Wayfinder, an AI Agent platform under Parallel, was pushed to the forefront today. Also at the center of the vortex are Kaito, which was very popular in the market some time ago and TokenTable, a token distribution platform under CZ, which was "personally selected" by CZ. What happened during this period.

Today is the day when Wayfinder starts airdropping token $PROMPT. After launching, OKX and CoinBase have been successfully launched, and a perpetual contract has been launched on Binance. However, the process of claiming airdrop tokens was not smooth. A large number of users reported that the page had received it after the interaction, but they did not receive the airdrop. At the same time, someone "grabbed" more than 120 ETHs "about 189,000 US dollars" due to this airdrop. What happened?

Parallel is a gaming company led by Solana Venture, Base, Amber Group and others to raise $85 million. It has developed the AI-powered survival simulation game Colony, while the protagonist of this article, Wayfinder, is used for various use cases in China Unicom's AI game Colony and blockchain and other non-game environments.

There are three parts of TGE together, namely Caching reward "Staking $PRIME", APP reward, and KAITO reward. And there was a problem with KAITO's airdrop collection.

KAITO and WayFinder airdrops were "Yoinked"

Cause of the incident

KAITO and Wayfinder’s airdrop activities plan to distribute a total of 5 million tokens to Yapper, of which 4 million will be allocated for Yap’s more than 90 points, while 1 million will be allocated for less than 90 points. As the event opened, Yapper began claiming its own token. But the problem also comes with it. Many users said in the Discord channel that they did not receive tokens after interacting, but showed that their tokens had been received.

Just when everyone was confused, the developer Ultra shouted to AIWayfinder on the social platform X, and MEV Frontrunner was stealing the $PROMPT redeemed on the KAITO event page and redeemed it to ETH. And he also laughed at himself for discovering so quickly that he was "Yoinked".

Yoink is a slang term, meaning "quick rob" or "steal". It has appeared and is widely used in DeFi Summer. MEV Frontrunner Yoink usually refers to a specific MEV robot or strategy that specifically "snatch" other users' trading opportunities by taking the lead.

Now certified by EtherScanMEV Frontrunner YoinkThe address is bound to a social media X account yoink6980, which was previously yoink6980 to inform the community that it took a flaw in the ERC-2771 protocol.Real attacker, the funds that saved the community were founded, such as in December 2022 he saved DFX Finance funds and returned them to users.

The 120 ETH people stolen this time used the MEV snatch attack and used the "Yoink" method, but the purpose seemed not to protect users, but to plunder them.

Developer Ultra"0x_ultra"Reviewed, "What happened today is that Kaito Yappers' AI Wayfinder claims contract configuration errors and the airdrop receivers are not preconfigured in the Merkelgen proof, which allows MEV Yoink to find opportunities in the memory pool and react quickly to exploit this vulnerability and preemptively execute any slow token claims."

Whose fault is this?

Since then, "I get yoinked" and "Bro was lucky not get yoinked" have become the words that users who did not receive airdrops or received airdrops in this WayFinder and KAITO event have shared the most words on social media.

Team member Kalos said in an announcement that "the issue of claiming airdrop tokens with Kaito is not on our side, but we are working with them to resolve it" and specifically mentioned that "and the contract was not created by Wayfinder." Fud's voices on this matter are growing in the community, and there are questions about whether the claim contract was not audited at all or simply written by AI.

TokenTable, the technical support platform responsible for this KAITO airdrop, also responded quickly, saying that this incident will not affect other Wayfinder airdrops or any other TokenTable airdrops, and will compensate all users who did not receive tokens due to MEV impact in this airdrop, including all failed transaction fees, which will also be refunded in the form of ETH. And mentioned that there is no problem with smart contracts, and MEV is the fundamental problem. We can learn from the official website that the TokenTable contract is responsible for auditing companies such as tteSec, Nethermind, and TonTech.

PopPunk, the founder of g8keep, commented on the incident on social media X, "I remind you a long time ago!" In fact, as early as the day before the airdrop, he posted on X to mock some of the problems in Wayfinder's claim contract, and believed that it was very bad for them to store each individual claim in the map on the chain instead of Merkelgen's approach.

Wayfinder team member Kalos responded to a tweet, "The smart contract is reviewed by Quantstamp and other companies and has done Merkelgan several times. It may save us some gas, but mapping is better for users." PopPunk said he did not understand why mapping is better for users unless they directly interact with the contract to claim the airdrop, rather than from the official website.

While this incident may not be the issue of "Caching" receiving contracts under Wayfinder, some community members pointed out that the Merkelgan contract may indeed reduce Yoink risks through design. For example, users are required to submit a unique Proof "binding address" or restrict a single collection window, which increases the difficulty of robot copying transactions. Off-chain Proof distribution can be combined with a private transaction pool "such as Flashbots" to hide mempool visibility and reduce the chance of being monitored.

According to existing clues, TokenTable may have assumed greater responsibility in this incident, but we have no way of knowing which party the error is attributed to, and are waiting for further investigation reports. But in any case, it is thankful that TokenTable is willing to take responsibility for this, and users will not suffer any losses in it.

One wave has not been settled and another wave has started again, the pledger's accusation

$PRIME Three-year pledger suffered heavy losses

In June 2024, Wayfinder released an event where pledge $PRIME will get the opportunity to participate in Wayfinder's "Future Airdrop", and the more rewards you will get as you pledge it for the longer you pledge it.

Kaito and WayFinder's airdrop processing has just been solved. On the other hand, the user who pledged $PRIME to become a Cache was miserable. Community member Lsi-luna was one of the people involved in the event. He sent a soul-searching question on Discord, "Even if the airdrop received part of it this time, referring to the plunge in the price of $PRIME, I received only 2% of what I invested."

Do we still need to participate in the community when distribution is imbalanced?

In fact, this situation has happened countless times in many blockchain projects, but what really made the community feels that it has been staking $50,000 in January to only get $200, while Binance alone can get $100 for free with a website feature activity. The contempt for contributors and their generosity towards non-contributors make them very angry.

The rewards given by the Kaito event were more, and several emerging Yappers gained a lot from this airdrop, ranging from thousands to nearly ten thousand dollars, even though they hardly paid attention to the project. Team member Kalos issued a statement on this. Cachers can receive a total of $PROMPT tokens, while the total number of social tasks including Kaito's program is $20 million. Cachers now receives only 28% of all rewards, but this does not win back the hearts of the community.

Even many people who received the airdrop could not stand it. For this reason, Simon, the founder of Moonrock Capital, posted a statement that he received a $10,000 worth of $10,000 in the airdrop pages of Kaito and AIWayfinder, and said that he didn't know why AIWayfinder would reward himself, even though he had barely mentioned the project.

Then I couldn't help expressing my confusion about this phenomenon. "I don't need to make any contribution to claim tokens, sell tokens, and extract the value in the middle. And those who pay 100% of the cost have no return. I said before, and now I'll say it again, the airdrop has expired and it's meaningless."

Kaito founder Yu Hu reminded in the comment section that Simon wrote a tweet about AIWayfinder last month, and Simon replied, "Thank you for sharing, even I forgot this one myself. I thought I needed to keep talking about Wayfinder and share MindShare for them."

Those who pledge tokens accept the risk of falling token prices and the cost of time waiting for a year. The “influential” person posted a tweet with 28 likes a month ago, and the former received less than 1/10 of the latter, which may be the reason for the community’s anger.

PRIME has dropped nearly 90% from its highest point of $1.6 billion, and has also dropped 75% from the start of June activity.