![soleconomist's tweet photo. == On the $CLOUD airdrop, part 2 ==
Thank you all for taking the time to read and respond to the first part of the $CLOUD airdrop explainer. I'm staggered and flattered by the comments and criticism, and delighted that this seems to have sparked a lively discussion. I wanted to give a little bit more context about why and how we're thinking about earnestness, and reflect on what we can do better for next time.
## Is 5% for earnestness too much?
Many people applauded the fact that we were trying to do something different and reward good people in the space. Thank you for the kind words! We appreciate it a lot.
The most common criticism was that while rewarding earnestness is a great idea, an equal split between earnestness and capital was too much. These tweets sum it up quite well:
I agree that 50% is big. But is it too big? We're sending a message -- that capital and earnestness are just as important to us.
Our goal at @sanctumso is to 1000x the size of the onchain economy, and we want to reward anything that helps us achieve that goal. Capital is important, but the bottleneck right now isn't capital. The truly rare commodity are good people with their heart in the right place, because those are the ones that we need in order to fulfill our vision.
In order to build the onchain economy, we need people brave enough to try LSTs as a funding method -- that's creators and artists (Sanctum Social, @Pathfinders__ ), vendors selling goods and services (@RaposaCoffeeCo, @Raiba_AI , @playonshaga , @helium_mobile, @fusewallet), public goods (@_cubik ), and many more. We need users who are willing to support this radical new model. We need missionaries, not mercenaries. That is why we are rewarding the earnest.
That said, we have heard your feedback. We understand that the allocation is large. Hence, we have decided to implement vesting on the earnestness airdrop. This will encourage people who receive the earnestness airdrop to be long-term aligned. The vesting period will be the same as Alpha Vault buyers.
One consequence of doing this is that it will decrease the total float on day 1 by 5%. As we are committed to a high and healthy float on day 1, we are considering increasing the total supply that will be provided on LFG. I will give the full and finalised details very soon.
## Was the process too subjective?
Many had concerns about the objectivity and transparency of our process. @itschieph said that "it's pretty subjective and decision controlled by small team who wont catch every interaction, especially outside of the sanctum disc/twitter. "
That's a very valid criticism. While I would have loved to be more transparent with the public, unfortunately being too transparent would have made it impossible to judge earnestness accurately. We cannot reveal objective metrics as any such metrics would be gamed [^2], but in general we looked for constructive criticism/feedback (even if negative!), good and thoughtful content that displays an understanding of the vision/value proposition, translating Sanctum documents to reach the non-English-speaking community, etc. We spent the past months searching through Twitter, Discord, Telegram, YouTube etc. to identify contributions, from 2023 all the way up to the cutoff date (1st July 2024 EST 0000).
Let me share our process to find and check earnestness, and give some examples of earnest people.
Firstly, I know that you may have shilled Sanctum to your private alpha group, grandmother, football club, etc., and thank you very much for that, but unfortunately we cannot consider contributions in these venues. That is what cupcakes are forπ
Secondly, we do not prioritise people that we previously knew or are famous. You don't have to be a KoL or a Twitter "threadooor" to be considered earnest. We do not care how many views or RTs your posts get.
For the Sanctum Discord we downloaded the entire chat log and looked through all 1.6 million messages across multiple channels. There are 9509 unique users who have sent at least one message in channels we monitored. We looked at both quality and quantity -- a consistent record of being helpful to new users or contributing to the discussion was rewarded; spamming low-quality messages was not. While we don't care about how many Wonderland quests you completed, actively participating in helping to solve the quests did count. We made sure to look through content that was shared in the #usercontent channel too.
For Twitter we do two separate passes: one chronological, one per-user via Sanctum Profiles. We have around 125k profiles with socials connected. We use the Twitter Pro API to search and download every tweet/reply relating to Sanctum and we view manually from there. These two different passes make sure that we don't miss anyone and that we can even reach out to people who did not set up a profile. We liked thoughtful, balanced posts that focused more on Sanctum's broader mission rather than the airdrop. A good example is @jameshanley's whiteboard explainers.
We have at least two different teams of graders. The two teams of graders first calibrate together on a few dozen profiles before they separate and work independently. If there is a disagreement between the two teams when grading a profile, we discuss them and come to a consensus.
Lastly, we reached out to our Wonderland partners and asked them to suggest people that were helpful in their community who we may have missed. We didn't take their word as gospel -- we made sure to independently verify.
At the end, everything goes into an earnestness spreadsheet that looks like this:
Every single person is assigned an Earnestness Level from zero to four, with Level Four reserved for only the most earnest people. I can't share the finalised numbers as we are still looking through the data.
Here is an example of somebody who is not an influencer or a thread writer, but is still very earnest. @bengsharksol has over 14,000 messages in the Sanctum Discord. His first message was in 21st of April 2024, where he asked a "newbie question" about Sanctum. He then suggested dark mode the next day, and has been very active throughout helping answer questions, flag spam etc.
The support of Bengshark and other community members was incredibly helpful during busy times like when Wonderland momentarily went down and the team was scrambling to fix it. Sanctum would not have been a success without them.
Some people also said that this was all an elaborate setup for the core team to enrich insiders. We definitely did not do this. The decision to make earnestness a component of the airdrop was kept a secret between core team members only -- we did not tell anybody else. Needless to say, no Sanctum team member gets any earnestness allocation, and the two KoLs we gave allocation to are also not eligible.
(as an aside, there are a lot easier ways to give allocation to insiders and KoLs that don't involve writing posts viewed by hundreds of thousands of people: you can do a tiered airdrop, letting insiders know what the tier cutoffs are in advance, so they can sybil perfectly to get maximum allocation. or raise a round and give allocation to whoever you want -- no justification needed).
## Does this "cheapen" earnestness?
@case_fud mentioned that "everyone who says something nice about @sanctumso is now just a duplicitous Earnestness farmer that cannot be trusted... if you monetize authenticity you TAINT authenticity and lose it." [^3] @tongnk also mentioned that there may be people starting to farm earnestness going forward.
This is a good point. Our goal is to make the space better, and we try very hard not to "pull up the ladder". @jito_sol and @JupiterExchange gave tiered airdrops with immense wealth effects (great for Solana), but it made things a lot harder for protocols that came after. The downside of having two successful tiered airdrops is that there is a lot more sybil activity now. Jito had ~10k wallets in their points program. We had 330k wallets in Wonderland.
I believe what we have done will be a positive contribution, even if people start earnestness farming. Imagine you gave people money to go visit the elderly in nursing homes. Does it cheapen things? Perhaps. Would there be some people trying to game the system? Maybe. But at the end of the day, I think a world where more people keep lonely people company in their dotage is a good one.
Likewise, we've been transparent about the kind of behaviour we reward. And if that gets influencers to talk about the actual product and values rather than focusing on "airdrop airdrop airdrop", that is a positive contribution to the space.
Projects have already been trying to reward earnestness for a long time. Tiered airdrops tried to reward small users over big whales. Then you had things like Discord level and Galxe quests, but these were very much gameable. We tried our best to make earnestness hard to game by reviewing every user manually and selecting for thoughtful and consistent contributions. Nonetheless, this is definitely a concern, and in Season 2 we'll have to be a lot more judicious in how we measure and reward earnestness.
## How do I be earnest?
A handful of people asked "I know I was not earnest, what can I do to be earnest next time?". Thank you very much for asking this question! We need more people like you in this space. First, I'd recommend reading @paulg's "The Lesson to Unlearn" [^1]. There is no "trick" to be earnest -- just take the time to understand our mission, be helpful and participate where you can. We are in dire need of good people in crypto.
Sanctum hit ~1B in TVL in 37 days of Wonderland. I think it's a lot easier to be kind and helpful and be one of the few earnest folks, than to find $1M to put in Sanctum.
## What we can do better next time
In hindsight I think it would have been better to announce our plans for rewarding earnestness first before opening Sanctum Profiles. We did it the other way because we were trying very hard not to leak information, but it wouldn't have mattered anyway given the cutoff, and then people would be able to have the full context on whether or not to set up a profile and link their socials.
## Conclusion
Thank you all once again for your thoughts and feedback -- I read everything and appreciate all of it. We aren't perfect, but I hope documenting this helps give more context to our decisions and serve as a reference for future founders. I hope our decision to introduce vesting for the earnestness component helps alleviate some of the concerns.
Airdrop design is hard. Linear airdrops reward passive whales; active community members -- who may not have as much capital -- get crumbs. Tiered airdrops give a massive portion to undeserving sybil farms, leaving less on the table for true capital contributors and active community members. We try our best to change the lives of people who contribute meaningfully to Sanctum's mission in both monetary and nonmonetary ways.
*Stay tuned for part 3, where I will talk about our efforts to deal with sybils so we can reward capital contributors as much as possible.*
[^1]: @paulg, The Lesson to Unlearn https://t.co/Yw07MZTTPW
https://t.co/TE0j4f25Fa
[^2]: @a_m_mastroianni, How to drive a stake through your own good heart https://t.co/bhsApEwpa7
[^3]: @case_fud : (https://t.co/omGsmQbgxU
)](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GR-fkFEaUAA1DOF.jpg)
![soleconomist's tweet photo. == On the $CLOUD airdrop, part 2 ==
Thank you all for taking the time to read and respond to the first part of the $CLOUD airdrop explainer. I'm staggered and flattered by the comments and criticism, and delighted that this seems to have sparked a lively discussion. I wanted to give a little bit more context about why and how we're thinking about earnestness, and reflect on what we can do better for next time.
## Is 5% for earnestness too much?
Many people applauded the fact that we were trying to do something different and reward good people in the space. Thank you for the kind words! We appreciate it a lot.
The most common criticism was that while rewarding earnestness is a great idea, an equal split between earnestness and capital was too much. These tweets sum it up quite well:
I agree that 50% is big. But is it too big? We're sending a message -- that capital and earnestness are just as important to us.
Our goal at @sanctumso is to 1000x the size of the onchain economy, and we want to reward anything that helps us achieve that goal. Capital is important, but the bottleneck right now isn't capital. The truly rare commodity are good people with their heart in the right place, because those are the ones that we need in order to fulfill our vision.
In order to build the onchain economy, we need people brave enough to try LSTs as a funding method -- that's creators and artists (Sanctum Social, @Pathfinders__ ), vendors selling goods and services (@RaposaCoffeeCo, @Raiba_AI , @playonshaga , @helium_mobile, @fusewallet), public goods (@_cubik ), and many more. We need users who are willing to support this radical new model. We need missionaries, not mercenaries. That is why we are rewarding the earnest.
That said, we have heard your feedback. We understand that the allocation is large. Hence, we have decided to implement vesting on the earnestness airdrop. This will encourage people who receive the earnestness airdrop to be long-term aligned. The vesting period will be the same as Alpha Vault buyers.
One consequence of doing this is that it will decrease the total float on day 1 by 5%. As we are committed to a high and healthy float on day 1, we are considering increasing the total supply that will be provided on LFG. I will give the full and finalised details very soon.
## Was the process too subjective?
Many had concerns about the objectivity and transparency of our process. @itschieph said that "it's pretty subjective and decision controlled by small team who wont catch every interaction, especially outside of the sanctum disc/twitter. "
That's a very valid criticism. While I would have loved to be more transparent with the public, unfortunately being too transparent would have made it impossible to judge earnestness accurately. We cannot reveal objective metrics as any such metrics would be gamed [^2], but in general we looked for constructive criticism/feedback (even if negative!), good and thoughtful content that displays an understanding of the vision/value proposition, translating Sanctum documents to reach the non-English-speaking community, etc. We spent the past months searching through Twitter, Discord, Telegram, YouTube etc. to identify contributions, from 2023 all the way up to the cutoff date (1st July 2024 EST 0000).
Let me share our process to find and check earnestness, and give some examples of earnest people.
Firstly, I know that you may have shilled Sanctum to your private alpha group, grandmother, football club, etc., and thank you very much for that, but unfortunately we cannot consider contributions in these venues. That is what cupcakes are forπ
Secondly, we do not prioritise people that we previously knew or are famous. You don't have to be a KoL or a Twitter "threadooor" to be considered earnest. We do not care how many views or RTs your posts get.
For the Sanctum Discord we downloaded the entire chat log and looked through all 1.6 million messages across multiple channels. There are 9509 unique users who have sent at least one message in channels we monitored. We looked at both quality and quantity -- a consistent record of being helpful to new users or contributing to the discussion was rewarded; spamming low-quality messages was not. While we don't care about how many Wonderland quests you completed, actively participating in helping to solve the quests did count. We made sure to look through content that was shared in the #usercontent channel too.
For Twitter we do two separate passes: one chronological, one per-user via Sanctum Profiles. We have around 125k profiles with socials connected. We use the Twitter Pro API to search and download every tweet/reply relating to Sanctum and we view manually from there. These two different passes make sure that we don't miss anyone and that we can even reach out to people who did not set up a profile. We liked thoughtful, balanced posts that focused more on Sanctum's broader mission rather than the airdrop. A good example is @jameshanley's whiteboard explainers.
We have at least two different teams of graders. The two teams of graders first calibrate together on a few dozen profiles before they separate and work independently. If there is a disagreement between the two teams when grading a profile, we discuss them and come to a consensus.
Lastly, we reached out to our Wonderland partners and asked them to suggest people that were helpful in their community who we may have missed. We didn't take their word as gospel -- we made sure to independently verify.
At the end, everything goes into an earnestness spreadsheet that looks like this:
Every single person is assigned an Earnestness Level from zero to four, with Level Four reserved for only the most earnest people. I can't share the finalised numbers as we are still looking through the data.
Here is an example of somebody who is not an influencer or a thread writer, but is still very earnest. @bengsharksol has over 14,000 messages in the Sanctum Discord. His first message was in 21st of April 2024, where he asked a "newbie question" about Sanctum. He then suggested dark mode the next day, and has been very active throughout helping answer questions, flag spam etc.
The support of Bengshark and other community members was incredibly helpful during busy times like when Wonderland momentarily went down and the team was scrambling to fix it. Sanctum would not have been a success without them.
Some people also said that this was all an elaborate setup for the core team to enrich insiders. We definitely did not do this. The decision to make earnestness a component of the airdrop was kept a secret between core team members only -- we did not tell anybody else. Needless to say, no Sanctum team member gets any earnestness allocation, and the two KoLs we gave allocation to are also not eligible.
(as an aside, there are a lot easier ways to give allocation to insiders and KoLs that don't involve writing posts viewed by hundreds of thousands of people: you can do a tiered airdrop, letting insiders know what the tier cutoffs are in advance, so they can sybil perfectly to get maximum allocation. or raise a round and give allocation to whoever you want -- no justification needed).
## Does this "cheapen" earnestness?
@case_fud mentioned that "everyone who says something nice about @sanctumso is now just a duplicitous Earnestness farmer that cannot be trusted... if you monetize authenticity you TAINT authenticity and lose it." [^3] @tongnk also mentioned that there may be people starting to farm earnestness going forward.
This is a good point. Our goal is to make the space better, and we try very hard not to "pull up the ladder". @jito_sol and @JupiterExchange gave tiered airdrops with immense wealth effects (great for Solana), but it made things a lot harder for protocols that came after. The downside of having two successful tiered airdrops is that there is a lot more sybil activity now. Jito had ~10k wallets in their points program. We had 330k wallets in Wonderland.
I believe what we have done will be a positive contribution, even if people start earnestness farming. Imagine you gave people money to go visit the elderly in nursing homes. Does it cheapen things? Perhaps. Would there be some people trying to game the system? Maybe. But at the end of the day, I think a world where more people keep lonely people company in their dotage is a good one.
Likewise, we've been transparent about the kind of behaviour we reward. And if that gets influencers to talk about the actual product and values rather than focusing on "airdrop airdrop airdrop", that is a positive contribution to the space.
Projects have already been trying to reward earnestness for a long time. Tiered airdrops tried to reward small users over big whales. Then you had things like Discord level and Galxe quests, but these were very much gameable. We tried our best to make earnestness hard to game by reviewing every user manually and selecting for thoughtful and consistent contributions. Nonetheless, this is definitely a concern, and in Season 2 we'll have to be a lot more judicious in how we measure and reward earnestness.
## How do I be earnest?
A handful of people asked "I know I was not earnest, what can I do to be earnest next time?". Thank you very much for asking this question! We need more people like you in this space. First, I'd recommend reading @paulg's "The Lesson to Unlearn" [^1]. There is no "trick" to be earnest -- just take the time to understand our mission, be helpful and participate where you can. We are in dire need of good people in crypto.
Sanctum hit ~1B in TVL in 37 days of Wonderland. I think it's a lot easier to be kind and helpful and be one of the few earnest folks, than to find $1M to put in Sanctum.
## What we can do better next time
In hindsight I think it would have been better to announce our plans for rewarding earnestness first before opening Sanctum Profiles. We did it the other way because we were trying very hard not to leak information, but it wouldn't have mattered anyway given the cutoff, and then people would be able to have the full context on whether or not to set up a profile and link their socials.
## Conclusion
Thank you all once again for your thoughts and feedback -- I read everything and appreciate all of it. We aren't perfect, but I hope documenting this helps give more context to our decisions and serve as a reference for future founders. I hope our decision to introduce vesting for the earnestness component helps alleviate some of the concerns.
Airdrop design is hard. Linear airdrops reward passive whales; active community members -- who may not have as much capital -- get crumbs. Tiered airdrops give a massive portion to undeserving sybil farms, leaving less on the table for true capital contributors and active community members. We try our best to change the lives of people who contribute meaningfully to Sanctum's mission in both monetary and nonmonetary ways.
*Stay tuned for part 3, where I will talk about our efforts to deal with sybils so we can reward capital contributors as much as possible.*
[^1]: @paulg, The Lesson to Unlearn https://t.co/Yw07MZTTPW
https://t.co/TE0j4f25Fa
[^2]: @a_m_mastroianni, How to drive a stake through your own good heart https://t.co/bhsApEwpa7
[^3]: @case_fud : (https://t.co/omGsmQbgxU
)](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GR-faU1agAAQ45B.jpg)
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Community members will continue to monitor for any issues over the next 24 hours.
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Explore UniFi is now live on @Galxe!
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1/10
== On the $CLOUD airdrop, part 2 ==
Thank you all for taking the time to read and respond to the first part of the $CLOUD airdrop explainer. I'm staggered and flattered by the comments and criticism, and delighted that this seems to have sparked a lively discussion. I wanted to give a little bit more context about why and how we're thinking about earnestness, and reflect on what we can do better for next time.
## Is 5% for earnestness too much?
Many people applauded the fact that we were trying to do something different and reward good people in the space. Thank you for the kind words! We appreciate it a lot.
The most common criticism was that while rewarding earnestness is a great idea, an equal split between earnestness and capital was too much. These tweets sum it up quite well:
I agree that 50% is big. But is it too big? We're sending a message -- that capital and earnestness are just as important to us.
Our goal at @sanctumso is to 1000x the size of the onchain economy, and we want to reward anything that helps us achieve that goal. Capital is important, but the bottleneck right now isn't capital. The truly rare commodity are good people with their heart in the right place, because those are the ones that we need in order to fulfill our vision.
In order to build the onchain economy, we need people brave enough to try LSTs as a funding method -- that's creators and artists (Sanctum Social, @Pathfinders__ ), vendors selling goods and services (@RaposaCoffeeCo, @Raiba_AI , @playonshaga , @helium_mobile, @fusewallet), public goods (@_cubik ), and many more. We need users who are willing to support this radical new model. We need missionaries, not mercenaries. That is why we are rewarding the earnest.
That said, we have heard your feedback. We understand that the allocation is large. Hence, we have decided to implement vesting on the earnestness airdrop. This will encourage people who receive the earnestness airdrop to be long-term aligned. The vesting period will be the same as Alpha Vault buyers.
One consequence of doing this is that it will decrease the total float on day 1 by 5%. As we are committed to a high and healthy float on day 1, we are considering increasing the total supply that will be provided on LFG. I will give the full and finalised details very soon.
## Was the process too subjective?
Many had concerns about the objectivity and transparency of our process. @itschieph said that "it's pretty subjective and decision controlled by small team who wont catch every interaction, especially outside of the sanctum disc/twitter. "
That's a very valid criticism. While I would have loved to be more transparent with the public, unfortunately being too transparent would have made it impossible to judge earnestness accurately. We cannot reveal objective metrics as any such metrics would be gamed [^2], but in general we looked for constructive criticism/feedback (even if negative!), good and thoughtful content that displays an understanding of the vision/value proposition, translating Sanctum documents to reach the non-English-speaking community, etc. We spent the past months searching through Twitter, Discord, Telegram, YouTube etc. to identify contributions, from 2023 all the way up to the cutoff date (1st July 2024 EST 0000).
Let me share our process to find and check earnestness, and give some examples of earnest people.
Firstly, I know that you may have shilled Sanctum to your private alpha group, grandmother, football club, etc., and thank you very much for that, but unfortunately we cannot consider contributions in these venues. That is what cupcakes are forπ
Secondly, we do not prioritise people that we previously knew or are famous. You don't have to be a KoL or a Twitter "threadooor" to be considered earnest. We do not care how many views or RTs your posts get.
For the Sanctum Discord we downloaded the entire chat log and looked through all 1.6 million messages across multiple channels. There are 9509 unique users who have sent at least one message in channels we monitored. We looked at both quality and quantity -- a consistent record of being helpful to new users or contributing to the discussion was rewarded; spamming low-quality messages was not. While we don't care about how many Wonderland quests you completed, actively participating in helping to solve the quests did count. We made sure to look through content that was shared in the #usercontent channel too.
For Twitter we do two separate passes: one chronological, one per-user via Sanctum Profiles. We have around 125k profiles with socials connected. We use the Twitter Pro API to search and download every tweet/reply relating to Sanctum and we view manually from there. These two different passes make sure that we don't miss anyone and that we can even reach out to people who did not set up a profile. We liked thoughtful, balanced posts that focused more on Sanctum's broader mission rather than the airdrop. A good example is @jameshanley's whiteboard explainers.
We have at least two different teams of graders. The two teams of graders first calibrate together on a few dozen profiles before they separate and work independently. If there is a disagreement between the two teams when grading a profile, we discuss them and come to a consensus.
Lastly, we reached out to our Wonderland partners and asked them to suggest people that were helpful in their community who we may have missed. We didn't take their word as gospel -- we made sure to independently verify.
At the end, everything goes into an earnestness spreadsheet that looks like this:
Every single person is assigned an Earnestness Level from zero to four, with Level Four reserved for only the most earnest people. I can't share the finalised numbers as we are still looking through the data.
Here is an example of somebody who is not an influencer or a thread writer, but is still very earnest. @bengsharksol has over 14,000 messages in the Sanctum Discord. His first message was in 21st of April 2024, where he asked a "newbie question" about Sanctum. He then suggested dark mode the next day, and has been very active throughout helping answer questions, flag spam etc.
The support of Bengshark and other community members was incredibly helpful during busy times like when Wonderland momentarily went down and the team was scrambling to fix it. Sanctum would not have been a success without them.
Some people also said that this was all an elaborate setup for the core team to enrich insiders. We definitely did not do this. The decision to make earnestness a component of the airdrop was kept a secret between core team members only -- we did not tell anybody else. Needless to say, no Sanctum team member gets any earnestness allocation, and the two KoLs we gave allocation to are also not eligible.
(as an aside, there are a lot easier ways to give allocation to insiders and KoLs that don't involve writing posts viewed by hundreds of thousands of people: you can do a tiered airdrop, letting insiders know what the tier cutoffs are in advance, so they can sybil perfectly to get maximum allocation. or raise a round and give allocation to whoever you want -- no justification needed).
## Does this "cheapen" earnestness?
@case_fud mentioned that "everyone who says something nice about @sanctumso is now just a duplicitous Earnestness farmer that cannot be trusted... if you monetize authenticity you TAINT authenticity and lose it." [^3] @tongnk also mentioned that there may be people starting to farm earnestness going forward.
This is a good point. Our goal is to make the space better, and we try very hard not to "pull up the ladder". @jito_sol and @JupiterExchange gave tiered airdrops with immense wealth effects (great for Solana), but it made things a lot harder for protocols that came after. The downside of having two successful tiered airdrops is that there is a lot more sybil activity now. Jito had ~10k wallets in their points program. We had 330k wallets in Wonderland.
I believe what we have done will be a positive contribution, even if people start earnestness farming. Imagine you gave people money to go visit the elderly in nursing homes. Does it cheapen things? Perhaps. Would there be some people trying to game the system? Maybe. But at the end of the day, I think a world where more people keep lonely people company in their dotage is a good one.
Likewise, we've been transparent about the kind of behaviour we reward. And if that gets influencers to talk about the actual product and values rather than focusing on "airdrop airdrop airdrop", that is a positive contribution to the space.
Projects have already been trying to reward earnestness for a long time. Tiered airdrops tried to reward small users over big whales. Then you had things like Discord level and Galxe quests, but these were very much gameable. We tried our best to make earnestness hard to game by reviewing every user manually and selecting for thoughtful and consistent contributions. Nonetheless, this is definitely a concern, and in Season 2 we'll have to be a lot more judicious in how we measure and reward earnestness.
## How do I be earnest?
A handful of people asked "I know I was not earnest, what can I do to be earnest next time?". Thank you very much for asking this question! We need more people like you in this space. First, I'd recommend reading @paulg's "The Lesson to Unlearn" [^1]. There is no "trick" to be earnest -- just take the time to understand our mission, be helpful and participate where you can. We are in dire need of good people in crypto.
Sanctum hit ~1B in TVL in 37 days of Wonderland. I think it's a lot easier to be kind and helpful and be one of the few earnest folks, than to find $1M to put in Sanctum.
## What we can do better next time
In hindsight I think it would have been better to announce our plans for rewarding earnestness first before opening Sanctum Profiles. We did it the other way because we were trying very hard not to leak information, but it wouldn't have mattered anyway given the cutoff, and then people would be able to have the full context on whether or not to set up a profile and link their socials.
## Conclusion
Thank you all once again for your thoughts and feedback -- I read everything and appreciate all of it. We aren't perfect, but I hope documenting this helps give more context to our decisions and serve as a reference for future founders. I hope our decision to introduce vesting for the earnestness component helps alleviate some of the concerns.
Airdrop design is hard. Linear airdrops reward passive whales; active community members -- who may not have as much capital -- get crumbs. Tiered airdrops give a massive portion to undeserving sybil farms, leaving less on the table for true capital contributors and active community members. We try our best to change the lives of people who contribute meaningfully to Sanctum's mission in both monetary and nonmonetary ways.
*Stay tuned for part 3, where I will talk about our efforts to deal with sybils so we can reward capital contributors as much as possible.*
[^1]: @paulg, The Lesson to Unlearn https://t.co/Yw07MZTTPW
https://t.co/TE0j4f25Fa
[^2]: @a_m_mastroianni, How to drive a stake through your own good heart https://t.co/bhsApEwpa7
[^3]: @case_fud : (https://t.co/omGsmQbgxU
)
![soleconomist's tweet photo. == On the $CLOUD airdrop, part 2 ==
Thank you all for taking the time to read and respond to the first part of the $CLOUD airdrop explainer. I'm staggered and flattered by the comments and criticism, and delighted that this seems to have sparked a lively discussion. I wanted to give a little bit more context about why and how we're thinking about earnestness, and reflect on what we can do better for next time.
## Is 5% for earnestness too much?
Many people applauded the fact that we were trying to do something different and reward good people in the space. Thank you for the kind words! We appreciate it a lot.
The most common criticism was that while rewarding earnestness is a great idea, an equal split between earnestness and capital was too much. These tweets sum it up quite well:
I agree that 50% is big. But is it too big? We're sending a message -- that capital and earnestness are just as important to us.
Our goal at @sanctumso is to 1000x the size of the onchain economy, and we want to reward anything that helps us achieve that goal. Capital is important, but the bottleneck right now isn't capital. The truly rare commodity are good people with their heart in the right place, because those are the ones that we need in order to fulfill our vision.
In order to build the onchain economy, we need people brave enough to try LSTs as a funding method -- that's creators and artists (Sanctum Social, @Pathfinders__ ), vendors selling goods and services (@RaposaCoffeeCo, @Raiba_AI , @playonshaga , @helium_mobile, @fusewallet), public goods (@_cubik ), and many more. We need users who are willing to support this radical new model. We need missionaries, not mercenaries. That is why we are rewarding the earnest.
That said, we have heard your feedback. We understand that the allocation is large. Hence, we have decided to implement vesting on the earnestness airdrop. This will encourage people who receive the earnestness airdrop to be long-term aligned. The vesting period will be the same as Alpha Vault buyers.
One consequence of doing this is that it will decrease the total float on day 1 by 5%. As we are committed to a high and healthy float on day 1, we are considering increasing the total supply that will be provided on LFG. I will give the full and finalised details very soon.
## Was the process too subjective?
Many had concerns about the objectivity and transparency of our process. @itschieph said that "it's pretty subjective and decision controlled by small team who wont catch every interaction, especially outside of the sanctum disc/twitter. "
That's a very valid criticism. While I would have loved to be more transparent with the public, unfortunately being too transparent would have made it impossible to judge earnestness accurately. We cannot reveal objective metrics as any such metrics would be gamed [^2], but in general we looked for constructive criticism/feedback (even if negative!), good and thoughtful content that displays an understanding of the vision/value proposition, translating Sanctum documents to reach the non-English-speaking community, etc. We spent the past months searching through Twitter, Discord, Telegram, YouTube etc. to identify contributions, from 2023 all the way up to the cutoff date (1st July 2024 EST 0000).
Let me share our process to find and check earnestness, and give some examples of earnest people.
Firstly, I know that you may have shilled Sanctum to your private alpha group, grandmother, football club, etc., and thank you very much for that, but unfortunately we cannot consider contributions in these venues. That is what cupcakes are forπ
Secondly, we do not prioritise people that we previously knew or are famous. You don't have to be a KoL or a Twitter "threadooor" to be considered earnest. We do not care how many views or RTs your posts get.
For the Sanctum Discord we downloaded the entire chat log and looked through all 1.6 million messages across multiple channels. There are 9509 unique users who have sent at least one message in channels we monitored. We looked at both quality and quantity -- a consistent record of being helpful to new users or contributing to the discussion was rewarded; spamming low-quality messages was not. While we don't care about how many Wonderland quests you completed, actively participating in helping to solve the quests did count. We made sure to look through content that was shared in the #usercontent channel too.
For Twitter we do two separate passes: one chronological, one per-user via Sanctum Profiles. We have around 125k profiles with socials connected. We use the Twitter Pro API to search and download every tweet/reply relating to Sanctum and we view manually from there. These two different passes make sure that we don't miss anyone and that we can even reach out to people who did not set up a profile. We liked thoughtful, balanced posts that focused more on Sanctum's broader mission rather than the airdrop. A good example is @jameshanley's whiteboard explainers.
We have at least two different teams of graders. The two teams of graders first calibrate together on a few dozen profiles before they separate and work independently. If there is a disagreement between the two teams when grading a profile, we discuss them and come to a consensus.
Lastly, we reached out to our Wonderland partners and asked them to suggest people that were helpful in their community who we may have missed. We didn't take their word as gospel -- we made sure to independently verify.
At the end, everything goes into an earnestness spreadsheet that looks like this:
Every single person is assigned an Earnestness Level from zero to four, with Level Four reserved for only the most earnest people. I can't share the finalised numbers as we are still looking through the data.
Here is an example of somebody who is not an influencer or a thread writer, but is still very earnest. @bengsharksol has over 14,000 messages in the Sanctum Discord. His first message was in 21st of April 2024, where he asked a "newbie question" about Sanctum. He then suggested dark mode the next day, and has been very active throughout helping answer questions, flag spam etc.
The support of Bengshark and other community members was incredibly helpful during busy times like when Wonderland momentarily went down and the team was scrambling to fix it. Sanctum would not have been a success without them.
Some people also said that this was all an elaborate setup for the core team to enrich insiders. We definitely did not do this. The decision to make earnestness a component of the airdrop was kept a secret between core team members only -- we did not tell anybody else. Needless to say, no Sanctum team member gets any earnestness allocation, and the two KoLs we gave allocation to are also not eligible.
(as an aside, there are a lot easier ways to give allocation to insiders and KoLs that don't involve writing posts viewed by hundreds of thousands of people: you can do a tiered airdrop, letting insiders know what the tier cutoffs are in advance, so they can sybil perfectly to get maximum allocation. or raise a round and give allocation to whoever you want -- no justification needed).
## Does this "cheapen" earnestness?
@case_fud mentioned that "everyone who says something nice about @sanctumso is now just a duplicitous Earnestness farmer that cannot be trusted... if you monetize authenticity you TAINT authenticity and lose it." [^3] @tongnk also mentioned that there may be people starting to farm earnestness going forward.
This is a good point. Our goal is to make the space better, and we try very hard not to "pull up the ladder". @jito_sol and @JupiterExchange gave tiered airdrops with immense wealth effects (great for Solana), but it made things a lot harder for protocols that came after. The downside of having two successful tiered airdrops is that there is a lot more sybil activity now. Jito had ~10k wallets in their points program. We had 330k wallets in Wonderland.
I believe what we have done will be a positive contribution, even if people start earnestness farming. Imagine you gave people money to go visit the elderly in nursing homes. Does it cheapen things? Perhaps. Would there be some people trying to game the system? Maybe. But at the end of the day, I think a world where more people keep lonely people company in their dotage is a good one.
Likewise, we've been transparent about the kind of behaviour we reward. And if that gets influencers to talk about the actual product and values rather than focusing on "airdrop airdrop airdrop", that is a positive contribution to the space.
Projects have already been trying to reward earnestness for a long time. Tiered airdrops tried to reward small users over big whales. Then you had things like Discord level and Galxe quests, but these were very much gameable. We tried our best to make earnestness hard to game by reviewing every user manually and selecting for thoughtful and consistent contributions. Nonetheless, this is definitely a concern, and in Season 2 we'll have to be a lot more judicious in how we measure and reward earnestness.
## How do I be earnest?
A handful of people asked "I know I was not earnest, what can I do to be earnest next time?". Thank you very much for asking this question! We need more people like you in this space. First, I'd recommend reading @paulg's "The Lesson to Unlearn" [^1]. There is no "trick" to be earnest -- just take the time to understand our mission, be helpful and participate where you can. We are in dire need of good people in crypto.
Sanctum hit ~1B in TVL in 37 days of Wonderland. I think it's a lot easier to be kind and helpful and be one of the few earnest folks, than to find $1M to put in Sanctum.
## What we can do better next time
In hindsight I think it would have been better to announce our plans for rewarding earnestness first before opening Sanctum Profiles. We did it the other way because we were trying very hard not to leak information, but it wouldn't have mattered anyway given the cutoff, and then people would be able to have the full context on whether or not to set up a profile and link their socials.
## Conclusion
Thank you all once again for your thoughts and feedback -- I read everything and appreciate all of it. We aren't perfect, but I hope documenting this helps give more context to our decisions and serve as a reference for future founders. I hope our decision to introduce vesting for the earnestness component helps alleviate some of the concerns.
Airdrop design is hard. Linear airdrops reward passive whales; active community members -- who may not have as much capital -- get crumbs. Tiered airdrops give a massive portion to undeserving sybil farms, leaving less on the table for true capital contributors and active community members. We try our best to change the lives of people who contribute meaningfully to Sanctum's mission in both monetary and nonmonetary ways.
*Stay tuned for part 3, where I will talk about our efforts to deal with sybils so we can reward capital contributors as much as possible.*
[^1]: @paulg, The Lesson to Unlearn https://t.co/Yw07MZTTPW
https://t.co/TE0j4f25Fa
[^2]: @a_m_mastroianni, How to drive a stake through your own good heart https://t.co/bhsApEwpa7
[^3]: @case_fud : (https://t.co/omGsmQbgxU
)](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GR-hT4QaMAAENvW.jpg)
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