Airdrop Guide: Black Friday Edition
A Word to the Wise for Airdrop Farmers
Who doesn’t love getting free money airdropped right into their wallet?
The problem?
Besides being unsustainable, many projects are buckling down to EXCLUDE airdrop farmers
If you’re farming airdrops, make sure to read this
It has been common practice for a while now for crypto participants to farm or Sybill upcoming airdrops with multiple wallets. Many have made thousands, hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars in some cases this way. However, now too many people are attempting to farm airdrops using various wallets or identities and the likelihood that this will remain a viable approach is fast ending. Make sure you understand the state of the airdrop game so that you don’t end up wasting time, energy and money.
If you’ve spent any time on Crypto Twitter, you’ll have seen countless threads about how to be eligible for upcoming airdrops. They’re everywhere and repetitive. Attempting to interact with protocols to receive airdrops isn’t the issue, it’s the cat and mouse game that protocols and Sybill farmers are playing to try and evade each other.
Why is airdrop farming a problem?
The idea behind airdrops is to incentive users to actually use a protocol, after all, a protocol needs users if it ever wants to grow. How to get those users? Incentivize them! However when a single individual or entity games the system and farms an airdrop with multiple wallets, they are then eligible to receive large amounts of tokens - giving them an unfair advantage in governance as well as the fact that mercenary farmers will dump a token, hurting the market price of the project’s coin. Obviously protocols are eager to avoid this.
Protocols are now using various sophisticated methods and proprietary network analysis to exclude Sybil attackers from airdrop eligibility. Optimism, for example, removed 17,000 addresses from their airdrop list that were suspected Sybil attackers. Other methods include splitting airdrops into a series of airdrops, where in the successive airdrops, accounts that immediately sold their tokens within a certain time frame are removed from eligibility. A list of “Zero Contribution Accounts” would then be public for projects that are intending to launch a token to see and use for their own purposes. Essentially a blacklist.
If you’re interested in checking out the depths of what professional airdrop farmers are doing on their part, check out this thread:
So, now that you’re aware of the state of the game - just be conscious of the fact that if you’re trying to game an airdrop, the protocol is actively looking out for ways to exclude you from it. This means that organic use of a protocol is encouraged. That being said, there’s still money to be made from upcoming airdrops so make sure you are organically using protocols to make sure you’re eligible. Airdrops are still one of the best ways out there for growing a small account.
Some of the most anticipated upcoming airdrops include:
Arbitrum
StarkWare
zksync
LayerZero
Shardeum
Optimism
Sui
Sei
Make sure to follow us for more future guides on how to actually participate in these airdrops, for now, just consider this a word to the wise.
Subscribe to receive our brief daily and extended weekly newsletter along with in-house research content!
Please Share, Leave Feedback, and Follow Us on Twitter, Telegram, and LinkedIn to stay connected with us.