Rewarding Loyalty: Automatic Airdrop for All Holders
By DeHub Team — 2021-07-03
When a vulnerability was found in the v1 contract, we paused interactions with it, patched and redeployed. The part that mattered to holders was what happened next: a snapshot of every balance before the new contract went live, and an automatic 1:1 airdrop to every one of them.
Nobody had to claim. Nobody had to sign anything. Nobody missed a window.
Why automatic, and why it matters
The normal way to handle this is a claim page. It is much cheaper, and it is standard practice, and we did not do it — because a claim page quietly transfers the cost of your mistake onto the people it was made against.
Claim mechanisms fail for ordinary reasons. People are travelling. People miss the announcement. People have lost access to the wallet they held in, or do not understand what a claim is, or see a link asking them to connect a wallet after a security incident and correctly decide not to trust it. Every one of those produces a holder who did nothing wrong and ends up with nothing, and every unclaimed balance ends up back with the project.
The incident was ours. The remediation should not have had a participation requirement.
What automatic actually involves
It is more work, and worth being clear about what the work is:
- The snapshot has to be defensible. One block, taken before deployment, published so anyone can check their own balance against it.
- Distribution costs real money. Thousands of individual transfers at network fees, paid by the project, with no offsetting unclaimed remainder.
- Edge cases have to be decided in advance and in public. Balances held in pools, in contracts, mid-transfer at the snapshot block — every one of those needs a stated rule, applied consistently, before anyone can accuse you of choosing winners after the fact.
The precedent it set
This is the first time DeHub airdropped its holders, and it set the pattern for everything since. Airdrops have been part of the utility model since the first whitepaper in 2021, and the ones that followed — the partner airdrop for the fan.site fork, and later the Last Chad Standing distributions — all inherited the same assumptions. Snapshot published, rules stated up front, holders not required to perform to be included.
It also set an internal standard we have been held to since: when we break something, the fix is not finished when the code is fixed. It is finished when the people affected are whole. That principle was tested much harder in Q4 2022, when a tax-trigger malfunction froze the token and the liquidity pool and forced a full v2 relaunch with more than 25,000 holders to migrate. The approach did not change. It just got considerably more expensive.
The thing nobody accounts for
Doing it this way in 2021 is the reason the 2022 migration worked at all.
By late 2022 we were asking 25,000 people to take an unusual action with their wallets, immediately after a failure we had caused, in an environment full of people impersonating us and hoping someone would click the wrong link. The only real asset we had in that conversation was a prior example of how we behave when we break something.
Handling the first incident properly was not just the right thing at the time. It was the credit we spent a year later, when we needed it and could not have earned it retroactively.