Keybase and Stellar's 2 billion XLM airdrop ended early after attracting massive spam and bot activity. The program distributed only 300 million XLM instead of the planned amount, as fraudsters exploited verification methods to claim free tokens at scale.
Keybase and Stellar Development Foundation partnered to airdrop 2 billion XLM to Keybase users over 20 months, but the program concluded early with only 300 million XLM distributed. Spammers and bot farms exploited the airdrop by compromising old GitHub and Hacker News accounts to pass Keybase's verification checks, causing operational strain on those platforms. Despite initial success in bringing new users to both services, the fraud became unmanageable by the November airdrop phase. Keybase implemented SMS verification and behavior filters but couldn't prevent sophisticated bot operations, particularly from regions with limited internet infrastructure. Both companies ultimately decided the abuse outweighed the benefits and ended the distribution.