Recently, two large airdrops, Celestia and Starknet, have changed the traditional rules of airdrops. They have allocated airdrop quotas to contributors of code on Github. Recently, someone from the overseas community made a simple correction to a typo in the Starknet code on Github and received an airdrop of 1,800 STRK tokens, which is worth approximately $3,200 at the current pre-market price.
Examples of such “free money” have opened up a new battlefield for “carpetbaggers”, who have shifted their focus to the Github repositories of major projects. They act as watchdogs for the project teams, “correcting typos” or even submitting meaningless fixes in order to potentially receive airdrops. However, these activities are not beneficial for the project teams and only increase the workload for the engineers.
Toghrul Maharramov, a contributor to the Scroll project’s code, criticized the airdrop rules of Celestia and Starknet on the X platform. He claimed that these rules have disrupted the open-source software in the entire cryptocurrency industry. While allocating airdrops to contributors of open-source software is a good idea, Toghrul Maharramov believes that in the cryptocurrency industry, all good ideas eventually get destroyed.
In addition, Pseudo, a researcher from Scroll, stated that the Scroll Github repository received over 1,000 comments over the weekend, with the majority coming from carpetbaggers.
However, these comments are not entirely worthless. Mudit Gupta, the Security Lead at Polygon, stated that even if it’s just fixing a typo, it should not be considered “spam” because they are still correcting errors in the repository. Millie X, a member of the Synthetix Spartan Council, jokingly added:
