The Best and Worst Airdrops of 2024

Let's start with a success story.

Drift is a decentralized futures trading platform that has been running on Solana for almost three years. Drift has been the target of several hacking attacks. The team strategically allocated 12% of the total token supply for airdrop — a relatively high percentage — and implemented a smart bonus system that was activated every 6 hours after the initial distribution.

Launching with a modest market cap of $56 million, Drift surprised many, especially when compared to other vAMMs (virtual automated market makers) that had fewer users and histories but higher valuations. Drift’s market cap soon reached $163 million (a 2.9x increase since launch).

Now let's move on to the brightest loser of the year.

ZkLend was positioned as a platform for lending and borrowing various assets based on the Starknet protocol. But now the value of $ZEND has fallen by 95%, and daily trading volumes barely exceed $400,000. This is a sharp contrast for a project that once had a market cap of $300 million.

So how did the project end up in such a sorry state? First of all, the concept of ZkLend was not particularly innovative: creating a farming network where users could earn rewards through various protocols, and attracting liquidity and users through rewards and cross-chain activity.

However, this ended up with ZkLend being filled with users who were solely focused on short-term rewards. So instead of creating a sustainable ecosystem, ZkLend ended up being dependent on reward hunters (drophunters), which led to low customer retention. Because, logically, after receiving the reward, the drophunters quickly sold off the tokens and left the project.