In this article you’ll learn how to get an Airdrop all by yourself, what is the secret, or the combination of actions, you need to take to be eligible for an Airdrop and why projects do it. We’ll tell you about the difference between different airdrop types and which ones would work best for you.
When the crypto is fresh out of the oven — it needs distribution. Crypto needs holders to have a Market Cap and be attractive to the traders and seekers of the true coin. To do that, crypto projects launch an Airdrop, which is a reward distribution event based on your activity during testnet or even before that. Usually, fresh projects request you to do something in return for the promise to drop some coins.
Airdrop is a huge event for the project. They’re usually done at large scale and rewards are shared between thousands of people simultaneously, so after an Airdrop you have a surge of new holders. Notably, you might register MCap growth or even a little too big of a bump on the price chart. If the project’s price is weak — sub-1$ and it has no utility use case — an Airdrop might end in a huge sale which can tank the coin’s price, like with Hamster Kombat.
Not all Airdrops are made equal. There’s a fine line between a drop during the project's active marketing stage amidst new partnerships and a silent token distribution as a response to hot & spicey drama in the community. There’s also Airdrops which target only specific fractions of the community or even only brand ambassadors. In general, an Airdrop is distributed via official channels of communication — a verified Telegram channel, by a valid admin member in group chat, via a web page or directly to your wallet by one of the protocols of the project. For instance: user received UNI from the official Uniswap protocol — it’s a legit drop; user received UNI from an unknown protocol which is 2 days old — that’s a scam, report it.
There’s multiple Airdrop types:
— Old School Airdrop; You don’t need to do anything special, just a few transactions or interactions with the project's smart-contract/dApp is enough to be eligible for a small portion of rewards. Usually, being present at a certain time and place is enough.
— The Bounty Airdrop; As the name implies — you’re a bounty hunter and have to sweat a little for those sweet coins. To do so, you need to complete a set of tasks — usually of a marketing nature — to become eligible. The most common requests are «repost our pinned message», «put #hastag in your username», «Invite X friends», «Subscribe to our social networks», «press a like under our CEO’s new tweet». Not much, but it's honest work to support the growth of the project you like.
— The «Loyal Holder» edition Airdrop; To be eligible you have to hold a certain amount of the project's crypto prior to the announcement of the event. Ofc, nobody’s asking to do it prior to TGE — that’s a hot take and usually signals about a scam issue. Some notable examples are holding project’s crypto staked in the Liquidity Pool for a certain time.
— The Retrodrop; Conditions are blurry, general rule of thumb — you had to do something in the testnet, mainnet, interact with protocols and dApp (if present) in the times of project’s youth. For instance — generating a number of transactions on-chain constituted a zk Sync drop rate, nevertheless, it was miniscule and caused disdain in the community. The biggest retrodrop was made by Uniswap — they’ve sent around 3k$ or 400 to 550 UNI to each of the 210,000 users. To be eligible for the drop you had to interact with protocol up to a certain date: namely, swap and exchange crypto.
— The CEX Launchpool Drop; This one means the project has money, because CEX activities are always: 1) pricey and 2) take a lot of due diligence from the staff. Not to be confused with silver lining — CEX’es are happy to list hype’y projects and due diligence may be poorly conducted, so always DYOR.
How to spot a fake Airdrop? There’s a number of tactics in your sleeve:
For as long as you’re willing to make an extra step — yes. Airdrops get progressively harder to be exploited since the mid-2017. In a way it’s a cold war arms race: people make more accounts to get a drop, project devs make more tasks that are hard to follow with multiple accounts by the single person.
What is multiaccounting in Airdrops? Essentially, you generate a number of wallets — usually people go with 100+ — and repeat a certain set of actions for every account. To make it simpler people write scripts in Python or — may the gods forgive you — Java Script. We’re not sharing how to replicate that — for reasons — but you can always google up «How to write a Python script to manage multiple wallets in %blockchain%». Multiaccounting is okay if you’re from a third world country, but if your native currency is $, € or £ it’s just not worth the effort and you are better off geting a freelance gig.
Will multiaccounting keep you ahead of the curve? Nope, because projects employ anti-cheating measures all around and multiaccounting considered unfair play. Once you are detected — measures are taken: you are either excluded from the drop, banned or reported. Some leave it as is and let you walk away with crypto in your bags — there’s always an element of gambling — but most projects will try to punish you.
Latest Airdrop trends show you shouldn’t rely on them as a source of income. One notable change is that for some Airdrop tasks you actually have to put some crypto in to cover up fees and gas costs. It’s a small sum, which is there only to annoy multiaccounters — imagine paying gas/smart-contract trigger fees for 100+ accounts.
Can your NonBank Wallet receive airdrops? Yes, it’s built like a regular wallet, so you can use it to get airdrops from multiple networks at once thanks to the «Spaces» feature which generates a separate wallet & address each time. You can manage your «Spaces» from a single NonBank account, but be aware that we do not guarantee it will help you claim multiple airdrops at once, tho, we’re also not stopping you from trying that.
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