A new kind of snapshot
Cool Cats has done a few airdrops now. We dropped a limited ice cream run and of course the GHXST collab. In both drops, one thing was very obvious — snapshot methods are largely to blame for the anger.
A new snapshot technique we are cooking up puts you in the driver’s seat. You decide if you are included to not.
Feeling cheated
A regular point of contention with airdrops is — how is the snapshot taken?
There are countless ways to take a snapshot:
- token holders at a given time
- who holds the most tokens
- who holds the least tokens
- how long a token has lived in a wallet
- …
In most of the methods, there is a way to game it. Consider the first method:
Token holders at a given time
If you take your snapshot a day before your airdrop and don’t announce your airdrop in advance, you might get a fair distribution. Although, people that sold/traded a token just before the airdrop would be furious that you didn’t tell them.
If you announce the airdrop in advance, people will try to cheat and split tokens between wallets in an attempt to increase their chances of winning a drop.
As the team organizing the drop, you cant win. You have to pick the lesser of two evils.
Sadly almost every snapshot method is susceptible to manipulation.
Fighting bots
Bots are an issue for every online marketplace and NFTs are no different.
As a small company, Cool Cats does not have the funds or time to invest in complicated anti-bot systems, especially for blockchain-related activities. Luckily, someone else has already done a lot of work in this field and we can use their systems — Twitter.
A creative new kind of snapshot
As a team, we were stuck on the idea that snapshots had to be code-driven.
But why?
Sure NFTs run on the blockchain and the blockchain is the hot topic right now, so it makes sense that people gravitate towards that for solutions. But, there is a very simple solution that puts the community in charge, creates community engagement, works as a marketing tool, and defeats bots and manipulation.
You, you are the solution.
Snapshot competitions
Imagine a Twitter competition, it could be a creative competition, perhaps draw a cat, maybe name a cat. You don’t have to be a great artist or even a creative person, you just have to submit a unique entry. No copy and paste entries.
Submit your entry accompanied by an Opensea link to a cat you own and that’s it. Simply by entering the competition you have won a position on the snapshot.
It should be noted that winning a spot on the snapshot does not guarantee that you will win. It merely means that you are now eligible to be included in the raffle.
Pros
- Twitter naturally handles bot activity
- Whales are unlikely to split their cats across multiple wallets and create multiple Twitter accounts to enter each cat they own
- As you are responsible for your own entry, you essentially decide if you want to be in the snapshot or not
- Engages the community
- Creates a fun event that all of Twitter can be a part of and enjoy
- Helps to anchor holders to their favorite cats
- The Opensea link will provide us with an address and we can easily scrape the Twitter competition thread and check for duplicate entries from the same Twitter account or Opensea account
Cons
- Someone could miss the competition and subsequently an airdrop that they might otherwise be eligible for
- Hard to use this method to reward certain groups of holders — more code-driven snapshots would still be required
- Potentially time heavy for the team to verify ownership
- Overuse could easily result in the community getting bored
In conclusion
I personally love this method. Sure it might require a little more work on our behalf, but the fact that it puts you in the driver’s seat is a massive positive.
We just have to be very careful how many times we use it. The risk of boring an audience is high and there is something to be said for the fun of a random airdrop.
