Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News
As an InfoFi platform, Kaito, with its AI-driven Yap points mechanism, incentivizes high-quality content creation and builds a virtuous content and attention ecosystem. However, recent controversies surrounding its cooperative projects Eclipse and Humanity's airdrop, coupled with Kaito's deep-seated dilemmas regarding transparency, fairness, and community trust, have pushed Kaito into the spotlight. This not only raises doubts about the rationality of Kaito's mechanism within the community but also reflects the deep-seated contradictions in the entire cryptocurrency field regarding user incentives and community building.
Kaito's cooperative project airdrop controversy and response
Eclipse's 'Death Note' and self-built leaderboards
The recent airdrop from the Ethereum SVM L2 network Eclipse has sparked controversy among KOLs and the community regarding Kaito users. Many community users reported that genuinely active users who dared to speak out did not receive the airdrop, raising doubts about the effectiveness of Kaito's data in the distribution outcomes.
In response to the controversy, Eclipse community leader Alucard revealed on July 8 the behind-the-scenes logic of the airdrop distribution: Eclipse used Kaito data to create its own private X leaderboard. Other projects will follow suit and adopt similar practices. It is hoped that more projects can manually remove haters, users who farm multiple projects, and airdrop accounts from the list. Each project will imitate our Death Note model.
Kaito founder Yu Hu added, 'Each project will receive the complete social data analysis provided by Kaito at the time of the snapshot, including each user's contributions, public sentiment analysis, volume analysis, user historical behavior and reputation analysis, geographical information, loyalty analysis, etc., within a customizable time period. Each project will conduct the final allocation based on the data, its own project preferences, and Kaito's reference opinions. For example, some projects give extra bonuses to early users, some add loyalty bonuses, some add geographical bonuses, and some do not mind negative commenters, etc. This is all highly customizable. The same applies here at Eclipse.'
This means that the data provided by Kaito serves only as a basic reference, with the final allocation power entirely in the hands of the project parties.
Previously, according to Eclipse OG @Yangsolana, Eclipse stated during an AMA event that they created a 'Death Note' blacklist, excluding approximately 50,000 wallets from the airdrop. In addition, the top 1000 wallets were manually reviewed by the Eclipse team.
In fact, members of the Eclipse team had repeatedly stated their position before the airdrop, suggesting they would reward genuine community members. For example, Eclipse community leader Alucard had sharply expressed the following viewpoint:
'Kaito is just a tool and does not have the ability to recognize users' beliefs or loyalty.'
'True community members actively participate, contribute, hold beliefs, and grow alongside the ecosystem. They wish to win together with others. If you are farming 30 projects simultaneously, waiting to dump tokens and then disappear, then you are not a community member at all.'
'Eclipse is cooking for the community, not for KOLs.'
'If you are only farming and dumping, then you are a parasite suffocating cryptocurrency. We need communities with real beliefs.'
This position, while winning some long-term supporters' recognition, has also sparked controversy over fairness due to the subjectivity of 'manual screening'. The community questions: if Kaito data is only a reference, can users' efforts be arbitrarily dismissed by project parties?
Humanity adds palm verification requirements
Coincidentally, the airdrop of the identity verification network Humanity also fell into the responsibilities of 'betraying users' and 'extreme anti-exploitation'. The project has added palm verification and other biometric requirements on top of the existing Kaito points, resulting in many users losing their eligibility to claim.
Yu Hu explained that in the case of Humanity, the project party did mention at the initial announcement of rewards that everyone needed to complete steps such as fingerprint collection, but due to a lack of ongoing reminders and the short time frame, many people failed to complete it for various reasons. Some accounts, despite being Yappers/Stakers, did not receive any allocation for the following reasons:
Everyone must complete palm verification on the Humanity website before the airdrop checker.
For stakers, they also need to hold wallets associated with sKAITO/YT-sKAITO.
For Yappers, they need to enter their claiming wallet after the airdrop checker is released and before the claiming starts.
The Humanity team has also added a strict anti-witch mechanism in the final allocation, primarily based on the quality of recommendations.
Humanity stated before the airdrop, 'Airdrops should reward early users and build a strong community, but in reality, airdrops have been hijacked by bots, witches, and exploiters, failing to reward real users and wasting project resources. Therefore, Humanity verifies real users through Fairdrop, determining whether they are genuine users based on the number of social credentials associated with human identity, whether they have used the application or scanned their palms in any global promotional activities, and whether they have contributed as real humans in the community.'
The deep-seated contradictions of Kaito's mechanism
The lack of transparency and the vicious cycle of fraud
Kaito has been questioned for its lack of transparency, especially in data handling, weighting algorithms, and token distribution.
Whether Kaito or the project parties it collaborates with, both Kaito's leaderboard and the project parties' self-built leaderboards suffer from a lack of transparency. Consequently, the logic of points distribution has become an 'opaque box'.
Currently, a large amount of homogenized content generated by AI floods X, and genuine high-quality creators may be marginalized. More seriously, this ecosystem is forming a vicious cycle: speculators profit by gaming the system; real users gradually lose interest due to a mismatch between input and rewards; project parties, in order to filter out effective users, are forced to adopt radical measures such as manual review and additional verification, further raising the participation costs for ordinary users. If algorithms are completely transparent, they become easier to abuse, making it a challenge to balance transparency with fraud prevention. The 'high-quality content ecosystem' that Kaito is attempting to build may be turning into a playground for gamers.
The positioning dilemma of data providers
In response to the controversies arising from cooperative projects, Kaito founder Yu Hu's response revealed its core dilemma: not participating in the final decision-making of the project parties, yet having to bear the scrutiny of the decision outcomes. This could lead users to invest time and energy based on Kaito's rankings and points system, only to potentially gain nothing due to the subjective selection of the project parties.
Therefore, Yu Hu stated, 'Kaito, as a platform that has only been established for six months, currently has a singular entry scenario, but soon Kaito will penetrate capital and various scenarios, so its constraints and influence will continuously increase.'
The common dilemma behind the controversy: Community building in the Crypto space
Kaito's dilemma is a common problem faced by the entire cryptocurrency field in community building. In a context of extreme volatility in the cryptocurrency market and rampant short-term speculation, project parties hope to attract users through airdrops while fearing being abandoned by 'haircutters' after being exploited, resulting in various harsh screening mechanisms.
However, manual intervention and subjective judgment also carry risks. Eclipse's 'Death Note' aims to eliminate speculators but may exclude genuine critics due to the team's subjective preferences; Humanity's palm verification can filter out bots but also leaves out some privacy-sensitive users. This approach of 'sacrificing fairness for fairness' highlights the industry's technical and mechanistic limitations in identifying 'real contributions' and 'long-term beliefs'.
Kaito's achievements and plans
According to Dune data, Kaito AI has distributed tokens worth $106 million to various communities (excluding Kaito's own airdrop), with over 200,000 active Yappers each month.
Kaito founder Yu Hu mentioned, 'In the past six months, the platform has assisted in distributing $100 million in rewards. The vast majority of projects exhibit a strong sense of commitment, and many even exceeded their reward distributions, reflecting the concept of coexistence between Web3 projects and users.'
This achievement indicates that the InfoFi model still holds value, but frequent controversies also warn: if issues such as transparency and trust remain unresolved, the trust of users in Kaito will gradually erode.
According to Yu Hu and Kaito's official disclosures, recent plans or suggestions include:
Token distribution: Kaito strongly recommends that all teams allow Kaito to handle the final allocation for Yappers and the Kaito ecosystem.
Signal > Noise, focus on high-quality content, improve the identification of genuine high-quality content, and enhance ecosystem sustainability.
Algorithm improvement: Ensure that genuine, high-quality discussions are prioritized.
Reputation: Considering the addition of an on-chain reputation mechanism to help further filter out AI-generated spam and reward high-quality 'real' users.
Combine real usage: not only reward Yapping but also integrate real usage and ownership.
Cultural building: Promote the community from 'score farming culture' to long-term value co-creation.
In addition, Kaito founder Yu Hu stated earlier this month that the capital launchpad and gkaito will be launched in the third quarter, introducing the new Kaito Connect mechanism.
Summary
The recent controversy surrounding Kaito reflects the complexity of the relationship between data platforms and project parties in the Web3 ecosystem. Eclipse's 'Death Diary' and Humanity's additional requirements expose the limitations of Kaito's mechanism, while historical transparency issues exacerbate community dissatisfaction. Although Kaito's founder's response clarified some misunderstandings and showcased Kaito's achievements in reward distribution, the contradiction between autonomy and transparency in the allocation process still needs to be resolved.
In terms of cooperation models with project parties, Kaito may need to explore more reasonable divisions of responsibilities. Perhaps a standardized data screening framework can be established to clarify which dimensions are objectively assessed by the platform and which fall within the customizable range of project parties. Additionally, introducing third-party audit mechanisms can ensure fairness in the allocation process.
For project parties, the means of screening real users also need to be more humane. Find a balance between anti-witch attacks and protecting ordinary users' rights, avoiding the exclusion of potential community members due to overly harsh rules.
Kaito's controversy is both a crisis and an opportunity to rebuild trust. Only by confronting the issues and actively transforming can the InfoFi model return to its roots, genuinely incentivizing valuable content creation and community building, injecting momentum into the long-term development of the cryptocurrency industry.
