Anyone who’s been on Twitter recently has seen the obnoxious airdrop farming for all different gaming companies. It started this season with Portal but quickly evolved to many more companies. The more obnoxiously you spam the more money you get. One of the most popular companies was Gaimin or GaiminIo or GMRX. Gaimin promised massive rewards for spamming them anywhere and everywhere you could.
That was until it came time to claim. What came was nothing short of disaster. Some people got eight to ten times what they qualified for. Some people got an eighth or a tenth of what they qualified for. And some people got nothing. Enter in Zeus, a little known NFT artist. Zeus is 90% blind and the only thing stopping him from fixing his problem is a surgery. Furthermore the inability to get that surgery will, in short time, cause complete and total blindness.
Zeus has been grinding day and night trying to sell NFTs so that he can afford his surgery, to little success likely due to volume having not really returned to the NFT market. So when a chance to earn money by simply putting in work with Gaimin came around Zeus jumped at it. He put aside everything else he was doing, gave up his sleep, and worked around the clock spamming GMRX everywhere he could to wrack up points.
In the end Zeus earned enough points for about 253,000 GMRX tokens, more than enough to cover his surgery and prevent him from total blindness. But unfortunately due to Gaimins horrible system he was only given a fraction of what he rightfully earned and what was promised to him, a measly 38,555 GMRX. He no longer had enough for his surgery and to prevent his blindness.
So Zeus did what any reasonable person would do. He tried to reason with them in their Telegram channel and was quickly blocked. He tried to send them a message on Twitter and was ignored. Then he made a tweet on Twitter and was also mostly ignored. Of note, and perhaps suspiciously or just a very strange coincidence all of the large accounts with followings that could create a PR issue got their allocation or over allocated. Since they got theirs nobody was left to care about the little guy like Zeus.
But it gets even worse. Rather than make things right Gaimin announced a second large batch of tokens was ready and waiting for farmers in round 2. The company has promised to make right the people who got 0 tokens but has remained entirely silent on the people who got a fraction of what they were owed. Meanwhile they sit on enough tokens to make everyone whole and honor their obligations but instead choose to do a second round before doing the morally right thing and making the first round right. In entirety. Not just the people who got 0 tokens.
Of note, the token distribution was supposed to be 50% at launch and 50% over 12 months but that doesn’t explain why Zeus got far less than 50% of what he was owed. Meanwhile the company has taken the stance that people should just prepare for round 2 and work hard for those tokens. All while Zeus continues to go more and more blind while this company entirely ignores him and the human impact of not honoring their obligations. In fact they seem to ignore anyone and everyone who doesn’t have a large enough following to create an issue.
People in third world countries gave up their lives for this company only to get shafted and Gaimin’s response has so far been “we don’t care”. Of course they don’t say that in words but certainly through actions offering no assurance whatsoever for the people like Zeus who got a minute fraction of what they were promised. Patrol Crypto reached out to Gaimin through email and Telegram and they failed to provide a response, further saying “we don’t care”.
Unfortunately for Gaimin, however, some people do care. While they are completely happy with someone who worked over 20 hours a day for weeks to boost their project going blind due to their inability to honor their obligations, we are not. And this industry should not be either. Continuing to ignore the Zeus’s out there and allow corporate sadism to continue in web3 we are only reinforcing the notion that our industry has no standards. That people can scam all they want and nobody has to be held to any standards. And while airdrop farmers may think it is helping their bags to support such corporate evil it actually hurts everyones bags. Because without more and more examples like this and without the inability of the market to hold the bad actors like Gaimin accountable we would have mass adoption.
Instead we have a whole swath of people who’s lives were ruined and we have Zeus who will go totally blind all because they didn’t honor their word. Meanwhile they sit on the resources to do so and rather than do the morally right thing they decide to do another round. And when you ask them about the people who’s lives are impacted. All you get is “we don’t care”. And when you try to bring it up to the larger crypto community all you get is “we don’t care”. And yet we wonder why we don’t have mass adoption yet. We need to care. Gaimin needs to care. And we need to demand better from the companies doing business in our space. Because from the outside looking in it seems we are a space with no morals, no standards, and no accountability. And we continue to prove that this assessment is right. So please join me in tagging Gaimin and demanding that they make things right for Zeus and the countless others of whom they’ve blown off obligations for. Otherwise we are no better than the outside world views us.