98% of users were identified as Sybil and progressively removed, allowing the project to build and reward an authentic community.
The Path to Success
Teams need growth strategies & a product that helps them attract real users and create evangelists. From hundreds of conversations, we learned that today’s platforms don’t support long-term growth goals because they don’t drive adoption of the core product alongside questing criteria. Building communities through more traditional paid + organic channels like paid search & social, influencer or ‘KOL’ marketing, and high quality social + content marketing still win in the long run.
Snag is helping its 50+ partners including Flow, ApeChain, OpenSea, and Camp Network grow highly engaged communities. If you’re a Web3 project looking to grow your community and launch a better token, don’t hesitate to reach out!
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