A crypto airdrop farmer lost more than $112,000 in newly issued tokens by burning the entire reward on failed blockchain transactions.
In crypto, a professional airdrop farmer (or squatter) is a person who interacts with emerging protocols solely for the airdrop rewards, often using multiple wallets to compound the rewards.
Cryptocurrency wallet 0x7f4 received about $112,700 worth of Monad (MON) tokens as a reward for activity leading up to the launch.
In an unfortunate turn of events, the trader lost the entire $112,000 across hundreds of failed blockchain transactions, which all deducted gas fees despite not being completed, according to blockchain data from Solscan.
“Congratulations to 0x7f4e…fa7d who managed to spend their entire Monad airdrop (112.7k) on failed txn fees,” wrote crypto investor Joe, in a Monday X post.
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The incident serves as a reminder to run test transactions before large-scale transfers, which involve users sending a small amount of funds to the destination address to verify that the transfer parameters are correct.
Based on the transaction patterns, the user behind the wallet probably submitted hundreds of transactions in a short time, likely through a script, but didn’t notice that the first transactions had begun failing.
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SlowMist warns of Monad claim portal hack
The incident came as some Monad airdrop recipients reported missing allocations. According to Cos, founder of blockchain security firm SlowMist, a vulnerability in the Monad claim portal allowed hackers to bind a user’s allocation to an attacker-controlled wallet.
Multiple users reported not receiving their airdrop shares, which were “bound to a hacker’s address” before the allocation was disseminated, wrote Cos in a Tuesday X post.
Cos said the exploit let attackers “hijack” a user’s session on the claim page and redirect the airdrop to their own address without requiring wallet confirmation.
Airdrop farmers have been a long-standing issue for emerging cryptocurrency projects due to their value-extraction methods, which seek to sell the tokens immediately after the airdrop.
In March 2023, it was revealed that airdrop hunters consolidated $3.3 million worth of tokens from Arbitrum’s ARB airdrop from 1,496 wallets into just two wallets they had controlled.
Earlier in February, non-fungible token (NFT) platform OpenSea paused its airdrop reward system, following user backlash that the new mechanics promoted wash trading and prioritized earning fees, not genuine builder activity.
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