Moonbirds Collection Faces Criticism After User Wins 50+ NFTs During Raffle

cryptonews.com:

Newly-launched non-fungible token (NFT) project Moonbirds has been hit with controversy, with some wondering if there was a potential raffle manipulation.

Etherescan data shows that one user created more than 400 "accounts to Sybil Attack the Moonbirds raffle," said the pseudonymous crypto researcher Zachxbt. The user managed to win more than 50 NFTs.

Sybil attacks occur when individuals/small groups act as large groups of individuals by creating multiple addresses.

Meanwhile, Harri, a developer at Moonbirds, said one day before the launch that they have removed entries of "14,649 bots and sneaksters," leaving 32,218 candidates for a spot in the raffle.

"We ended up setting higher thresholds than we first anticipated and did a LOT of manual checks to really try to minimise the legit people taken out by mistake. Some small scale cheating will have gone under our radar but we thought it was worth it to avoid false positives." Harri added.

Some users noted that the team could have removed a lot of bots by "analyzing the flow of funds and wallet activity."

Yes they could have done way more checks and really guarantee the mint to fair users. Too many dead Twitters/Discords and empty wallets to filter out.

Launched on Saturday, Moonbirds is a collection of 10,000 utility-enabled PFPs (profile pictures), each with randomly distributed features. The project is the first NFT drop by tech entrepreneur Kevin Rose’s PROOF Collective, a private members-only collective of 1,000 dedicated NFT collectors and artists.

PROOF Collective released 7,875 of the PFPs for sale via an allowlist, which was formed via a raffle process. The NFTs went for sale for an ETH 2.5 (USD 7,630) mint price. However, the collection has since burst in popularity and