Kaito Dilemma: When the final distribution rights of airdrops are handed over to the project party, how can trust be maintained?

As Kaito of the InfoFi platform, it incentivizes high-quality content creation through the AI-driven Yap points mechanism, building a healthy content and attention ecosystem. However, recent controversies surrounding the airdrop of the collaborative projects Eclipse and Humanity, coupled with Kaito’s deep-seated dilemmas regarding transparency, fairness, and community trust, have pushed Kaito into the spotlight. This not only raises questions within the community about the rationality of the Kaito mechanism but also reflects the deeper contradictions in the entire cryptocurrency field regarding user incentives and community building.

The Kaito partnership project airdrop controversy and response

Eclipse’s “Death Note” and self-built leaderboard

The airdrop of the Ethereum SVM L2 network Eclipse released this month for Kaito users has sparked controversy among KOLs and the community. A large number of community users reported that those who are truly active in the community and unafraid to speak out did not receive the airdrop, raising questions about the validity of Kaito’s data.

In response to the controversy, Alucard, the head of the Eclipse community, responded on July 8, revealing the behind-the-scenes logic of the Airdrop distribution: Eclipse created its own private X ranking using Kaito data. Other projects will follow suit and adopt the same approach. We hope more projects can manually remove haters, users who farm multiple projects, and Airdrop accounts from the list. Each project will emulate our Death Note model.

Kaito founder Yu Hu added, “Each project will receive a complete social data analysis provided by Kaito at the time of the snapshot, including each user’s contributions over a customizable time period, public opinion analysis, volume analysis, historical behavior and reputation analysis, regional information, loyalty analysis, and more. Each project will make the final allocation based on the data, their own project preferences, and Kaito’s reference opinions. For example, some projects offer additional bonuses to early users, some projects provide loyalty bonuses, some projects give regional bonuses, and some projects are indifferent to negative feedback, etc. This is highly customizable. The same applies here at Eclipse.”

This means that the data provided by Kaito is only for basic reference, and the final allocation rights are entirely in the hands of the project party.

Previously, according to Eclipse OG@YangsolanaIt is said that Eclipse previously stated in an AMA event that they have created a “Death Note” blacklist, excluding approximately 50,000 wallets from the Airdrop. In addition, the top 1000 wallets were manually reviewed by the Eclipse team.

In fact, the Eclipse team members have repeatedly stated their position before the Airdrop and hinted at rewarding true community members. For example, the head of the Eclipse community, Alucard, has sharply expressed the following opinion:

“Kaito is just a tool and does not have the ability to recognize user beliefs or loyalty.”

“True community members actively participate, contribute, hold faith, and grow together with the ecosystem. They hope to win together with others. If you are farming 30 projects at the same time, waiting to dump tokens and disappear, then you are not a community member at all.”

“Eclipse is cooking for the community, not for KOLs.”

“If you are only in it for farming and selling, then you are a parasite killing cryptocurrency. We need a community with true belief.”

This position, while winning the recognition of some long-term supporters, has also sparked controversy over fairness due to the subjectivity of “artificial selection.” The community questions: if Kaito’s data is merely a reference, will users’ efforts be arbitrarily negated by the project party?

Humanity increases palm print verification requirements

Coincidentally. The airdrop of the identity verification network Humanity has also fallen into the responsibilities of “betraying users” and “extreme anti-deduction.” The project has added biometric requirements such as palm print verification on top of the original Kaito points, resulting in a large number of users losing their eligibility to receive.

Yu Hu explained that in the case of Humanity, the project party did indeed state during the initial official announcement of the rewards that everyone needed to complete steps such as fingerprint collection. However, due to the lack of continuous reminders afterwards, coupled with the short time frame, many people did not complete it for various reasons. Some accounts, even though they are Yapper/Staker, did not receive any allocation for the following reasons:

• [ ] Everyone must complete palm verification on the Humanity website before the Airdrop checker.
• [ ] Stakers also need to have an associated wallet that holds sKAITO/YT-sKAITO.
• [ ] For yappers, you need to enter the receiving wallet after the Airdrop Checker is released and before the claim starts.
• [ ] The Humanity team has also added a strict anti-witch mechanism in the final allocation, mainly based on the quality of the recommendations.

Humanity stated before the Airdrop that “Airdrops should reward early users and build a strong community, but in reality, Airdrops have been hijacked by bots, witches, and profiteers, failing to reward real users and wasting project resources. Therefore, Humanity verifies real users through Fairdrop, with methods of determining whether they are real users including the number of social credentials associated with their human identity, whether they have used the application or scanned their palm in any global promotional activities, and whether they have contributed to the community as real humans.”

The deep contradictions of the Kaito mechanism

Lack of transparency and the vicious cycle of ranking manipulation

Kaito has always been questioned for its lack of transparency in mechanisms, especially in data processing, weighting algorithms, and token distribution.

Whether it is Kaito or the project party collaborating with it, whether it is the Kaito leaderboard or the leaderboard built by the project party, there exists a situation of lack of transparency. Therefore, the logic of points distribution has become a “black box.”

Currently, a large amount of AI-generated homogenized content is flooding X, and truly high-quality creators may be marginalized instead. More seriously, this ecosystem is forming a vicious cycle: speculators profit by manipulating rankings; real users gradually leave due to the disproportion between effort and reward; project parties have to adopt aggressive measures such as manual reviews and additional verifications to filter effective users, which further increases the participation cost for ordinary users. If the algorithm is completely transparent, it can be more easily abused, making it a challenge to balance transparency and prevention of manipulation. The “high-quality content ecosystem” that Kaito is trying to build may be turning into a playground for rank manipulators.

The positioning dilemma of data providers

In the face of controversies arising from collaborative projects, Kaito founder Yu Hu’s response reveals its core dilemma: not participating in the final decisions of the project party, yet having to bear the doubts regarding the decision outcomes. This could lead users to invest time and effort based on Kaito’s rankings and points system, yet they might end up with nothing due to the subjective selection by the project party.

Therefore, Yu Hu stated, “Kaito, as a platform that has only been established for 6 months, currently focuses on a single entry scenario, but soon Kaito will expand into capital and multiple scenarios, so its constraints and influence will continue to increase.”

Behind the Controversy: Common Challenges in Building the Crypto Community

Kaito’s dilemma is a common problem faced by the entire cryptocurrency sector in community building. Against the backdrop of volatile cryptocurrency markets and rampant short-term speculation, the project party wishes to attract users through Airdrops, yet fears being abandoned after being taken advantage of by “shearers”. This contradiction has led to the emergence of various stringent screening mechanisms.

However, human intervention and subjective judgment also carry risks. Eclipse’s “Death Note” aims to eliminate speculators but may exclude genuine critics due to the team’s subjective preferences; Humanity’s palm print verification can filter out bots but also turns away some privacy-sensitive users. This practice of “sacrificing fairness for the sake of fairness” highlights the industry’s technological and mechanistic limitations in identifying “real contributions” and “long-term beliefs.”

Kaito’s achievements and plans

According to Dune data, Kaito AI has distributed tokens worth $106 million to various communities (excluding Kaito’s own Airdrop), with over 200,000 monthly active Yappers.

Kaito founder Yu Hu mentioned, “In the past 6 months, the platform has helped distribute $100 million in rewards, and the vast majority of projects have a strong sense of contract spirit, with many projects even distributing rewards in excess, which reflects the concept of coexistence between Web3 projects and users.”

This achievement indicates that the InfoFi model still holds its value, but the frequent controversies also serve as a warning: if issues such as transparency and trust remain unresolved, users’ trust in Kaito will gradually erode.

According to official disclosures from Yu Hu and Kaito, recent plans or suggestions include:

• [ ] Token Distribution: Kaito strongly recommends that all teams let Kaito be responsible for the final distribution aimed at Yappers and the Kaito ecosystem.
• [ ] Signal > Noise, focus on high-quality content, improve the recognition of real quality content, and enhance ecological sustainability.
• [ ] Algorithm Improvement: Ensure that genuine, high-quality discussions are prioritized.
• [ ] Reputation: Considering the addition of an on-chain reputation mechanism to further filter out AI garbage and reward high-quality “real” users.
• [ ] Combining real use: not only rewarding Yapping, but also integrating real use and ownership.
• [ ] Cultural Construction: Promote the community to shift from “score brushing culture” to long-term value co-creation.

In addition, Kaito founder Yu Hu stated earlier this month that the capital launchpad and gkaito will be launched in the third quarter, introducing a new mechanism for Kaito Connect.

Summary

The recent controversy surrounding Kaito reflects the complexity of the relationship between data platforms and the project party in the Web3 ecosystem. Eclipse’s “death diary” and Humanity’s additional requirements exposed the limitations of the Kaito mechanism, while historical opacity issues exacerbated community dissatisfaction. Although the responses from Kaito’s founders clarified some misunderstandings and showcased Kaito’s achievements in reward distribution, the contradiction between autonomy and transparency in the allocation process still needs to be addressed.

In the collaboration model with the project party, Kaito may need to explore a more reasonable division of responsibilities and rights. Perhaps a standardized data screening framework can be established to clarify which dimensions are objectively assessed by the platform and which fall within the customizable scope of the project party. At the same time, a third-party auditing mechanism can be introduced to ensure the fairness of the allocation process.

For the project party, the means of screening real users should also be more humane. It is important to strike a balance between countering witch hunts and protecting the rights of ordinary users, avoiding the rejection of potential community members due to overly strict rules.

The controversy surrounding Kaito is both a crisis and an opportunity to rebuild trust. Only by facing the issues and actively transforming can the InfoFi model return to its original intention, truly incentivizing valuable content creation and community building, and injecting momentum into the long-term development of the cryptocurrency industry.

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