Strategies for Maximizing Crypto Airdrop Gains (2024)
Introduction
Airdrops have emerged as a key player through the crypto world, offering both promotional leverage for emerging projects and valuable rewards for active participants. This dual functionality underscores the importance of airdrops within the crypto ecosystem, particularly in the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector. The allure of free tokens has captured the attention of both seasoned investors and newcomers, making it crucial to understand how to navigate and optimize these opportunities effectively.
What Are Crypto Airdrops?
Crypto airdrops serve as a strategic tool for blockchain-based projects, designed to distribute tokens directly to the wallets of users. These distributions can take various forms, ranging from rewarding existing token holders to incentivizing potential new users to engage with a project. The underlying goal is to boost the project’s visibility, increase token circulation, and foster a robust community of supporters. Understanding the different types of airdrops and the criteria for participation is the first step towards maximizing their potential.
Finding Airdrop Opportunities
Just because a project is offering “points” doesn’t mean they are worth putting money into. This will become increasingly true as the bull market goes on. Luckily, there are quite a few airdrop hunters out there that help you find projects with a higher likelihood of airdropping tokens. I use Bankless’s Airdrop Hunter.
At the end of the day, everything is about risk. There are a few indicators you should look at to determine risk of a project and potential airdrop rewards:
- Are there any notable investors backing the project?
- Are the founders anonymous?
- How much TVL does the project have?
- Are you able to withdraw your funds if you change your mind?
- Is the project focusing on points or creating value?
Projects have found that offering points is an easy way to attract investments. Just be careful that some bad projects will also be offering points to attract your money.
How to Get Airdrops
As protocols have started pushing out airdrops, there are some easy ways to maximize your airdrops with the same amount of investment.
First you want to make sure you qualify for an airdrop. Here are the basic requirements for most airdrops:
Interact with the protocol a few times
Most protocols want you to interact with their project. Depending on the project, this would be depositinng, lending, borrowing, or swapping funds. The more you interact, the higher likelihood that you meet this requirement.
Put more than $100 into the protocol
You don’t know what the minimum investment is but $100 seems to be about right. The next bar is $50. Protocols will continue to put min investments into the requirements as more people realize how to game the system.
Invest as soon as possible
This one seems obvious but there are two reasons for this. First, some of these protocols offering airdrops have been around for years. Take Starknet, they’ve been around for a while and just offering an airdrop recently. Some of their cutoff criteria was over a year ago. The other reason is that points are rewarded per epoch / block / time. Therefore, the longer you are gaining rewards, the more points you get.
Use other DeFi protocols / chains
This is the hardest recommendation as there are so many other DeFi protocols out there. If you are a regular DeFi user, then you will probably interact with some of the major protocols anyways. Some recommendations would be to use any protocols that are co-owned by the developers. Spark Finance on Ethereum is offering points but is owned by MakerDAO. Spark will most likely give rewards to MakerDAO users.
Now for ways to Maximize Your Airdrops
Use multiple wallets
If you are able to invest more than $50–$100, then repeat the above steps with multiple wallets. The minimum token airdrop usually exceeds what extra points you would have accrued in a single wallet. So add as many wallets as you can handle.
Using Referral Codes
Most protocols have referral codes to give out. An easy way to get referrals is to refer your other wallets. Easy way to get extra points for the same investment.
Looping
If you aren’t familiar with looping, this is when you lend your crypto to a protocol, borrow against it, and then restake that asset back into the protocol. You can keep “looping” to increase leverage or accrue points. One easy way to gain additional points is to borrow from one protocol and put those funds into another. Easy way is to deposit liquid staking tokens for SOL/ETH, borrow SOL/ETH and convert into an LST to put onto another protocol. The borrow APYs are virtually identical to the liquid staking APYs.
Look for protocols that will be the source of other airdrops
Look for protocols that create new ecosystems on top of them. Eigenlayer is the most common right now where the new applications that use Eigenlayer security will almost certainly give airdrops to Eigenlayer stakers. Another one is Dymension.
Join Discord for the protocol
Some airdrops have given out airdrops based on community engagement (e.g. Wormhole). By throwing “gm” into the chat, you might hit the community engagement requirements over time.
Diversify
Don’t focus on just a few airdrops on one chain. The more you expand, the more likely you will hit airdrop requirements without intending to do so. In a time of vastly growing chains, we don’t know which ones will be the most successful or even offer the best airdrop.
Conclusion
These are just a few ways to find and then maximize your airdrops. If you are looking for ease, lookup airdrop hunters to help you track future airdrops. Hopefully points season will be fruitful for us all.
-Just Another Crypto Analyst
Doing this for fun but if you want to leave a tip:
Ethereum: 0xa33aE4207466cD866D13fA587067B1F824C06d4A
Solana: 6bYE5H4qXW5oa8Y1Jxk7zXZXSaJGHGhcrV3UUPCejzXF
Cosmos: cosmos1uv0cu8mcmpdcfdemt28aej6zxw8vrr4kmdd5gr
