APriori, a trading startup backed by Binance founder Changpeng Zhao’s venture YZi Labs, is facing allegations of a Sybil attack in its recent token airdrop. The majority of APR tokens airdropped onto the BNB chain were allegedly claimed by wallets controlled by a single entity.
The Genesis Airdrop of the new YZi Labs project in late October was to reward early contributors, testnet users, and owners of partner NFTs such as MadLads and Moonbirds.
According to BSCScan blockchain data, approximately 5,800 wallets connected through transaction patterns collected approximately 80% of the total APR distributed on the BNB chain.
According to CoinGecko data, the market capitalization of the APR token is $52 million, down 61.194% from the all-time high of $134 million reached on October 23, the day of the airdrop.
Did Priori's airdrop claim include a Sybil attack?
These wallets were observed receiving small BNB deposits between October 19th and 20th, days before aPriori announced that it would start charging on the BNB chain. The tokens were presumably just enough to cover the gas fees for airdrop invoice transactions.
All 5,800 addresses received BNB from the same 13 source wallets over several weeks, but their owners have not yet been discovered. Clustering behavior is synonymous with a project manipulation technique where one operator uses thousands of wallets to claim rewards several times, also known as a Sybil attack.
aPriori announced on October 22 that the airdrop will take place on Ethereum and BNB chains. Still, activity by the group of 5,800 wallets began as early as October 19, suggesting that those controlling the wallets had prior knowledge of the launch network.
“The provision of reserve funds to thousands of addresses on the BNB chain before the official announcement is an unusual red flag,” a pseudonymous researcher named Nagiiseiseihiro pointed out on X.
⌘ A priori: what happened behind the scenes
(Click to read more)After hearing what happened with @aPriori, I decided to collect the data and today I finally completed the analysis.
There are links to the .csv and .xlsx files in the comments section.
This… pic.twitter.com/1xicRUycQb— NAGI (MON to $1) (@Nagiiseishiro) October 24, 2025
To qualify for the airdrop, users had to interact with aPriori’s testnet tokens on Monad, the upcoming Ethereum-compatible blockchain. Testnet tokens have no value, and formal eligibility criteria were not made public until they were published.
Despite the ongoing controversy surrounding the airdrop, aPriori’s APR token has shown signs of recovery in the past 24 hours. According to data from CoinmarketCap, the token rose 3.79%, in contrast to last week's 12.57% decline.
This rally may be caused by market mechanics that pushed APR's 7-day Relative Strength Index (RSI) to 21.67, well below the level that traders consider oversold, indicating it may be undervalued.
APR's 24-hour trading volume increased by 33.93% to $14.57 million on the back of renewed speculative interest among short-term traders and algorithmic funds. A close above $0.29 could regain upward momentum, but a break below $0.28 risks a revisit to October's local lows.
Crypto community query token accumulation concentration
Insider involvement conversations regarding X intensified shortly after the airdrop began, with one NFT enthusiast who goes by the handle “Danny” claiming that hundreds of wallets linked to aPriori’s internal accounts were collectively receiving a significant allocation of APR tokens.
“The aPriori team has at least 450 rat warehouse accounts on Nadfun. The top 450 APR holders on Nadfun are all aPriori team accounts. This means they have a mouse warehouse of 225,000 tokens,” the user wrote.
The post lists wallet addresses 0x3f59…2fdEBB87 and 0xAFd…26421D3 as the highest holders on the Nadfun leaderboard. According to user data, each targeted address received 503 APR tokens from Genesis Airdrop.
aPriori was developed by a team of former engineers from Jump Trading, Coinbase, and Citadel Securities. The startup has raised $30 million from venture firms. YZi GoodHashKey Capital, Pantera Capital, Primitive Ventures.
While community members expected an airdrop to take place once the Monad network launches later this year, aPriori has pivoted to the Ethereum and BNB chains, surprising many of the early supporters who were participating in Monad's testnet efforts.
