Retroactive Airdrop — Hop & Connext
If you’ve followed the cryptocurrency industry for any portion of time greater than a few weeks, you’re probably familiar with airdrops. It was just the other week, September 8th to be exact, when I was waiting in line at the Walgreens drive-thru pharmacy that I read the dYdX airdrop was worth $100k+. My head hit the steering wheel in disappointment — that could have paid off my student loans. Too bad U.S. users were excluded from the airdrop (thanks regulators). Regardless, it’s a good lesson. Every project will eventually have a token, it’s the way the industry is headed. Therefore, it’s worth interacting with these projects before that day does come. Why? Early users get rewarded, we’ve seen it time and time again. If you don’t have the money to ape — or even build a portfolio for that matter — just start using these things.
“Cryptocurrency airdrops — the act of depositing cryptocurrency in public crypto wallets — are used as a tool for marketing, liquidity creation, and network bootstrapping for many types of blockchain projects” — Cryptopedia
Typically a retroactive airdrop occurs when an existing protocol announces it is rolling out a native token. Those who meet certain criteria, often by performing a trade or contributing to the project before a cutoff date, are rewarded a certain allocation of the token at launch.
Let’s revisit some other retroactive airdrops over the past year; maybe that will get you clicking your way to a bigger wallet.
Uniswap- September 2020, 400 UNI. Today’s Value: $8,450.
Eligibility Criteria- have interacted with the protocol in any way before September 1, 2020.
1inch- December 2020, ~1636 INCH. Today’s Value: $4,270.
Eligibility Criteria- have interacted with the protocol in any way before December 24, 2020.
Moving on from the equine shoulda-coulda-woulda, Optimism and Arbitrum have officially launched! While Ethereum’s Layer 2’s are not without fault, they have unlocked new ecosystems. Typically when hunting for potential retroactive airdrops, a new ecosystem is the best place to look. Here, new applications have spawned and are looking to attract users. Sometimes the simplest thing such as doing a token swap will earn you a portion of the later announced airdrop. Looking at these new Layer 2s, I have my eye on Hop Protocol and Connext.
“Hop allows users to quickly and easily transfer tokens directly between layer-2s, sidechains, and layer-1 Ethereum.”
“At its core, Connext is a network of liquidity pools on different chains. Users swap value between these pools, similar to AMM DEXes like Uniswap.”
In short, both are DeFi protocols that allow you to quickly bridge assets between many different chains, including but not limited to: Arbitrum, Optimism, Ethereum Mainnet, Polygon, and xDai. Connext supports a few more than Hop, with Binance Smart Chain, Fantom Opera and others included. Nonetheless, these both look like textbook cases for a DeFi protocol retroactive airdrop/fairdrop. If at the very least all you do is perform one swap on each of these, you have a chance. To put it in perspective, if you performed one trade on dYdX before the cutoff date (snapshot date), you received 310.75 $DYDX, valued at $3,698 at the time of writing (market crashed today too).
Action: perform one transaction with both Hop Protocol and Connext.
Best of luck and happy hunting.
— Brandon Goss
Join Coinmonks Telegram Channel and Youtube Channel learn about crypto trading and investing
