Airdrop School 2. — What is the origin of Airdrops?
First public announcement of Airdrop happened in August 2017, when company Omise sent “OMG” tokens to every wallet that held more than 0.1 ETH.
According to Jun Hasegawa, CEO of Omise, the company pioneered the airdrop concept on Ethereum in August 2017, after announcing it would airdrop its “OMG” tokens to every wallet that held more than 0.1 ETH.
Omise decided to conduct an airdrop to raise awareness about the project, but Hasegawa spoke to the broader benefits of the distribution model, writing in an email to CoinDesk — via a spokesperson, “The real value of Ethereum projects doing Airdrops to all ETH holders is that it’s a crypto economic mechanism designed to incentivize Ethereum project communities to maintain alignment with the entire ethereum community.”
After Omise, the trend slowly started to become predominant PR strategy for new projects. Since August 2017, when the average number of monthly Airdrops was 2, there is a significant change in the number of Airdrops released, with the average number of 5 Airdrops DAILY.
As this table clearly shows, there is an exponential growth in number of Airdrops that come out daily. The similar trend can be seen in the number of emerging ICO’s.
