Valist Project Spotlight: Dropz
Tired of Airdrop farmers? Use Dropz!
Dropz was one of the many products built at the ETH NYC hackathon, they are building a platform that offers standardized metrics for airdrop eligibility. Simply put Dropz is making airdrops easy and fair. We had a short chat with them and here it is for your reading pleasure.
First off, let’s talk a bit on the team, who’s building Dropz?
I’m Kai, a CS student and developer with a passion for web3. My teammate Matt is a product focused developer and business dev learning and building in web3. The two of us met at ETHNYC while standing in line for food and came up with the idea for Dropz a few minutes before the hackathon kick-off 😄
We had a great time and highly recommend attending hackathons to anybody looking to get into web3 development!
That’s absolutely fantastic, awesome to hear that serendipity brought the team together. What is Dropz?
Dropz is a platform that offers standardized metrics for airdrop eligibility and helps onboard more people into the entire web3 ecosystem by showing them which protocols / apps they have yet to interact with. Dropz also verifies the personhood of individual accounts. Soon-to-airdrop protocols can query data about which users have met certain requirements for airdrops without having to worry about sybil attacks or having to collect all the web3 interaction data themselves.
Interesting, definitely see a need for this, with the rise in popularity of Airdrop farming groups on Telegram, what made your team decide to build Dropz?
Going into the hackathon, we wanted to build a solution for incentivizing web3 users to increase their engagement in the broader ecosystem. At first we thought about creating a simple bounty platform (you complete a task like using a certain protocol, you receive a direct reward). Then, we realized that this approach may not be sustainable and figured that airdrops already offer a way to indirectly incentivize people to use new protocols.
However, we noticed that there are issues with the current airdrop landscape. Apps that want to airdrop often have to deal with airdrop farmers that distort the fair token distribution. Additionally, they have to figure out how to collect and query airdrop eligibility data themselves as there is no standardized source for this information.
From a web3 users point of view, it can be hard to find new protocols to interact with. It’s often unclear how to increase your chances for airdrops. If the path for interacting with new dApps was more transparent, it would motivate more users to experiment with more protocols/services. By showing individual users their overall web3 engagement score, Dropz gamifies web3 usage, making it fun to interact with new dApps.
Love the fact that you’re looking at it from the point of view of both the user and project. What is the tech stack you used?
For data storage, we attempted implementing SkyNet’s new User Profile DAC but ran into beta issues with the services so we moved to a temporary address-verified mapping in memory for the demo due to time restrictions
Sick, why did you choose this stack? For speed, ease of use, or something else?
Mostly for ease I’d say. React has the most convenient libraries for working with Ethereum for example and in a hackathon you need to get a PoC up and running in a very short timeframe. We also chose to work with some tools that were new to us though, as we aimed to explore some of the interesting technologies offered by the event sponsors.
Sweet, what new tools did you explore and were they worth the try?
This was our first time working with Worldcoin and Skynet. It was also our first time using Valist. I think exploring new tools is always worth it as it broadens your horizons in the dev space and some of those tools might come in handy down the line.
Well said, thats an underrated benefits to Hackathons, they make you explore tools. little self plug😆, how was the experience using Valist?
It was good, creating a project on Valist and publishing our first release all went smoothly!
Glad to hear that, user-friendly UI has always been a significant issue in Web 3, how is Dropz approaching that?
We tried to simplify the interface as much as possible. All a user needs to do, is log in with their wallet. There dashboard shows their web3 engagement score and which protocols they have successfully interacted with.
Another page called “dropletz” (a droplet is a task to complete) shows each dApp/network they haven’t yet interacted with, with a button that redirects to that dApps website. There can also be multiple dropletz for each dApp if tasks are more specific.
Sounds easy enough, Web3 needs to get to a point where users can easily navigate interfaces without needing to be a rocket scientist
Why did you publish on Valist? How easy or hard was publishing?
It was good, creating a project on Valist and publishing our first release using the CLI went smoothly! Talking with Valist team about keygen and the CLI made it exciting to work with.
That’s awesome — we’re glad you share the vision to decentralize web3 from the bottom up!
If you enjoyed our chat with Dropz, you should definitely check out Dropz before they are fully live.
Keep up with the Dropz and the team here:
Valist Project: https://app.valist.io/murrs/dropz
ETHGlobal showcase: https://ethglobal.com/showcase/dropz-2gw8a
Kai’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/krd_fy
Matt’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattmurrs
