The $MANAV genesis airdrop

The genesis airdrop bots cannot farm. Eligibility is gated by Proof of Human Work, allocation is curved to reward early signal-not-volume, and the claim window is short enough that mercenaries do not bother.

The lesson

The the last few years airdrop cycle taught crypto exactly what not to do. Loyalty points programs were arbitraged by industrial farms. Time-bound questing was solved by VPN swarms. "Volume" was meaningless once a single LP could simulate a thousand traders. The protocols that paid out the most token typically retained the fewest users, because the recipients were never users to begin with. Manav's genesis design starts from the assumption that any program a bot can join, a bot will dominate.

Eligibility: humans, not wallets

Only attested Manav DIDs are eligible. No wallets, no email signups, no twitter follows, no quest-app activity. To qualify, a human registers with Manav, completes the device-bound liveness check, and accumulates at least 30 days of witnessed work artifacts before the snapshot. The cost to fake one eligible human is high; the cost to fake ten thousand is prohibitive.

Allocation: rewards early, not loud

Allocation is split across three buckets, totaling 6% of the total supply:

Builders (3%). Anyone whose Manav DID has merged code, shipped designs, or signed customer-side attestations against the open-source protocol or its reference implementations during the testnet period. Allocation scales with attested artifact count, capped at the 90th percentile.

Early relying parties (2%). Companies that integrated Manav verification into a production product in early access. Allocation is per integration, per relying-party DID, with a single-organization cap to prevent a single firm from claiming the bucket.

Verified-human early adopters (1%). The first 250,000 humans to complete attestation. A flat per-human grant, decaying linearly with registration order so the 250,000th human still receives a nontrivial allocation but the 1st receives roughly 4×.

Anti-Sybil layers

Three independent checks must all pass before a claim becomes withdrawable. The PoHW witness graph must show at least three independent witnesses on at least three independent artifacts. Behavioral fingerprints must not match an existing claimed account at threshold. Hardware attestation must bind the DID to a unique secure element. Suspected duplicates are routed to a reviewer queue; confirmed duplicates forfeit all three claims and lose Trust Score for one year. The math is unkind to Sybils on purpose.

Claim window

Claims open for 30 days. After that, unclaimed allocation flows back into the protocol treasury for community-governed redistribution. Mercenary farmers depend on long, leaky claim windows; we close ours at the moment our actual users have reasonably had time to claim.

What this is not

It is not a marketing budget. It is not a points program. It is not a launch incentive. It is a thank-you to the first humans who proved the protocol worked before there was a token reason to. The cap-table reflects that.

Common objections

The honest objections: protocols without products fail, and tokens without revenue are speculative. We answer the first with a hosted commercial layer and design partners shipping today; the second with a fee model where the protocol earns from real agent verifications, not from token velocity.

Frequently asked questions

Is this about a token, or a protocol? A protocol first. The token exists to align incentives — humans earn for attested work, relying parties spend to verify, the network captures a small fee. The protocol stays useful even if the token's price is volatile; the token gets useful only when the protocol is.

How is this not just another crypto identity project? Most crypto identity projects answer 'is this a unique human?' and stop. This one answers 'what did this human authorize?' which is a different question. The substrate (hardware-attested device, recoverable, revocable) is also designed for enterprise compliance, not just consumer Sybil resistance.

What happens if the chain has an outage? Verification continues. Signatures verify locally; the chain anchors audit roots periodically, not per-action. A multi-day chain outage would delay forensic anchoring but not block any agent action that already had a valid delegation.

Where to start

Move from this to end of airdrop farming for the technical design and manav token explained for the economic shape. The protocol and the token are designed to be read in that order — design first, incentives second.

What the genesis cohort gets that later cohorts cannot

The genesis cohort — the first issuers, witnesses, and integrators — earns rewards from a curve that decays predictably. Later cohorts will participate in a network with stronger effects, more relying parties, and more stable token economics, but the genesis emissions will not be available again. This is intentional. The genesis cohort is taking risk that later cohorts will not have to take: integrating against unstable APIs, signing on the credibility of a not-yet-proven protocol, evangelizing inside their organizations against entrenched alternatives. The reward curve compensates for that risk. Later cohorts get a more reliable network in exchange for the lower emissions, which is the bargain every protocol that bootstraps from cold-start makes. The decision for prospective participants is therefore not "is the curve generous" but "is the protocol the one that earns the durable trust." If yes, genesis is the asymmetric bet. If no, no curve is generous enough.

If your airdrop rewards activity, bots win. If it rewards humans, humans win. The math is that simple.