Linea Delays LXP Mint After Detecting Sybil Activity

Linea has paused distributing LXP tokens after detecting Sybil activity that bypassed issuers and attained attestations as if they are genuine users.

Consensys’ zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) scaling solution Linea said that its planned mint of Linea Voyage XP (LXP) tokens is “taking longer than normal” because of Sybil activity.

Sybil farming refers to the process of creating multiple accounts to unfairly be entitled to rewards. The term Sybil comes from a book about a woman with multiple personalities, and the problem of Sybil attacks are persistent ahead of highly anticipated airdrops where some users exploit the system by creating several wallets that meet the criteria for receiving tokens.

1. Thanks to the community, we detected Sybil activity which managed to bypass issuers and attain attestations as though they are individual people. We strive to make our Voyage human-centric, so this caused us to pause distributing LXP

— Linea (@LineaBuild) May 11, 2024

Linea’s LXP tokens are non-transferrable soulbound tokens that cannot be bridged to other networks. LXP will be allocated to users and decentralized applications that participated in Lineea’s testnet voyage and entertainment festival. These tokens will only be claimed if accounts can demonstrate Proof of Humanity (PoH) through on-chain attestation providers.

Still, it appears that some Sybil farmers managed to slip through the cracks, and Linea is now working to revoke these attestations.

Earlier this month, LayerZero announced a self-reporting option for users engaged in Sybil-like behaviour, with a 15% token allocation for those that are honest with their disclosures before May 17.

The policy, aimed at a fair token distribution, drew both praise and backlash from the crypto community. Zach Rynes, known better as his Crypto Twitter pseudonym ChainLinkGod argued that LayerZero benefitted massively from airdrop farmers in the past, and the move to block these actions ahead of their own airdrop was hypocritical.

“Airdrop farmers definitively provide value to protocols,” he said, noting that they help stress test infrastructure and provide an initial source of revenue to protocols when organic usage is initially lower.