How to receive cryptocurrency airdrops strategically?

Last week I sent 10 satoshis to block potential members via Lightning Network.

Although these 10 satoshi bitcoins are probably not enough for everyone. But long-time readers of Block Situation will surely remember that two years ago, you could get various cryptocurrencies worth about TWD 5,000 from Coinbase Earn at the touch of a finger. In addition, the decentralized exchange Uniswap also issued 400 UNI coins to each user. Just keeping these cryptocurrencies to the present is worth more than 400,000 Taiwan dollars.

This makes many people regard cryptocurrency airdrops as "free lunches" and actively look for where is the next airdrop opportunity? This article will provide some tools for you to find airdrops you forgot to claim, and teach you how to claim cryptocurrency airdrops strategically.

Airdrop Culture

Airdrop is a well-established culture in the currency circle.

The earliest cryptocurrency airdrop occurred in June 2010, when Gavin Andresen, a software engineer who co-developed the Bitcoin system with Satoshi Nakamoto, set up a website called Free Bitcoins . Users can get 5 bitcoins as long as they paste their bitcoin payment address on the website. It was worth only 1 cent (about 0.3 Taiwan dollars) that year, and the current market price is as high as 6.6 million Taiwan dollars.

The site was shut down in early 2011, during which time a total of 19,715 bitcoins were issued.

Where does the coin come from? Andresen himself only contributed 1,100 of them, and the other 18,000 were donated by miners or big players at the time. I don’t know if you have found that the Free Bitcoins website has been established for more than half a year, and it does not require identity verification at all, but the number of times it has been received is less than 4,000.

It is obvious that people didn't take Bitcoin seriously at that time, and even if it was a free gift, it would be troublesome to operate. But this is also the original intention of Andresen to set up the website - to let more people experience the working mechanism of Bitcoin. In a 2018 interview , Andresen noted:

At that time, the technical threshold for people to obtain 50 bitcoins (mining rewards) through mining was very high. It is a relatively simple method to directly receive free of charge, and it allows more people to access bitcoins. So at that time even Satoshi Nakamoto thought this website giving away bitcoins for free was a great project.

In 2021, airdrops remain the best way to guide users into the world of cryptocurrencies.

That's why I invite you to install wallets from time to time and send NFTs or cryptocurrencies for free. Even now, there are still many people who miss the opportunity because of the trouble, but if you are willing to try it, you might as well start by checking whether you have forgotten to receive the cryptocurrency airdrop.

Airdrop strategically

The first step to receiving a cryptocurrency airdrop is to have a wallet of your own.

On the Ethereum blockchain, most people choose the MetaMask wallet. After you have a wallet, you can check which airdrop rewards you can claim as long as you copy and paste the payment address to the Earni.fi website.

Taking my own address as an example, it shows the UNI coins I have received and the NFT certificate, and there is still an airdrop worth 1 USD that I have not received. But if I wanted to know where to get that $1, I had to pay $29 a month to become a paid Earni.fi member.

In addition to telling paying users which airdrops have not been claimed, Earni.fi will also automatically review the eligibility for users when new airdrops appear, and notify them by email as soon as possible.

However, anyone who has ever received an airdrop must know that when they receive the notification, they are often several steps late, and they can only watch others receive the money. It is important to qualify yourself as soon as possible.

I will simply divide the current cryptocurrency airdrops on the Internet into two categories according to the timing of the announcement of eligibility:

1. Prior notice
2. Post-mortem

Taking the cryptocurrency information website CoinMarketCap as an example, they recently opened an airdrop section , allowing users to receive airdrops of various cryptocurrencies in one stop. The chart below shows the cryptocurrency airdrops currently in progress and upcoming in the future. The website will also instantly display the current number of airdrop participants, the total number of airdrops and the end time.

However, this is not a "free lunch", but a marketing tool.

Take the Qubit airdrop with the largest number of participants in the picture above as an example. You must first follow the Twitter accounts of Qubit and BSC, share Qubit's airdrop posts and tag three friends, and finally join the Qubit telegram group. After completing these tasks, you can only be considered eligible to participate. Airdrops are not for everyone. Out of 860,000 participants, there were only 2,000 lucky winners, each of whom received 125 QBT tokens (market price about $9).

Qubit is equivalent to spending 250,000 QBTs as advertising fees in exchange for the number of followers on Twitter accounts and telegram groups. The airdrop section of CoinMarketCap is an advertising platform. On the one hand, it helps the cryptocurrency team to reach more users, and on the other hand, it also relies on the new team to bring more traffic to its platform.

This is a "pre-announcement" cryptocurrency airdrop. It is characterized by clear tasks and low participation threshold, but there are many monks and few porridges, and there are not many cryptocurrencies that can be obtained. Therefore, more people like the "post-mortem" cryptocurrency airdrop.

The most representative is that the decentralized exchange Uniswap issued the governance token UNI coin in September 2020, and airdropped 15% of the UNI coin of the total issuance to users who have used Uniswap in the past. On average, each person can get 400 UNI coins.

The Uniswap airdrop is not a marketing ploy, nor is it intended to reach more new users. On the contrary, Uniswap will return the UNI governance token, which symbolizes decision-making power, to the old users, so that the early users will become the "shareholders" of Uniswap, and they will jointly decide the future development of Uniswap.

You can't predict which teams will launch "post-mortem" airdrops. The number of participants in such airdrops is small, and the amount of airdrops ranges from thousands of Taiwan dollars to millions of Taiwan dollars. There are also people on the Internet who will specialize in researching which DeFi projects may launch governance tokens in the future, and try their luck to be the "old users" of these projects.

This is already an open secret. The information website DefiLlama even kindly sorted out the popular DeFi rankings that have not yet issued cryptocurrencies. As long as people become users of these applications one by one, you are likely to be the next lucky one to receive airdrop rewards.

It's just that some people see the opportunity to receive airdrops, and some people see the handling fee, effort, and time cost to operate these DeFi. How to maximize economic benefits can be said to be the common trouble of every DeFi player.

Maximize economic benefits

Both CoinMarketCap and DefiLlama are committed to reducing information asymmetry, so that the incident of Free Bitcoins giving 5 bitcoins for free but no one cares about it will no longer happen. It would be great if you could participate in each project on the list one by one.

However, human time is limited. Moreover, according to past experience, airdrop returns that can be predicted in advance are relatively small, while airdrop returns that are difficult to predict are relatively large. For busy modern people, I think it is a better way to get back to the essence and keep curiosity about blockchain applications and try it out instead of taking airdrop rewards as the sole purpose.

Even if you don’t get the airdrop reward in the end, you still gain new knowledge and experience in the early experience of new technology. If the airdrop can be obtained in the future, it will be the icing on the cake.

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