Evolution of the airdrop concept

The market has evolved from gratuitous ‘thank you’ airdrops to point farming, inflated user expectations and the fight against multi-accounting.

The first airdrops

⚫️First in the crypto industry airdrop was conducted by AuroraCoin in 2014, distributing tokens to Icelandic residents to incentivise their use as currency.

Classic Retrodrops

⚫️2020 Uniswap conducted a retrodrop without announcing it in advance. 90% of the addresses that interacted with the protocol received 400 UNI (roughly $1400 at the time of bidding). This set a new standard for airdrops, where users are rewarded for past activity.

User sharing models

⚫️2023 projects like Aptos and Jito began implementing models where users were categorised by activity. For example, users who participated in the Aptos test network received 150-300 APTs depending on activity.

Allocation by activity

⚫️Arbitrum and Optimism introduced action-based distribution in 2023, where rewards were based on participants' onchain activity.

Points programmes

⚫️2024 point-based programmes started to displace retrodrops. An example is the Renzo protocol, where users earned points for actions, which were then converted into tokens.

Airdrops are gradually losing their effectiveness. Distributions from ZKsync and LayerZero have shown that this tool can exhaust itself: developers try to get the most out of users, and those create multi-accounts to get tokens and sell them quickly. Thus, trust between the parties is reduced...