The popularity of airdrops seems not to be as high as it was some time ago, and I haven’t written an article on the topic of airdrops for almost a month. However, airdrops are still one of the main ways for many people to participate in the crypto field. On the current Internet, we can retrieve a lot of tutorials about airdrops, and most of the tutorials always make some exaggerated descriptions in order to attract people's attention, such as claiming that you can get 10+ by participating in a certain airdrop. Thousands of dollars in potential earnings and more.
Here we need to understand two simplest problems first:
First, it is indeed possible to obtain 100,000+ US dollars in income by participating in airdrops, just like someone can get rich in a few days by playing MemeCoin, but these are a very small number of people, and these people basically have their own unique characteristics. Some how-tos.
Typically, only a few wallets can obtain most of the airdrop tokens, and the vast majority of wallets can only obtain a small amount of airdrop tokens. Let’s take the recent Entangle project as an example. Through the wallet distribution chart below, we can see this distribution very clearly.
Second, most online airdrop tutorials are actually more based on traffic considerations. For example, bloggers will leave corresponding invitation links in the text to attract people's clicks to help them earn airdrop points.
Therefore, as long as it is an airdrop project involving invitation points, no one should be able to beat various KOLs or traffic bloggers. Of course, this itself (free airdrop tutorial) is also a mutually beneficial thing. Everyone has what they need, and there is actually nothing wrong with it.
Next, let us change our perspective/thinking and re-understand: What is an airdrop?
1. Risk/reward ratio (RR) of airdrops
As far as the encryption field is concerned, the main ways for ordinary users to participate in the primary market are airdrops, IDOs, IEOs, etc. Moreover, airdrops also seem to represent one of the best RRs in the crypto market, because in most cases, users can indeed spend very little money and earn more money. In this process, they pay more. Or time and energy.
Of course, this issue needs to be considered comprehensively, such as:
- How many of the projects you participated in were actually airdropped?
- How many of these airdrop projects are you eligible to receive?
This may require strategy and personal experience, such as how to select the projects with the greatest potential for airdrops and how to maximize the amount of airdrops your wallet can receive. Yesterday in the group, I found that some partners were also discussing the topic of SOL ecological airdrop. Among them, Mr. Yu also shared with everyone the strategies of several projects he has recently participated in.
I think what Mr. Yu said in the group is quite reasonable: There are many online tutorials, but not many can truly understand how to play SOL airdrop.
2. Expectation of the potential of airdrops
Many people feel that the current airdrops are very involved. One of the main reasons for the involution is that people always like to get together with the most popular airdrop projects. If there are too many people, it will become involved. For example, almost everyone knows that well-known projects like zkSync will definitely issue airdrops, so everyone will rush to participate, and the results will become more and more popular.
Most people spend their time and energy participating in specific airdrop projects. For example, they see the airdrop tutorial written by blogger A, then directly follow the tutorial, and a few days later they see the one written by blogger B. Airdrop tutorial, so continue to follow and participate. They seem to rarely think about whether this kind of airdrop project is really worth participating in.
In my opinion, this is putting the cart before the horse. I remember that in Hua Li Huawai’s previous series of airdrop guide articles, I also sorted out several specific steps for participating in airdrops. To summarize, they are:
Search → Record → Organize → Summarize → Participate (and continuously cycle and optimize this process)
In other words, I will put "participation" last, rather than participating from the beginning. There is no need to say much about "searching" and "recording". You can just use the X platform or some specialized on-chain tools. For example, as shown in the figure below, this tool can directly help you find a list of all possible airdrop projects in the cosmos ecosystem.
There are actually many similar on-chain tools. Among them, some of the commonly used airdrop project inspection tools have been compiled into the Hua Li Hua Wai toolbox. You can check them out as needed.
Here we focus on the above "summary". The summary actually means to make some basic evaluations of the airdrop projects you are looking for and recording to determine whether you want to participate, as well as the frequency, depth and specificity of participation. investment, whether it is possible to eat more than one fish, etc.
In short, only if you fully implement this strategy and combine it with your own experience and some special operations (multiple wallets, fingerprint readers, etc.) can you obtain considerable expected returns from airdrops.
3. Understanding the cost of airdrops
In fact, we have mentioned above that participating in airdrops may require more personal investment of time and energy, but many people still like to consider their actual gas consumption, funds invested (the cost of participating in transaction interaction), etc. as cost considerations.
In addition to the cost of participation, many people also ignore another cost: the cost of future time.
And this is one of the main reasons why they cannot persist in the airdrop. For example, many people browse the various airdrop information on But when the project actually issued the airdrop, when they went to verify the wallet address, they found nothing.
Almost everyone knows that participating in airdrops takes time. When you interact with a project and hope to receive airdrops, the process may take several months or even more than a year (this happens during the bull market). time will be shortened), so we must seriously consider the issue of future time costs.
4. “Impermanent” losses of airdrops
Although airdrops are one of the best RRs in the current crypto market, some "impermanent" losses still need to be considered in advance. Let's take a simple example:
Suppose a project requires you to purchase and lock some tokens for a certain period of time before you can receive an airdrop. However, during this period, the increase in BTC is much higher than the increase in the tokens you locked. So will you still choose to participate in the airdrop of this project?
In addition to the "impermanent" losses that may be caused by token price fluctuations, there is also a loss based on smart contract risks. For example, when you interact with airdrops, your wallet may interact with various smart contracts. , which does not rule out that some smart contracts are unaudited, and your wallet may face the risk of losing assets.
Of course, in this article we will not discuss the common phishing scam airdrop link methods on the Internet. This has nothing to do with the risks of the airdrop project itself, but more of a personal risk management/security awareness issue.
5. Information asymmetry in airdrops
Compared with the recent number of various MemeCoins being born every day, there are actually not too many reliable airdrop projects at present, which has led to increasingly fierce competition in airdrop projects. Moreover, as more retail investors join the army of airdrops, the conditions for receiving airdrops from many projects have become more and more complex and strict.
The following is a comparison between Uniswap’s airdrop that year and Starknet’s airdrop this year:
On September 17, 2020, Uniswap announced the launch of UNI tokens and airdropped 10.06% of the total tokens directly to the early 250,000 users. The airdrop rules for ordinary users are:
- 4.92% of the total amount was directly airdropped to 49192 early LPs (liquidity providers)
- In addition, as long as the wallet address has called the Uniswap v1 or v2 contract (has used Uniswap at least once), you can directly receive 400 UNI tokens.
On February 20, 2024, Starknet officially began to distribute its native token STRK. The airdrop rules for ordinary users are:
- Have used the Starknet network for at least 3 separate months
- Generate at least 6 or more transactions
- The total transaction amount is no less than USD 100
- The address held at least 0.005 ETH at the time of the snapshot (November 15, 2023)
- In addition, the specific quota of a single address will be increased gradually in 7 different levels according to the point rules, based on the user's usage time, total transaction amount and total number of interactive contracts.
Through the above comparison, we can intuitively see that in less than 4 years, the rules/structure of the airdrop field have undergone great changes.
In addition, some of the current airdrops have even directly evolved into games for large players (whales). For example, take the well-known Sun Cut as an example. Some time ago, he pledged 58,000 stETH in Puffer Finance and became a big player. The protocol’s points leader. Not only that, with the recent launch of Ether Fi's Wa mining project in An'an, Sun Gao directly pledged 120,000 ETH into the agreement, directly obtaining the air investment price of 3.45 million ETHFI tokens.
Ordinary people are busy racking up points every day, carefully studying all possible rules, and being careful to guard against witches. What is the result?
For invitation-based points airdrop projects, you can’t beat those KOL self-media traffic bloggers. For airdrop projects that pledge points, you can’t beat those whales. When it comes to wallet size, you can't beat those hairdressing studios. Some projects even have problems with rat warehouses and internal wallets, taking advantage of information asymmetry to continue to deprive ordinary users of the fairness of participating in airdrops.
Therefore, airdrops are not only getting more and more involved, but also making ordinary novice users more and more hopeless.
6. The future of airdrops
To sum up, airdrops are slowly changing from a simple game that everyone can participate in to a game that requires more experience, skills, and even funds to participate.
But no matter what problems airdrops currently face, I also believe that as time goes by, the gameplay and mechanisms of airdrops will definitely become more and more transparent and perfect, but as the participation threshold increases, many people will be directly excluded.
In fact, it is the same in any field, so we need to: keep learning and keep making progress.
From an investment perspective, what you should do is: find the things that suit you best, instead of following what others say and follow suit.
In a field, as long as you can do 1-2 things well and do them thoroughly, I think it is enough. Do complex things simply, do simple things repeatedly, and do repetitive things carefully.
I said: I am currently mainly doing two things, one is to hoard the big pie, and the other is to do self-media (Li Huawai).
Boss Heng in the group said: I am currently only doing two things, one is hoarding coins, and the other is specializing in airdrops (the last Starknet airdrop won more than 100 numbers, and it was worth at least US$100,000 based on the current STRK price) .
So, what do you want to say?
Okay, we will share the content of this issue here for the time being. This is also the 430th article updated by Hua Li Huawai. We will continue to bring you more related sharing later. Interested friends can contact us through Hua Li Hua Wai. Check out Li Huawai to learn more.
The data/pictures cited in the text come from some on-chain tool platforms. Partners of the Crypto mutual aid exchange group outside Hua Li Hua: You can directly view the exchange group articles synchronized to the group, including the full version of the data source/citation link.
Note: The above content is only a personal perspective and analysis, and is only used for popular science learning and communication. All projects mentioned in the title or text have no interest relationship with Hua Li Hua, nor do they constitute any investment advice. The crypto market is an extremely high-risk area. Please treat it rationally, increase your awareness of risk prevention, and abide by the relevant laws and regulations of the country and region where you are located!