Show HN: StealthDrop – Anonymous crypto airdrops using zero-knowledge proofs

> Using a community chest to reward front-runners for submitting claims is clever. Would the ETH reward still need to be at least as large as the transaction cost to incentivize front-runners? Or is there still a cut of the token being taken, in the hopes the token value will make up the difference?

Yeah, it definitely needs to be at least as large as the gas fee (otherwise front runners will just run the transaction locally and notice that it’s not worth rebroadcasting). Our mechanism doesn’t take a cut of the token, mostly because it is hard to put a value to the token as we mention in the post.

> It seems like there would still be a basic gas problem any time the receiving account wants to use the (ERC-20) token, eg to send the token somewhere else via a wallet or some other standard UI?

That’s certainly true, but if, for instance, your primary use case was as a governance token, most governance happens off-chain(on Snapshot Labs[1], for instance), so that wouldn’t require any funds.

[1]: https://snapshot.org/

Imagine someone sending you $100 to your bank account. Except those $100 can be tokens. And your bank account is your crypto address.

> I'm definitely onboard with the examples, where influential people's votes influence others, or an influential person votes against an expected outcome and draws ires

In fact, I see that as the potential #1 usecase: enabling zero-trust voting, with the "drop" simply being a way to instantiate the set of voters at time t to prevent a takeover by freshly created accounts created just for the vote.

A weighting by history (say give 20% more weight to a vote per year the address has existed) and activity (say on HN to give more weight to people who post regularly comments that do not get too many downvotes) could have interesting feature for online communities

In cryptocurrency, an "airdrop" refers to receiving free tokens in your wallet.

Some times they're designed to incentivize certain activities, like promoting the coin or participating in something.

As a marketing tactic, they work quite well. Crypto fans will do surprisingly large amounts of free PR and free work for "free" tokens.

From an economic perspective, if a token system is giving out free money to large numbers of people it's effectively inflating away the value of the coin. Ironic given the initial anti-inflation ethos that drove the early days of cryptocurrency.