Say you run an airdrop for the people who actually use your product. You set the rules, fund the pool, and open it up. Within hours, most of it is gone. Swept up by industrial airdrop farmers who each run thousands of wallets. Onchain, every one of those wallets looks like a different person, and nothing ties any of them to someone real. The users you built it for get the scraps.
Today we're launching Base Verify Onchain: one real person, one claim, enforced entirely in your smart contract. Live on Base Sepolia today!
Why this is hard
Every fix developers have reached for so far gives something up:
- Onchain heuristics like wallet age, balance, or past activity are trivial to fake. A farmer just funds thousands of wallets and lets them age until each one looks real.
- KYC works, but collecting IDs kills conversion and hands you a compliance burden.
None of them answer the only question that matters: is this one real person, or one of a farmer's thousand wallets?
Where Base Verify started
Earlier this year we launched Base Verify to close that gap. A user connects a wallet and verifies a real account they already have on Coinbase, Instagram, X, or TikTok. In return you get one guarantee: the same real person can claim only once, no matter how many wallets they hold, and you never see their credentials or personal data.
It's been used over 300,000 times, protecting rewards for partners like Base App, Cody, Scratch, and Bracket.
Offchain, there was a catch. To stop one person claiming twice, you had to dedupe identities yourself: a database of everyone who had already claimed, a check on every new claim, and the work of keeping that record consistent, available, and secure. Extra infrastructure, just to enforce a simple rule.
How it works now
Base Verify hands your contract a stable identity per real person, and you decide the rule it enforces, whether that's one claim each, a cap per person, or a single vote.
- Base Verify checks the identity behind the wallet against your rules, such as an active Coinbase One membership, or a verified X account with 1,000+ followers.
- If they qualify, it returns a deterministic identity hash and a signature.
- Your contract verifies the signature, stores the hash, and rejects any future claim where that same hash reappears.
The hash is the key. The same real person always produces the same hash, no matter how many wallets they use, so a farmer with a thousand wallets still counts as one. It can't be traced back to a name or account, so you enforce uniqueness without ever touching personal data.
What you can build
- Rewards and airdrops that reach real people. Each person enrolls once, so the thousand-wallet farmer counts as one and the rewards go to the community they were meant for.
- Fair launches and token sales. Per-wallet caps break against bots that generate fresh wallets. Cap allocation by real identity instead. Spinning up more wallets will get a farmer nowhere.
- Better terms for trusted users. Turn a real-world signal like a Coinbase One membership into onchain reputation, so loyal users earn better rates even from a brand-new wallet.
- One-person-one-vote governance. Wallet-counted votes bend to whoever controls the most addresses. Give each real person a single vote, enforced by the contract.
Try it today
The docs have everything you need to start building on Base Sepolia, and the demo shows how it works end to end. If you're running rewards, an airdrop, a token sale, or a DeFi protocol and want it to reach real people, reach out. We'd love to help!
This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, investment, or compliance advice. Base Verify Onchain is neutral infrastructure that helps smart contracts enforce eligibility and uniqueness; builders remain responsible for their own product, legal, and compliance decisions.
