aPriori, the trading startup backed by Binance founder Changpeng Zhao’s venture firm YZi Labs is facing allegations of a Sybil attack in its recent token airdrop. A huge chunk of the airdropped APR tokens on BNB Chain was allegedly claimed by wallets controlled by a single entity.
The new YZi Labs project’s genesis airdrop in late October was to reward early contributors, testnet users, and holders of partner NFTs such as MadLads and Moonbirds.
According to blockchain data on BSCScan, roughly 5,800 wallets connected through transactional patterns collectively scooped around 80% of the total APR distributed on BNB Chain.
According to CoinGecko data, the APR token has a market capitalization of $52 million, slipping 61.194% from its all-time high of $134 million reached on the day of the airdrop, October 23.
Did aPriori airdrop claim involve a sybil attack?
Between October 19 and 20, days before aPriori publicly announced that claims would open on BNB Chain, these wallets were observed receiving small deposits of BNB. The tokens were supposedly just enough to cover gas fees for airdrop claim transactions.
All the 5,800 addresses received their BNB from the same 13 source wallets over several weeks, whose owners are yet to be discovered. The clustering behavior is synonymous with a project manipulation technique where one operator uses thousands of wallets to claim rewards several times, also known as a Sybil attack.
aPriori publicly announced on October 22 that the airdrop would take place on Ethereum and BNB Chain. Still, activity from the 5,800-wallet group started as early as October 19, implying that whoever managed the wallets had prior knowledge of the launch networks.
“The preparatory funding of thousands of addresses on BNB Chain before the official reveal is an extraordinary red flag,” a pseudonymous investigator named Nagiiiiseishiro noted on X.
Eligibility for the airdrop required users to have interacted with aPriori’s testnet token on Monad, an upcoming Ethereum-compatible blockchain. The testnet token had no value, and the official eligibility criteria were not disclosed until the public announcement.
Despite the ongoing controversy over its airdrop, aPriori’s APR token showed signs of recovery in the past 24 hours. The token rose 3.79%, contrasting with a 12.57% decline over the past week, according to CoinmarketCap data.
The bounce may be driven by market mechanics, which have pushed APR’s 7-day Relative Strength Index (RSI) to 21.67, well below the levels traders would consider oversold, and it could become undervalued.
APR’s 24-hour trading volume climbed 33.93% to $14.57 million, against the backdrop of renewed speculative interest among short-term traders and algorithmic funds. A sustained close above $0.29 could restart an upward momentum, but a slip below $0.28 risks revisiting October’s local lows.
Crypto community queries token accumulation concentration
Insider involvement chatter on X intensified shortly after the airdrop began, where one NFT enthusiast going by the handle “Danny” propounded that several hundred wallets linked to aPriori’s internal accounts had collectively received substantial allocations of the APR token.
“The aPriori team has at least 450 rat warehouse accounts in Nadfun,” the user wrote, “Top 450 APR holders on Nadfun are all aPriori team accounts. This means they have a mouse warehouse of 225,000 tokens.”
The post listed wallet addresses, 0x3f59…2fdEBB87 and 0xAFd…26421D3, among the highest-ranking holders on the Nadfun leaderboard. Each qualifying address, according to the user’s data, received 503 APR tokens from the Genesis Airdrop.
aPriori was developed by a team of former engineers from Jump Trading, Coinbase, and Citadel Securities. The startup has raised $30 million from venture firms YZi Labs, HashKey Capital, Pantera Capital, and Primitive Ventures.
Community members had expected the airdrop to take place on the Monad network once it launched later this year, but aPriori pivoted to Ethereum and BNB Chain, surprising many early supporters who had participated in Monad’s testnet activities.
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