Event Timeline
About Kinto
Kinto was an Ethereum Layer 2 with an unusual premise. Every account required identity verification, and the pitch was that a KYC gated chain could offer protections a permissionless one cannot, aimed at users and institutions who wanted DeFi without anonymous counterparties. It ran airdrop seasons through 2024 and into 2025, with staking based criteria, and completed its token generation event on 31 March 2025.
Three months later it was effectively over. On 9 July 2025 a researcher publicly disclosed a technique for hiding a backdoor inside ERC-1967 proxy contracts, a pattern used across thousands of deployments, in a way that block explorers did not surface. Roughly twelve hours later an attacker used it against K, minting 110,000 tokens on Arbitrum and draining the liquidity pools. The token lost around 90% of its value.
Kinto tried to recover. A fundraise called Phoenix brought in over $1 million, but the drained ETH, new debt and the state of the market closed off further options. On 7 September the team announced it would shut down, and operations ceased on 30 September 2025. This entry exists because the airdrop was real and people farmed it. What it is worth today is nothing, and the archive should say so.
Airdrop Stats
How the Kinto airdrop worked
Create a verified Kinto account
Kinto required identity verification for every account. Unlike almost every other airdrop in this archive, there was no anonymous route in and no way to farm it with extra wallets.
Stake supported assets
Airdrop seasons were built on deposits. Season 2 required staking ETH, USDC or other supported assets before 16 February and holding the position through to the end of the campaign.
Hold through the whole season
Withdrawing partway through disqualified the stake. This rewarded people who left capital on a young chain for months at a time.
Earn through the Mining Program
Kinto intended to distribute up to 33% of supply over ten years to users, capital allocators and developers, with referrals and seasonal badges layered on top. The programme never ran anywhere near that long.
Receive at the March 2025 TGE
The token generation event concluded on 31 March 2025. Just over three months later the exploit destroyed the token's value, and the project closed in September.
Kinto is no longer operating
- The project shut down on 30 September 2025. Kinto announced closure on 7 September following the July exploit. This entry is here for the historical record. There is nothing to farm, claim or hold.
- The exploit was a supply chain style backdoor, not a contract bug in the usual sense. A hidden backdoor in ERC-1967 proxy contracts let the attacker mint without anything appearing wrong on block explorers. The disclosure went public roughly twelve hours before the attack.
- KYC gating protected nobody here. Kinto's entire pitch was that identity verification made it safer. The failure came through the contract layer, which identity checks do not touch.
- Recovery was attempted and failed. The Phoenix fundraise brought in over $1 million, but the drained 577 ETH plus new debt made further funding impossible.
- Treat airdrop details here as approximate. Kinto's own site is offline, so the season mechanics could not be confirmed against a primary source. The exploit and the shutdown are well documented; the farming criteria are not.
Kinto Links
Official channels, documentation and community for this airdrop:
This airdrop has concluded. It is kept for research rather than participation.
