Quests Platform? Are We Just Feeding the Sybil Machine?

[Sheyda]

Quests Are the New Airdrops… But Are We Just Feeding the Sybil Machine?

I really NEED your thoughts around it!

As a marketing manager, I’ve worked with Zilly, Layer3, Galxe, and several other Web3 marketing tools over the past few quarters. We tried everything like XP systems, social tasks, mini-games and even developed an in-house quest portal. But truth be told, the results never lived up to the promise.

On paper, these tools look great: quests → points → rewards → hype.

But in practice? It often feels like we’re just spinning the hamster wheel for Sybil farmers — people jumping from one points-based campaign to the next without ever caring about the product.

This model is becoming predictable:
Join → Do X to earn Y → Get the airdrop → Leave.
The real problem? We’re not nurturing users, we’re just incentivizing tourists.

According to DropMetrics, while gamified campaigns drive 2.4x higher initial engagement, most fail to retain over 60% of users once the incentives dry up. That says a lot.

So here’s what I’ve been thinking: How do we break this loop?
How do you reach real users of your protocol — the ones who stay, contribute, and become believers?

If you’ve tried a Web3 marketing tool or agency that actually delivered long-term value (even if just okay, not wow), please drop it below. I really want to hear your experience and figure out if there’s a valid portal or method out there that’s worth giving a try.

Let’s share the good, the bad, and the meh — because if we’re all running the same hamster wheel, maybe it’s time we rebuild the track.

[CrisMetis]

Intersting one. My personal take is 50/50 on this.

Some platforms might be slightly more effective than others, but most of the quests and campaigns I see out there aren’t really designed to retain users they’re mostly focused on boosting numbers or onboarding potential users (when they’re not bots, which is another persistent issue with Web3 quest platforms).

I believe that, like some GameFi projects are doing, the best approach is to build an in-house quest systemand focus on retaining users directly within your own ecosystem.

[Sheyda]

Exactly, they are limited time tools that help you to increase TX or onchain action for a period of time. This means there is no growth in your community but just random users/airdrop hunters will play around and leave.

[Vladimir]

I would say it’s the cheapest way to test your dapps and get attention, that’s all. You can do a massive marketing campaign, pay influencers/bloggers, get attention, but you can essentially get the same results. And is it so bad? This is just a way, an option. And yeah there are a lot of bad players, but in fact this sybil attack will help you identify your pain points, add some security protection and so on. I’m not saying that this is a GOOD traffic, quality is not good there, and it depends on the perspective.

And I remember some case when I’ve worked in another project and they paid 10k to a “marketing agency“ and the result of their work was not far comparing with Zealy aftereffect

[CrisMetis]

Hey Vlad, definitely, for sure there are situations where even paying a lot of money to a MKT agency might turn out worse than spending it on quests. I saw situations where MKT agencies had very strong and active communities, and when you engaged them (simply by paying them) their community almost became yours. However, as soon as you finished paying them, their community (most of it) flew somewhere else.

So I believe the real issue is working on retention. In both scenarios you might onboard users and boost numbers, which is true as you mentioned “might not be so bad” in some scenarios, but still it can’t be the final mission. Projects have to improve on retaining these users, and maybe this should also be a pain point for these quest platforms: being able to deliver a connection with the projects more than simply a quest to click on and forget about five minutes after they got the prize.

[Julie0xnana]

Quests only work long-term if they evolve from transactional tasks into meaningful community experiences that reward genuine contribution, not just clicks.

[Sheyda]

I agree but the longterm tasks should bring a staking value for them to convert a quest random user/rewards hunter into yoiur chain users.

[JohnAkway93]

Very good article, well done, personally I like only a few quests, and I believe when they do focus on on-chain activity, they definitely bring more value than a simple like, rt and comment one.