Original author: KarenZ, Foresight News
As an InfoFi platform, Kaito relies on the AI-driven Yap points mechanism to encourage high-quality content creation and build a healthy content and attention ecosystem. However, the recent airdrop controversy surrounding the cooperative projects Eclipse and Humanity, coupled with Kaitos deep dilemma in transparency, fairness and community trust, has pushed Kaito to the forefront. This not only triggered the communitys doubts about the rationality of Kaitos mechanism, but also reflected the deep contradictions in user incentives and community building in the entire cryptocurrency field.
Kaito cooperative project airdrop controversy and response
Eclipses Death Note and self-built charts
The airdrop of the Ethereum SVM L2 network Eclipse to Kaito users, which was released this month, has caused controversy among KOLs and the community. A large number of community users reported that users who are truly active in the community and dare to speak out did not receive the airdrop, and this distribution result has raised questions about the validity of Kaitos data.
In the face of controversy, Eclipse community leader Alucard responded on July 8, revealing the logic behind the airdrop allocation: Eclipse created its own private X-ranking using Kaito data. Other projects will follow suit and do the same. I hope more projects will manually remove haters, users who farm multiple projects, and airdrop accounts from the list. Every project will follow our Death Note model.
Yu Hu, founder of Kaito, added, Each project will get a complete social data analysis from Kaito at the time of the snapshot, including each users contribution in a customizable time period, public opinion analysis, volume analysis, user historical behavior and reputation analysis, regional information, loyalty analysis, etc. Each project will make the final allocation based on the data, its own project preferences, and Kaitos reference opinions. For example, some projects give extra bonuses to early users, some projects give bonuses to loyalty, some projects give bonuses to regions, and some projects dont mind black fans, etc. This is all highly customizable. The same is true here at Eclipse.
This means that the data provided by Kaito is only used as a basic reference, and the final distribution rights are entirely in the hands of the project party.
Previously, according to Eclipse OG @Yangsolana, Eclipse said in an AMA event that Eclipse created a Death Note blacklist, excluding about 50,000 wallets from the airdrop. In addition, the first 1,000 wallets were manually reviewed by the Eclipse team.
In fact, Eclipse team members have stated their positions many times before the airdrop, and hinted that they will reward real community members. For example, Alucard, the head of the Eclipse community, once sharply expressed the following view:
“Kaito is just a tool and does not have the ability to identify user beliefs or loyalty.”
“Real community members participate, contribute, believe in, and grow with the ecosystem. They want to win with everyone else. If you’re farming 30 projects at the same time, waiting to sell your tokens and disappear, you’re not a community member at all.”
Eclipse is cooking for the community, not kol.
“If you’re just farming and selling, then you’re a parasite that’s killing cryptocurrencies. We need communities with real conviction.”
Although this position has won the approval of some long-term supporters, it has also caused controversy about fairness due to the subjectivity of manual screening. The community questioned: If Kaito data is only for reference, will the users efforts be arbitrarily denied by the project?
Humanity adds palmprint verification requirement
Coincidentally, the airdrop of the identity verification network Humanity also fell into the responsibilities of backstabbing users and extreme anti-looting. The project added biometric requirements such as palm print verification on the basis of the original Kaito points, causing a large number of users to lose their eligibility to receive.
Yu Hu explained that in the case of Humanity, the project owner did say that everyone needed to complete fingerprint collection and other steps when the rewards were first announced, but because there were no continuous reminders and the time was short, many people did not complete it for various reasons. Some accounts did not receive any distribution despite being Yapper/Stakers for the following reasons:
Everyone must complete palm print verification on the Humanity website before airdropping the checker.
For stakers, they also need to have an associated wallet that holds sKAITO/YT-sKAITO.
For yappers, you need to enter the claim wallet after the airdrop checker is released and before the claim starts.
The Humanity team has also added strict anti-sybil mechanisms to the final distribution, based primarily on the quality of the recommendations.
Humanity said before the airdrop that “airdrops are supposed to reward early users and build a strong community, but in reality, airdrops have been hijacked by robots, witches, and bots, which neither rewards real users nor wastes project resources. Therefore, Humanity verifies real users through Fairdrop. The way to determine whether they are real users includes the number of social credentials associated with their human identity, whether they have used the application or scanned their palms in any global promotion activities, and whether they have contributed to the community as real humans.”
The Deep Contradiction of Kaito Mechanism
Lack of transparency and the vicious cycle of chart manipulation
Kaito has been questioned for its lack of transparency, especially in terms of data processing, weighting algorithm and token distribution.
Whether it is Kaito or the project partners, whether it is the Kaito ranking or the project partners’ self-built ranking, there is a lack of transparency. Therefore, the logic of point allocation has become a “black box”.
Currently, a large amount of AI-generated homogeneous content is flooding the market, and real high-quality creators may be marginalized. Whats more serious is that this ecosystem is forming a vicious cycle: speculators profit by swiping the charts; real users gradually lose their users because their efforts are not proportional to their rewards; in order to screen effective users, project owners have to take radical measures such as manual review and additional verification, which further increases the participation cost of ordinary users. If the algorithm is completely transparent, it is easier to be abused. How to balance transparency and anti-brushing becomes a problem. The high-quality content ecosystem that Kaito is trying to build may be reduced to a playground for swiping the charts.
The data provider’s positioning dilemma
In the face of the controversy caused by the cooperative project, Kaito founder Yu Hus response exposed its core dilemma: not participating in the final decision of the project party, but having to bear the doubts about the decision results. This may lead to users spending time and energy based on Kaitos list and points system, but may not get anything due to the subjective screening of the project party.
Therefore, Yu Hu said, Kaito is a platform that has only been around for 6 months. It currently has a single entry scenario, but soon Kaito will enter capital and multiple scenarios, so its binding force and influence will continue to increase.
Behind the controversy: Common problems in building the Crypto community
Kaitos dilemma is a common problem faced by the entire cryptocurrency field in community building. In the context of volatile cryptocurrency markets and the prevalence of short-term speculation, project owners want to attract users through airdrops, but they are also afraid of being abandoned by the fleecing party. This contradiction has given rise to various strict screening mechanisms.
However, manual intervention and subjective judgment also have risks. Eclipse’s “Death Note” is designed to eliminate speculators, but it may exclude real critics due to the team’s subjective preferences; Humanity’s palm print verification can filter out robots, but it also excludes some privacy-sensitive users. This practice of “sacrificing fairness for fairness” highlights the technical and mechanism limitations of the industry in identifying “real contributions” and “long-term beliefs.”
Kaitos achievements and plans
According to Dune data, Kaito AI has distributed $106 million worth of tokens to various communities (excluding Kaito’s own airdrops), with more than 200,000 active Yappers per month.
Yu Hu, founder of Kaito, mentioned that “In the past six months, the platform has helped to distribute $100 million in rewards. The vast majority of projects have a strong spirit of contract, and many projects have even distributed rewards in excess. This is also a reflection of the concept of coexistence between Web3 projects and users.”
This achievement shows that the InfoFi model still has its value, but the frequent controversies also warn: if issues such as transparency and trust continue to be unresolved, the trust of Kaito users will gradually disintegrate.
According to Yu Hu and Kaito official disclosure, recent plans or suggestions include:
Token Distribution: Kaito strongly recommends that all teams let Kaito be responsible for the final distribution to Yappers and the Kaito ecosystem.
Signal > Noise, focus on high-quality content, improve the identification of real high-quality content, and enhance ecological sustainability.
Algorithm improvements: Ensure that authentic, high-quality discussions are prioritized.
Reputation: We are considering adding an on-chain reputation mechanism to help further filter out AI garbage and reward high-quality real users.
Combined with real usage: Not only rewards Yapping, but also combines real usage with ownership.
Cultural construction: Promote the community from scoring culture to long-term value co-construction.
In addition, Kaito founder Yu Hu said earlier this month that capital launchpad and gkaito will be launched in the third quarter to introduce the new Kaito Connect mechanism.
summary
Kaitos recent controversy reflects the complexity of the relationship between data platforms and project owners in the Web3 ecosystem. Eclipses death diary and Humanitys additional requirements exposed the limitations of Kaitos mechanism, and historical opacity issues have exacerbated community dissatisfaction. Although the response from Kaitos founder clarified some misunderstandings and demonstrated Kaitos achievements in reward distribution, the contradiction between autonomy and transparency in the distribution process still needs to be resolved.
Kaito may need to explore a more reasonable division of responsibilities in its cooperation model with project owners. Perhaps a standardized data screening framework can be established to clarify which dimensions are objectively evaluated by the platform and which are customizable by the project owner. At the same time, a third-party audit mechanism can also be introduced to ensure the fairness of the allocation process.
For project owners, the means of screening real users also need to be more humane. Find a balance between anti-sybil attacks and protecting the rights of ordinary users, and avoid shutting out potential community members due to overly strict rules.
Kaito’s controversy is both a crisis and an opportunity to rebuild trust. Only by facing the problem and actively changing it can the InfoFi model return to its original intention, truly encourage valuable content creation and community building, and inject momentum into the long-term development of the cryptocurrency industry.
