Is It Time for Airdrop After User Verification? Base's Airdrop on the Agenda?

Is the airdrop farm about to fail? Base adds "real person verification" for on-chain applications.

Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News

Blockchain can record the behavior of each wallet, but it cannot determine just by the address whether ten wallets belong to ten different people or the same person.

This is not an issue for ordinary transfers, but it becomes a problem during airdrops, reward claims, or community voting: the rules state "one per person," but the smart contract can only recognize "one per address." As long as wallets are constantly changed, the same person can participate multiple times.

On the evening of July 28, the official account of Base developers, Base Build, announced the launch of Base Verify Onchain. This feature attempts to solve the aforementioned problem: applications can write rules into smart contracts such as "the same verified identity can only participate once" and "only users meeting specific conditions can participate." Currently, Base Verify Onchain operates on the Base Sepolia testnet.

What is Base Verify Onchain?

In simple terms, Base Verify Onchain is a verification mechanism that connects off-chain identity qualifications with on-chain contract rules.

It does not allow smart contracts to directly access users' X, Instagram, TikTok, or Coinbase accounts; instead, Base Verify's off-chain service first determines whether users meet the conditions, then issues a short-term valid verification result. The smart contract then verifies this result on-chain and decides whether to allow users to claim, deposit, mint, or vote.

The complete process can be divided into four steps.

First, developers predefine qualification rules in the smart contract, which includes a credential provider and one or more conditions. For example, an application may require users to have a verified X account, a certain number of X followers, or a valid Coinbase One membership.

Second, users connect their wallets and sign a message pointing to the application contract using SIWE (Sign-In with Ethereum). The application sends the message and wallet signature to the Base Verify API.

Third, Base Verify's off-chain service first verifies the SIWE message signed by the user and recovers the signing wallet address from the signature. It then reads the provider and conditions pre-set in the contract pointed to by the message and compares these conditions with the verified credentials stored in Base Verify for that wallet. Only when the user meets all conditions will Base Verify issue a short-term valid EIP-712 verification and return the hash (identityHash), expiration time, and verification signature to the application. This hash is used to identify and deduplicate the same verified identity in a one-way manner.

Finally, the application submits these three pieces of data to the smart contract. The contract checks whether the signature comes from a trusted signer, whether the verification has expired, and whether the verification matches the current chain, contract, and qualification rules. If the checks pass, the application contract queries whether the identityHash has been used before: if the same verified identity has previously participated, even if a different wallet is used this time, it will receive the same identityHash and be rejected by the contract.

It is important to distinguish between two aspects: whether the user meets the qualification conditions is determined by Base Verify's off-chain service; whether the signature is valid, whether it has expired, whether it corresponds to the current contract rules, and whether the identity has participated repeatedly are checked by the on-chain contract. The user's social account name, follower data, or membership information will not be directly written on-chain.

The identityHash is also not a unified identity number that can track users across all applications. It depends on both the verified identity and the application contract: the same identity generates the same hash when changing wallets within the same contract; when entering another contract, the hash changes. Therefore, different applications cannot directly associate the same user based solely on the identityHash.

It addresses qualification execution, not a universal identity system.

The core issue that Base Verify Onchain solves is how to reliably execute smart contracts regarding "who can participate" and "how many times the same identity can participate"?

It is suitable for clearly defined on-chain scenarios, such as airdrops that can only be claimed once per person, reward activities limited to specific users, and voting, minting, depositing, or claiming processes that need to reduce multi-wallet interference. The official testing page currently showcases two examples: users can complete verification through "valid Coinbase One membership" or "verified X account" and claim a test airdrop once on Base Sepolia.

It is important to note that Base Verify Onchain is not a universal identity system that can prove users' names, nationalities, or other legal identities, nor is it KYC. Successful verification only indicates that a verified identity meets the conditions pre-set by the contract. The contract will neither know who the user specifically is nor should it infer the user's personal information based on this.

Is Base Airdrop on the Agenda?

Once Base Verify Onchain was announced, it easily led to thoughts of Base tokens and potential airdrops. If there is a need to distribute on-chain rewards to real users in the future, it can indeed provide technical tools to prevent multiple wallets from claiming repeatedly.

At the same time, Base has confirmed the possibility of issuing network tokens on BaseCamp in September 2025. However, the official stated at that time that the relevant work is still in the early exploration stage, and no issuance time, token design, or governance arrangements have been announced.

Currently, Base Verify Onchain seems more like Base completing a piece of infrastructure for identity verification and preventing duplicate claims, rather than pressing the countdown for an airdrop. In the future, if Base issues network tokens and chooses to distribute them to users, this tool can indeed be used to screen qualified participants and limit repeated claims by the same identity.