• Keybase and the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) have announced the premature termination of their 2 billion XLM Airdrops yesterday.
• Due to an unmanageable flood of fake accounts, the campaign will be discontinued.

With a short and concise announcement Keybase and the Stellar Development Foundation announced yesterday that they will immediately stop their 2 billion XLM airdrop (worth about 120 million US dollars). With that, the airdrop which was announced in September this year, will end surprisingly after a distribution of only 300 million Lumen (XLM). Originally, the Airdrop was supposed to run for 20 months.

The XLM Stellar Space Drop Giveaway was initiated in collaboration by Keybase, a messaging and file sharing application and the Stellar Development Foundation. The beneficiaries of the campaign were to be the more than 300,000 Keybase users worldwide. The aim of both companies was to promote the use of XLM on the Keybase messaging platform and to attract new users to the platform.

Termination because of “hordes” of fake accounts

In September Keybase explained that an authenticated Keybase account is sufficient to automatically receive a certain amount of XLM on a wallet every month as long as the airdrop is running. As Keybase now announced, the last 100 million XLM will be distributed “to all qualified users” during the week starting December 15th. Keybase justifies this by stating that “hordes” of fake accounts have stormed the platform:

While this giveaway mostly worked, it’s clear that there will be decreasing returns and massively increased effort required. Why? Starting in the last week or so, hordes of fake people were beginning to come in, far beyond the capacity of Keybase or SDF to filter. It’s not in the Stellar network’s interest to reward those people; it is also not in Keybase’s interest to have them as Keybase users.

So the end of the airdrop was triggered by too many fake accounts that were impossible to filter from the real accounts. However, it was clear from the beginning that the airdrop could also be cancelled, perhaps because both companies foresaw evil.

As we’ve said from the beginning, SDF reserves the right to end this giveaway early. The last month will go out, of course.

Both Stellar and Keybase received a lot of positive press in the run-up to the airdrop. The XLM price benefited briefly from the news, as did the Keybase platform, which received tens of thousands of new registrations and increased its user base by a quarter.

Meanwhile, the Stellar Lumens (XLM) price has continued its downward trend over the past month, falling from 0.07681 USD on November 12 to 0.052582 USD (at the time of writing).

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