Problem
Web3 platforms often rely on user growth metrics to attract investment and establish market position. We investigate the phenomenon of 'double dippers' and 'airdrop farmers' — users who create fake or duplicate accounts to maximize airdrop rewards across multiple platforms.
Approach
Using on-chain data from major DeFi platforms, we identify patterns of coordinated account creation that inflate platform user counts and reputation metrics. We find that a significant fraction of purportedly active users are actually synthetic identities created to harvest airdrops.
Results
This practice undermines platform integrity, distorts governance voting, and creates misleading growth metrics for investors. We propose detection heuristics based on transaction timing, wallet clustering, and cross-platform behavioral fingerprinting to identify and filter fake consumer accounts.