Distilling the $DIS Alpha Airdrop — Qualifiers and Remediation

The TL;DR

• 1 inference = eligibility. If your machine completed a single verifiable inference during the Alpha window, you made the cut.
• 99.9 % of bot farms filtered. Scripts that spoofed GPUs, VPS nodes with no accelerators, and low-power phones all failed our proof-of-compute checks.
• Imperfect but fair. A handful of legit users were inevitably missed, but no tokens were siphoned to bad actors.
• Season 2 will widen the net. New models and low-compute options are on the roadmap so smaller rigs can earn in Beta.

Looking forward

Beta phase of Distribute is an important step in correcting the mistakes with our community. We’ve made every step of the contribution process more transparent, and will be working on new ways for contributors to earn outside of the standard airdrop procedure. Each contribution is uniquely weighted for its value on the network, and then represented on each users dash. If you do not have a machine capable of inference, you can contribute in other ways. High-end users running their GPUs will earn more, but everyone can get a piece of the pie in the new structure. You asked, we listened.

Why we were strict on verification

Distribute’s network is built on real distributed compute. If a node can’t run an AI model, it adds zero value to the grid—and drains rewards from those who can.
If you contributed during Alpha and were not eligible, you likely fell into the pools below.

1. You did not connect anytime during our benchmarking period (4-5 months).

2. You were not running real hardware (VPS with no GPU) for example.

3. You were on a mobile device or incompatible device (Not enough compute).

4. Botting or otherwise automating uptime through third party scripts.

5. If you fall into the above, we truly wanted as many eligible wallets as possible. But the network relies upon real contributions from real compute. Encouraging non-qualifying nodes connecting harms everyone. 

What we could have done better

• Wallet banner. Some users missed the deadline as we could have improved visibility.
• Credit’s were not 1:1. Botters and cheaters forced us to remove credits as the qualifier and pivot to inference based qualification. The new season is extremely transparent on this.
• Credits only for validated requests. This has already been added for the Beta Phase.

Allocations are final

Airdrop merkle roots are immutable once deployed. What we are doing is beginning to open contributions for lower end hardware users who could not contribute in season 1. We will continue to iterate and think about building/rewarding community in new ways for the Beta phase of the network. 

Bottom line

There were no “scams” that occurred. Our criteria was what should be expected when understanding what our product is. We will continue to work with the community to make future distributions more fair and transparent.