We are the Aaron Network Project Team
Our project is built on Cosmos SDK.
We want to share the problem we faced during our work, and we believe it’s important. We ask everyone to read to the end and, if possible, share this text with others.
To begin with — an introduction so that you can understand the entire chronology and how the problem arose.
We launched an airdrop in the summer of 2024 for the Cosmos community. We wanted to thank the community for their great product and for maintaining the Cosmos Hub system. In August, when the airdrop was over, we recorded its result — 219 thousand addresses (these are the addresses that confirmed their participation in the token distribution). It was not a claim, but a form where you had to enter your address and click the “confirm” button. We saved the database and forgot about it until October, while developing the project in parallel.
Then, in October, one of our developers began writing a microservice to generate the genesis file for launching the test network. While working with the database of confirmed addresses (those who were supposed to receive the drop), he discovered that 3 thousand addresses would hold 130 million tokens after launch (considering that the total initial supply should be 280 million). We considered this an unacceptable violation of the decentralization principles.
From the very beginning, we have been open with our community. We have never deceived anyone or given false hopes. So we decided to tell the truth — that we would exclude these addresses from the distribution. After that, we started receiving messages from users (we assume they were excluded from the airdrop). They informed us that in the Cosmos ecosystem, there are entire groups of people creating networks of addresses specifically to receive airdrops. They mentioned numbers: hundreds of addresses could be owned by one person. We considered it unfair to leave such addresses in our future network. Therefore, we decided to introduce additional criteria for our airdrop. We excluded those who delegated to the top-10 validators and those who had not voted in any Cosmos voting — from the 954th to the 971st vote.
We changed the conditions of the airdrop, but this is not prohibited. We have not launched the network yet, we are only planning to launch it. None of those who were included in the first version of the airdrop lost anything except for our future tokens.
Immediately after that, an attack on our social media began. Our Discord and Twitter were flooded with accounts that insulted us and threatened us. We tried to explain that our measures were aimed at improving the network, making it more economically sustainable. But people didn’t want to listen — they just flooded us with insults and threats. After that, we had no choice but to block the accounts that behaved like that. We realized this was a problem and suggested that other projects join the fight against Sybil addresses.
What Are Sybil Accounts and How Do They Threaten Cryptocurrency Networks?
This was the introduction. Now, let’s move on to the resolution.
On the day we called on other projects to join us in the fight (it was only about tightening the criteria for airdrops before the project’s launch), in the evening, a Twitter user — @Turugurdun — messaged us.
Our managers noticed the OdysswyNft in his profile and the pinned post. They pointed out that 95% of all accounts overlap with OdysswyNft, DefiGeek, and POSTHUMAN in their profiles. Some mention it in their usernames, while others mention it in their posts.
And literally an hour after the insults from @Turugurdun, we saw a post from @CosmosEcosystem accusing us of wanting to make changes to the Cosmos SDK code. This is a blatant lie. We have never called for, nor even thought about making changes to the Cosmos SDK to restrict the creation of addresses for one user. All our actions, as described above, were related to algorithms that exclude inactive addresses. These people distorted Aaron Schwartz’s words and used them in their false post.
Remember the publication time — 23:12. We noticed that immediately after publication, the Posthum account reposted it, which we had mentioned earlier.
We asked our managers to investigate who these people were, what united them, and if possible, determine where the attack on us was coming from. At that point, we suspected that this could be a planned action.
The traces led our managers to Russian-speaking Telegram chats. We have a developer from Ukraine in our team who helped with translating the screenshots and confirmed the authenticity of the materials provided. We also thank one of the chat admins who agreed to gather information for us about the activities of criminal crypto syndicates creating networks of Sybil accounts.
Our people went through the chats and discovered the source of all the negativity towards us — it’s the chat “Kryptobaza”. We were also able to identify the account that insulted us: @Turugurdun, who is listed as “Evil Crypto Grandpa” in Telegram. He is one of the administrators and authoritative members of the POSTHUMAN community, but he allows himself to resort to insults.
We studied the chat a bit more and found confirmation that the founder of Posthum (Vladimir) most likely passed the material for the publication to @CosmosEcosystem or even published it himself. We don’t know who owns the @CosmosEcosystem account, but in the chat, the head of Posthum mentions phrases from the post on @CosmosEcosystem at 22:32, although the post was only published at 23:12. No one contacted us, no questions were asked, we were simply slandered with a statement that we wanted to make changes to the Cosmos SDK code. Clearly, there was no intention to communicate with us. The goal was to discredit and humiliate us in front of the community.
“Well, in general, it’s a right, not a privilege, to have multiple accounts. The issue of users having many accounts is not the users’ problem; the distribution parameters need to be improved.”
We agree with you, Vladimir. This is exactly what we were working on – creating an algorithm that ensures fair token distribution. But you kept quiet about this and allowed your admins and participants to hate on us, turning a blind eye to the calls to attack our accounts and insult us.
“They spoke out in defense of real users with a large number of addresses.”
A large number”? Please specify the numbers, 100, 200, 500, or even more than 500 addresses for a single user! Why do you blatantly ignore the problem and deny it? Is this really acceptable for decentralization?
Furthermore, we can see that with Vladimir’s tacit approval in the chat, the hatred towards us is spreading and calls for an attack are being made.
“They’ve gathered data from people and now they’re going to trade it like phones and passports on the internet.”
“They’re tagging Mantra and Elys so they can both get fucked over just like them right before the drop.”
Throw this scam some comments so they don’t open their mouths
Clearly, our algorithms were accurate, and we managed to exclude entire networks of Sybil addresses. But we still didn’t understand the scale of what we had done. Our helpers went through other chats and discovered a larger criminal crypto syndicate called “Cosmosdrops io”. Interestingly, neither this nor other communities displayed as much negativity towards us as the Posthum community.
One of the participants in the chat commented on our actions to exclude 3 thousand large addresses, smiling and noting that this is exactly why you need to split Atom across addresses, and stated that he received 300 thousand tokens (while our total supply was 140 million). We tried to find out the number of addresses he owned, and we were told there were about 500 addresses. 500 addresses in the hands of one person. With one token distribution (without excluding Sybils), he can receive 300k tokens with a token supply of 140 million! And that’s just one person in one community. There are thousands of people there.
That’s why we need to multiply! Almost 300k tokens arrived
There are also smaller criminal groups sharing information about how many addresses participants have.
How many addresses do you have?
Additionally, active discussions are taking place on how to deceive projects and get into airdrops with the maximum number of addresses.
The person helping us shared information about message moderation in the POSTHUMAN chat.
I’m surprised, even shocked, by Vladimir’s behavior. I always thought of him as someone who supports technology, but in reality, with his silent approval, they inflated a problem out of nowhere.
I noticed this a couple of weeks ago. When the reputation bot was already up and running, and everyone was talking about it, he was sitting on a call and talking about wanting to create a reputation bank. I thought he might say something about the scoring bot, but he just stayed silent. Meanwhile, other admins in his chat started claiming that their scoring system would be the best.
Another point: they allow people to hate on Aaron, but as soon as someone criticizes their project or token, they delete the comment immediately. Any criticism of Defigika also gets deleted, by the way. There are many admins who are involved with Defigeeka as well.
His post in the Cosmos ecosystem is also very strange. I thought he had talked with you and that you were planning to make changes to how addresses are created, but it turns out he didn’t talk to you and just made this up. It’s extremely strange. If I didn’t personally know him and your team, I wouldn’t believe that he could encourage hate against a young project like this. Meanwhile, in his post about the ecosystem, he says he’s ready to provide informational support, but at the same time silently gives his consent for hate against you in his own chat, while on the call, discussing reputation and scoring, he doesn’t even mention you…
What is Cosmos address reputation from Aaron Network?
In some chats, they claim that we are “creating hype” around this situation, but we haven’t gained anything from this scandal and are not happy about it. We didn’t start the conflict; we were simply trying to defuse it by communicating with people and explaining our actions. We haven’t deceived anyone; we just wanted to make a fair distribution of our tokens. In return, we received a lot of hate with the tacit approval and support of one of the validators in the Cosmos ecosystem.
People have the right to create any number of addresses. We do not limit that, but we stand for decentralization principles. There cannot be decentralization if 3 thousand people hold half the supply of the network. Just as there can be no restrictions on changing airdrop rules.