Eclipse's "Death Note" and self-built leaderboard, Humanity's mandatory palm print verification, and the deepening trust rift in the Kaito ecosystem.

Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News

As Kaito on the InfoFi platform, it incentivizes high-quality content creation through the AI-driven Yap points mechanism, building a healthy content and attention ecosystem. However, recent controversies surrounding the airdrop of the collaborative projects Eclipse and Humanity, coupled with Kaito's deep-seated dilemmas regarding transparency, fairness, and community trust, have pushed Kaito into the spotlight. This has not only sparked community doubts about the rationality of Kaito's mechanisms but also reflects the deep contradictions in the entire cryptocurrency field regarding user incentives and community building.

Kaito's Collaborative Project Airdrop Controversy and Response

Eclipse's "Death Note" and Self-Built Leaderboard

The airdrop from the Ethereum SVM L2 network Eclipse this month, targeting Kaito users, has sparked controversy among KOLs and the community. Many community users reported that those who are truly active in the community and dare to speak out did not receive the airdrop, raising questions about the validity of Kaito's data.

In response to the controversy, Eclipse community leader Alucard stated on July 8 that the logic behind the airdrop distribution was revealed: Eclipse created its own private X leaderboard using Kaito data. Other projects are expected to follow suit and adopt the same approach. They hope that more projects can manually remove haters, users farming multiple projects, and airdrop accounts from the list. "Every project will emulate our Death Note model."

Kaito founder Yu Hu added, "Every project will receive a complete social data analysis provided by Kaito at the time of the snapshot, including each user's contributions, sentiment analysis, volume analysis, historical behavior and reputation analysis, regional information, loyalty analysis, etc., within a customizable time frame. Each project will make the final distribution based on the data, its own project preferences, and Kaito's recommendations. For example, some projects give extra bonuses to early users, some projects add loyalty bonuses, some projects add regional bonuses, and some projects do not mind black fans, etc. This is all highly customizable. The same goes for Eclipse."

This means that the data provided by Kaito serves only as a basic reference, and the final distribution power is entirely in the hands of the project parties.

Previously, according to Eclipse OG @Yangsolana, Eclipse had stated in an AMA that it created a "Death Note" blacklist, excluding about 50,000 wallets from the airdrop. Additionally, the top 1,000 wallets were manually reviewed by the Eclipse team.

In fact, members of the Eclipse team had repeatedly stated their position before the airdrop, hinting that they would reward true community members. For instance, Eclipse community leader Alucard sharply expressed the following views:

"Kaito is just a tool and does not have the ability to identify user beliefs or loyalty."

"True community members actively participate, contribute, hold beliefs, and grow together with the ecosystem. They want to win together with others. If you are farming 30 projects at the same time, waiting to sell tokens and disappear, then you are not a community member at all."

"Eclipse is cooking for the community, not for KOLs."

"If you are just farming and selling, then you are a parasite that is killing cryptocurrency. We need a community with true beliefs."

This stance, while gaining recognition from some long-term supporters, has also sparked debates about fairness due to the subjectivity of "manual screening." The community questions: If Kaito's data is only a reference, can users' efforts be arbitrarily negated by the project parties?

Humanity Increases Palm Print Verification Requirements

Coincidentally, the airdrop from the identity verification network Humanity also fell into the "backstabbing users" and "extreme anti-farming" responsibilities. The project added biometric requirements such as palm print verification on top of the original Kaito points, causing many users to lose their eligibility to receive rewards.

Yu Hu explained that in Humanity's case, the project party did indeed state at the beginning of the official announcement that everyone needed to complete steps like fingerprint collection, but due to a lack of continuous reminders and the short time frame, many people did not complete it for various reasons. Some accounts, despite being Yappers/Stakers, did not receive any distribution for the following reasons:

• Everyone must complete palm print verification on the Humanity website before the airdrop checker.
• For stakers, they also need to have a wallet associated with holding sKAITO/YT-sKAITO.
• For yappers, they need to input their receiving wallet after the airdrop checker is released and before the receiving starts.
• The Humanity team also added a strict anti-witch mechanism in the final distribution, mainly based on the quality of recommendations.

Humanity stated before the airdrop, "The airdrop should reward early users and build a strong community, but in reality, the airdrop has been hijacked by bots, witches, and farmers, failing to reward real users and wasting project resources. Therefore, Humanity verifies real users through Fairdrop, determining whether they are real users based on the number of social credentials associated with their 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 the Kaito Mechanism

Lack of Transparency and the Vicious Cycle of Ranking Manipulation

Kaito has long been questioned for its lack of transparency, especially regarding data processing, weighting algorithms, and token distribution.

Whether it is Kaito or the projects it collaborates with, whether it is the Kaito leaderboard or the self-built leaderboards of the project parties, there is a lack of transparency. As a result, the logic of points distribution has become a "black box."

Currently, a large amount of AI-generated homogeneous content floods X, while truly high-quality creators may be marginalized. More seriously, this ecosystem is forming a vicious cycle: speculators profit from ranking manipulation; real users gradually drift away due to the disproportion between effort and reward; project parties, in order to filter effective users, have to resort to manual reviews and additional verifications, further increasing the participation costs for ordinary users. If the algorithm were completely transparent, it would be more easily abused, making it a challenge to balance transparency and anti-manipulation. The "high-quality content ecosystem" that Kaito attempts to build may be turning into a playground for rank manipulators.

The Positioning Dilemma of Data Providers

In the face of controversies arising from collaborative projects, Kaito founder Yu Hu's response reveals its core dilemma: not participating in the final decisions of the project parties, yet having to bear the questioning of the decision results. This could lead users to invest time and effort based on Kaito's rankings and points system, only to potentially receive nothing due to the subjective screening by the project parties.

Therefore, Yu Hu stated, "Kaito, as a platform that has only been around for 6 months, is currently a single entry scenario, but soon Kaito will enter capital and various scenarios, so its constraints and influence will continue to increase."

The Common Challenges Behind the Controversy: Community Building in Crypto

Kaito's predicament is a common issue faced by the entire cryptocurrency field in community building. In the context of severe market volatility and rampant short-term speculation, project parties hope to attract users through airdrops while fearing being abandoned by farmers after being "sheared," creating a contradiction that has led to various stringent screening mechanisms.

However, manual intervention and subjective judgment also carry risks. Eclipse's "Death Note," while aimed at excluding speculators, may inadvertently exclude genuine critics due to the team's subjective preferences; Humanity's palm print verification, while filtering out bots, also excludes 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. As of the first quarter of 2025, Kaito's annualized revenue is $33 million.

Kaito founder Yu Hu mentioned, "In the past 6 months, the platform has assisted in distributing $100 million in rewards, and the vast majority of projects have a strong sense of contractual spirit, with many projects even exceeding their reward distributions, which reflects the coexistence concept of Web3 projects and users."

This achievement indicates that the InfoFi model still holds value, but the frequent controversies also serve as a warning: if issues like transparency and trust continue to go unresolved, the trust of users who farm rewards 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 let Kaito handle the final distribution for Yappers and the Kaito ecosystem.
• Signal > Noise, focus on high-quality content, improve the identification of real quality content, and enhance ecosystem sustainability.
• Algorithm improvement: Ensure that real, high-quality discussions are prioritized.
• Reputation: Considering the addition of an on-chain reputation mechanism to help further filter out AI garbage and reward high-quality "real" users.
• Combining real usage: Not only rewarding Yapping but also integrating real usage and ownership.
• Cultural building: Promoting the community to shift from "score farming culture" to long-term value co-creation.

Additionally, Kaito founder Yu Hu stated earlier this month that a capital launchpad and gkaito will be launched in the third quarter, introducing a new mechanism called Kaito Connect.

Summary

The recent controversies surrounding Kaito reflect the complexity of the relationship between data platforms and project parties in the Web3 ecosystem. Eclipse's "Death Note" and Humanity's additional requirements expose the limitations of the Kaito mechanism, while historical transparency issues exacerbate community dissatisfaction. Although the responses from Kaito's founder clarified some misunderstandings and showcased Kaito's achievements in reward distribution, the contradictions of autonomy and transparency in the distribution process still need to be addressed.

In terms of collaboration models with project parties, Kaito may need to explore a more reasonable division of responsibilities. Perhaps a standardized data screening framework can be established, clarifying which dimensions are objectively assessed by the platform and which fall within the customizable scope of the project parties, while also introducing third-party auditing mechanisms to ensure fairness in the distribution process.

For project parties, the means of screening real users also need to be more humane. Finding a balance between anti-witch attacks and protecting the rights of ordinary users is essential to avoid excluding potential community members due to overly stringent rules.

Kaito's controversies are both a crisis and an opportunity to rebuild trust. Only by confronting issues and actively transforming can the InfoFi model return to its original intention, truly incentivizing valuable content creation and community building, and injecting momentum into the long-term development of the cryptocurrency industry.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。