Inside a Vietnamese Phone Farm: How Airdrops Are Being Massively Exploited (Part 1)

[etfs]

I recently came across something wild that I think a lot of people here need to hear about — especially if you’ve ever wondered why your crypto airdrop campaign got botted to hell, or why your game’s economy collapsed overnight.

Turns out, there are literal phone farms — thousands of phones, running 24/7, spoofing users and gaming Web3 systems at scale.
A Tin Shed… with 30,000 Phones?

Mirai Labs CEO Corey Wilton (the guy behind Pegaxy, the NFT horse-racing game) recently toured one of these phone farms in Southern Vietnam. The setup? A refrigerated tin shed, about the size of a studio apartment, packed with 30,000 smartphones. Not an exaggeration.

“It’s genuinely scary,” Wilton said. “This is the kind of thing that killed Pegaxy.”

Wilton’s been trying to track these operations since 2021, when Pegaxy’s player base exploded to 500K DAUs — and he started getting reports of botting at industrial levels.
How Bot Farms Killed Pegaxy

Bots would run hundreds of accounts at once, buying up high-win-rate horses, racing non-stop, and draining the in-game currency for real-world profit. The game turned from competitive fun to who can extract value faster — killing the vibe, and eventually, the community.

“They were extracting from our user base. It basically set me on a warpath.”

The Farm Itself: Cold, Crowded, and Full of Phones

Wilton finally got to see one of these farms in May, after a former Pegaxy player spotted it on TikTok and connected him. He visited two remote sites, about 40 minutes outside Ho Chi Minh City.

One was a tin shack off the road with the A/C blasting. Inside: racks and racks of phones stacked floor to ceiling, narrow walkways, jumbled wires — pure chaos.

“It’s not pretty… You can even see in the videos, the wire management. Disastrous.”

He was shown the “rental” side of the business, where clients can literally hire the phone farm to do whatever they want: bot airdrops, manipulate views, farm mobile games, you name it.

[Nahiar806]

always wondered how some players were so fast at farming rewards or minting NFTs the second they dropped. Turns out, it wasn’t speed — it was scale. Thousands of phones running scripts 24/7 is not Web3 adoption. It’s a hostile takeover.

[alex]

You can’t build sustainable economies when bots can outplay humans 10,000 to 1. We need to stop treating these farms like fringe cases and start designing protocols with this threat as the baseline.

[Maxwell]

Not many founders would actually visit one of these farms. It’s like watching your ecosystem's killer in person. Hopefully more devs follow this lead — you can’t fight what you don’t understand.