The Philosophy behind the Morals Airdrop

Designing a good airdrop strategy to advance morality requires theorizing about the nature of virtue. For this, I shall call upon the original gangster of virtue theory.

This is the problem. Crypto is seen as having some of the worst people because we are separated from law and justice. Whose fault is it that we are separated from law? Well, the answer to that is obviously Gary Gensler, who spent years dishonestly trying to keep us in a Kafkaesque position where it was impossible for us to behave legally. We are now making progress on this. But why do we remain separated from justice? How do we make progress on that?

I think it is instructive to consider our reaction to the idea that “code is law”. This phrase was introduced widely by Larry Lessig, whom I would call a shining beacon of morality. He wasn’t an advocate for this idea as much as he was describing an emerging phenomenon for us to grapple with. A lot of people in crypto see the truth that embracing the idea that “code is law” delivers us some moral goods:

• Open source protocols make the rules fair.
• More transparency and predictability
• Less corruption, discrimination, favoritism
• Protects privacy rights, property rights, and truth

Great! So we went ahead and built systems to advance these virtues. Brilliant engineers building deterministic systems that are themselves the enforcers of justice. Perhaps, along the way, our confidence in the virtues of these systems caused some of us to outsource our own moral compasses to the technology itself. “This system will enforce morality, so I don’t have to worry about it.” “This is fair infrastructure, therefore anything that happens within it is, by definition, also fair.” That would be convenient, wouldn’t it?

But the notion that “code is law” also has plenty of downsides. The most obvious one is that it leads us to confuse “can” with “should”. Just because the code allowed you to do something doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. For example, Avi Eisenberg executed the Mango Markets exploit and framed his actions as legitimate because code is law. He was not alone in this philosophy! And it is a coherent, rational argument to make. But he was convicted, perhaps because it was obvious to most people that his actions had been taken without proper consideration of the morality of what he was doing. Morality is non-deterministic. A smart contract cannot be moral. People in crypto need to stop getting so high off our own supply that we completely forget that humans still need to make good moral decisions.

Our morality problem is not simply caused by academic disagreements like this. The other cause is very simple: People do not have enough money. I’m not going to give you stats about economic inequality and the cost of living. You get it. People who are existing in scarcity come to crypto because in this industry it is uniquely possible to go from scarcity to abundance quickly. In fact, this is one reason why I came to crypto, and one reason why I created this project. I personally do not have a feeling of economic desperation, but many people here do have that feeling. When you’re desperate, morality is harder to prioritize.

Even though I have referred to crypto’s immoral actors as “dickwaffles” and “scumbags”, there is a place for empathy as well. We assume that hackers are buying lambos but some of them are paying off medical debt and buying basic necessities. Perhaps rather than adopting the mindset that we should be purging the immoral people out of crypto, a better mindset would be to see how we can adjust the incentive structures of crypto such that people can profit more by taking moral actions than they profit by taking immoral actions. The morals airdrop is designed to create a new financial incentive for moral behavior. If enough of you send enough MORALS to heroic white hat hackers, we will see fewer black hat ones.

I personally chose the airdrop recipients for the first airdrop (20% of supply), and from then on there are 8 additional airdrops (33% of supply) in which the recipients are determined entirely by community voting. So most of the burden of moral judgment and capital allocation actually sits on your shoulders, dear reader. And yet, as the founder of this project, that first 20% was a big responsibility. How would I decide who in crypto should be considered moral enough to be worthy of this initial airdrop? I have my own personal views, but my task was also to take an approach which accurately represents the views of the crypto community. I decided that the right approach would be to focus on two types of people to reward:

• People who care about others over themselves
• People who responsibly create public goods

I think this simple approach aligns with crypto values, with traditional notions of morality, and with the wisdom of Aristotle as well. With this in mind, I brainstormed ways to find evidence of these virtues in onchain behavior. You can see the results of my search here, in the official list of phase 1 airdrop recipients:

I hope you appreciate the approach I took. It’s not a perfect list. I’ve never even heard of most of these people. I am confident that you will quickly correct my mistakes, lifting up those whom I forgot, and sending dust to anyone immoral who ended up on my list. But there’s another problem with my list: Most of them have no idea that they have received this airdrop. I didn’t do the normal thing of trying to airdrop to the most active crypto users who are likely to participate in the project. Instead, I airdropped to the most moral people I could think of, even if they are totally inactive, or I wasn’t 100% sure about their wallet address.

I need your help telling these people that they have received an airdrop.

First, because they will obviously want to know.
Second, because they are the foundation of our trust graph.

If you’ve read about how our Moral Score is calculated, you’ll know that anyone who receives an airdrop from our official airdrop wallet has more influence on the Moral Scores of other people. If they proclaim someone as good or bad, this will have a large impact on that person’s Moral Score. As a result, we need them to send some of their MORALS to other people. If you are a moral person, it’s totally encouraged for you to ask these people to send you a couple MORALS, not because of the financial value, but because we need as much data about moral signaling as we can get.

OK, so let’s say you received the airdrop. You absolutely are obligated to send at least 1 MORALS to some good actors and less than 1 MORALS to some bad actors. But you might do that and still have 99% of your airdrop left over. At that point, what’s the moral thing to do?

Well, I would be very happy if, as a side effect of this project, we enriched some people who are morally good. The point of the project is the onchain data, however if MORALS has financial value as well, it should ideally accrue to moral people. Those are the people who we need to be resourced so they can continue making beneficial contributions to the world. Perhaps I’m stating the obvious, but the majority of the supply of MORALS is being airdropped to morally good people for this reason.

But just because someone is morally good, doesn’t mean they need the money. So the correct thing for an airdrop recipient to do depends on their personal situation:

• For moral people who are resource-constrained and struggling to fund your important work: sell your airdrop to resource yourself.
• For moral people who are not resource-constrained: continue to gift most of your MORALS to others over time to reward good behavior.

I trust you to find the right balance between enriching yourself and enriching others. I don’t trust most people in crypto to find this balance. But if you qualify for the Morals airdrop, I do trust you.

And again, it’s not only about the financial value. And it’s not only about the onchain data, either. It’s also about the vibes. I think we can make this a project that feels really good for everyone to participate in. It’s an opportunity for fun, for generosity, for reflection, and for showing the rest of the world that the people of crypto are capable of upholding moral virtues.

Phase 1: Founder Airdrop

On May 19, 2026, 20% of total supply was sent directly to a curated list of addresses identified by the founder as having demonstrated good morals. To be more precise:

• 199,999,998,999.999 MORALS was sent to this list of people with good morals
• 1,000 MORALS was set aside to be sent to established crypto projects as part of the Bad Actor Identification Program
• 0.001 MORALS was sent to this list of people with bad morals

Eligibility

To be eligible for the community airdrops you must:

• Have a Moral Score above the global average at the unannounced snapshot block. (The current global average Moral Score, which updates every 5 minutes, is 69.8. You can search for your address to see your current Moral Score.)
• The “trust weights” of the wallets which proclaimed you to be good since the previous snapshot must add up to a minimum of 4.00 (and this threshold may be adjusted for future airdrops). Each wallet that proclaims you good contributes a weight based on their trust degree: 1st degree wallets contribute 1.00, 2nd degree contribute 0.50, 3rd degree contribute 0.25, and unranked wallets contribute 0.01. For example, you could qualify with 4 proclamations from 1st degree wallets, or 8 from 2nd degree wallets, or 16 from 3rd degree wallets, or any combination.
• Not be on the OFAC SDN list. We screen recipient addresses and exclude anyone on this list.
• Participation (buying or sending MORALS) is not required to qualify. Unusual? Yes. Moral? Also yes.

Distribution Formula

We think it makes sense to provide a continual incentive for everyone to behave morally, however we also want to avoid a “rich get richer” dynamic. So for this reason, we use a “dampening factor” to decrease the amount received by people who have already received a prior airdrop. We also use a square root function (sometimes called quadratic distribution, the same principle behind Gitcoin’s quadratic funding) to compress the gap between high and low moral scores. Here’s the formula:

Where dampening_factor is 1.0 for first-time airdrop recipients and 0.5 for anyone who has already received one. The dampening broadens distribution over time while still rewarding consistently moral actors. All qualifying wallets receive a proportional share of each airdrop. The number of recipients is not pre-determined. The amount someone receives is not pre-determined. Both are functions of how many wallets meet the eligibility criteria at snapshot time.

Trust Graph Expansion

All airdrop recipients become 1st degree trust anchors, significantly expanding the trust graph over time. For more about what 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree addresses are, please read how the Moral Score is calculated. By Phase 5 or 6, the trust graph should be deep enough that the system is robustly decentralized. Thousands of 1st degree wallets making independent moral judgments.

Degree inflation risk is mitigated by the compounding eligibility requirements: recipients need to be above the global average moral score, have several proclamations of being good from distinct, reputable wallets, and survive an unannounced snapshot. Even if a few non-moral actors slip through, the trust graph is self-healing. If a newly-minted 1st degree wallet starts proclaiming bad actors as good, the community can proclaim this wallet as bad, driving their score down.

Community Airdrops: Phases 2–9

Eight quarterly airdrops over two years, each distributing approximately 41,250,000,000 MORALS (4.125% of total supply). Snapshots are unannounced to prevent gaming. After each airdrop, the snapshot block, global average at that block, and full recipient list will be posted.