With the latest legal restrictions, for ICOs and other crypto-related projects, it has become very hard to raise funds from the broad audience. ICO airdrops have become a new effective way to increase awareness about your project and to promote it to the mass market. In this article, we are going to review the airdrops’ mechanics, how they can help ICOs promote their projects and the technical points you should be aware of if you’ve decided to use this way of promotion.
What is an ICO airdrop
Airdrops are free tokens that ICOs distribute among those users who actively promote the project or are registered on specific blockchains, such as EOS or Ethereum. By giving away free tokens of your project you can give your users an incentive to spread the word about it and thus grow your network.
Typically, in order to receive airdrop coins, a user has to share a specific post about the project on the social media accounts, such as Facebook and Twitter, with the condition not to delete the post up until a certain date, to follow the social profiles of the project and to provide the cryptocurrency wallet address for token distribution.
Also, some specific conditions can be added, such making your followers investigate your white paper in details and answer a pull of questions. This will ensure that the users really learn the core idea of your project and not just follow you to get free tokens.
A tool to avoid regulatory scrutiny
Apart from increasing awareness, airdrops are an effective tool that helps ICOs avoid regulatory scrutiny. In order to raise funds via crowdsale, you should check the information about each investor by gathering the so-called KYC (know your customer) data.
Not every project has enough resources to do it thoroughly and avoid scammers. Letting fraudsters into your project may lead to bad consequences for your relations with authorities.
An alternative way for an ICO to raise funds is to get the most from the institutional investors and to increase the popularity of the project by spreading the tokens for free among usual people.
How to run a crypto airdrop
ICO airdrops are created and distributed through a smart contract. So if you have decided to use this tool you should develop your smart contract in accordance with your needs.
The smart contract should contain the list of addresses where tokens will be forwarded to and the number of tokens to be sent to each address.
If you don’t have enough resources for this task you can use solutions ‘out-of-the-box’ from such projects as MyWish.io. This is a smart-contract constructor that allows you not only to get the contract in just a few clicks, but also to automatically setup the airdrop campaign for your ICO. Note that projects using our BestRate ICO payment tool may get a tasty discount from MyWish for their services if they say a secret word.
Where to promote your airdrop
If your project already has a set of followers the most obvious thing would be to promote your airdrops among them. These people are already familiar with your project and they would be eager to spread the word about it for a small reward from your side.
To get a broader coverage consider placing the information about your airdrop on the following platforms:
- Airdropalert.com — this is one of the most popular platforms for promoting your airdrops. It has more than 2M of monthly visits and is well known in the crypto-related circles. Other airdrop catalogs listed below have a much smaller audience, but still, it’s good to have more websites mentioning your project.
- Coinairdrops
- Airdropsmob
- TopIcoList — this is our partner at BestRate and our clients may also get a discount for promoting their projects on this website
- Airdroptracker
- Airdropalert
- YourFreeCrypto
- Airdropaddict
- Worthyairdrops.com
- Coinswitch.co
In case you run a project on EOS network:
Telegram channels. Contact their owners for promoting your airdrop:
Conclusion
Airdrops are a very effective way to increase the public awareness of your project. However, keep in mind that it’s not a pill from all diseases. For an airdrop campaign to be successful you first need to build a solid community around your project and a really working MVP that would back up your upcoming ICO.
Originally published at bestrate.org on August 7, 2018.
