How Many of the Four Famous Airdrop Cases Do You Know?

7 min readMar 17, 2022

XXX airdrop activity has officially started…

The XXX Exchange has another airdrop…

Airdrops in the crypto circle have always been a popular activity. Every time there is an airdrop, there will always be a large group of people participating. Many people often hold the mentality of getting rich through airdrops, and any airdrop is not bad. Can airdrops really make people rich? Do you really understand airdrops?

Airdrop = Free Lunch ?

First of all, let me introduce what airdrop is. Airdrop is to attract users’ attention to projects. At a certain point in time, it is given to would-be users in the form of snapshot records according to the proportion of other tokens in the wallet. Simply put, it is to send tokens to your block chain address (public key) free of charge.

However, is airdrop really a free lunch?

Most airdrops can be called free lunch because of their zero cost and benefits. Of course, the purpose of airdrops is to let users know about the project, let tokens get more attention, increase holdings and transactions, and also increase the community activity of tokens, such as letting you follow telegram groups, twitter and facebook. Of course, if you recommend this project to friends in the process of understanding the project, it will be more in line with the expectations of the project side. An airdrop makes the project achieve the effect of referral.

However, we must be careful of airdrop traps !

There is a kind of fraudulent airdrop, which is to cheat users’ personal information (name and ID number, etc.), kyc authentication, etc. Everyone should keep their eyes open when trading, and people who want your private key for various reasons and let you make money are usually fraudsters.

Successful Airdrop Cases

1. UNI

The most famous airdrop case should belong to UniSwap.

As we all know, Uniswap is the leading decentralized exchange and automated market maker on the Ethereum network. It provides users with the means to create liquidity pools for any token based on the ERC20 protocol standard and trade in a completely decentralized manner. On September 17, 2020, Uniswap officially launched the protocol governance token UNI, and announced that anyone who had used Uniswap before September 1 could receive 400 UNI airdrops, regardless of whether the exchange was successful or not. This airdrop, no one could have expected in advance, and successfully detonated the entire DeFi craze.

The price of UNI fluctuated between 2 and 4 dollars when it was launched, that is to say, Uniswap dropped 300 million to 600 million dollars to old users at once, which is an event that goes down in the history of the currency circle. Not to mention, the price of UNI has been soaring since then, rising to a maximum of 43 US dollars, 400 UNIs, worth about 16,000 US dollars, which can be described as a real benefit for many users.

The total number of UNI tokens is 1 billion, and after 4 years of unlocking, it will be inflated at a rate of 2% per year. The initial distribution method is:

60% allocated to Uniswap communities and users (15% of the total has been retroactively airdropped and has conducted mobile mining)
21.266% allocated to employees, 4 years unlocked
18.044% allocated to investment institutions, unlocked for 4 years
0.69% allocated to advisors, 4 years unlocked

2. ENS

The Ethereum Domain Name System (ENS) is the underlying basic protocol closest to the form of decentralization identity (DO) in the Ethereum ecosystem, providing users with decentralization domain names and identities. And because of the early choice of subscription fee system, it has continued to operate without the support of venture capital.

On November 2, 2021, ENS announced the issuance of airdrop tokens ENS. As long as you have previously registered the ENS domain name, you can obtain airdrop qualifications, while other people involved in ecological construction, such as communities and contributors, can obtain more considerable airdrops. This airdrop covers 138,000 address, which is another big carnival.

It is said that a college student received 46,000 contributor airdrops directly. According to the current price of 13.63 US dollars each, it is equivalent to receiving more than 620,000 US dollars directly. It is indeed on the road to wealth.

The total number of ENS tokens is 100 million, and the initial distribution method is:

25% Airdrop to ETH holders
25% allocated to contributors to ENS
50% of the treasury allocated to DAO

3. DYDX

DYDX is a governance token launched by the decentralization exchange dYdX. This time a total of 36,000 users are eligible to receive it, and the conditions for receiving it are also quite close to the people. Users who have made deposits in dYdX but have not traded can receive 310.75 tokens for airdrops, which is equivalent to 3,500 US dollars based on the price of 11.3 US dollars on the day of the token’s issuance; and if the transaction volume is more than 1 US dollar, you can get 1163.51 airdrops, which is equivalent to more than 13,000 US dollars. The strength makes it synonymous with prosperity in the eyes of many encrypted users.

Weibo KOL miner Lao Ma, previously built 800 accounts on DYDX, each account earned 1163.51 DYDX. Roughly speaking, this airdrop Lao Ma alone received more than 930,000 DYDX. According to the price at that time, it is equivalent to more than 10 million US dollars.

The total number of DYDX tokens is 1 billion. After 5 years, in order to ensure that the community has the resources to continue to promote the development of the agreement, the annual inflation rate of DYDX will not exceed 2%. The initial distribution method is:

50% allocated to community users
27.7% allocated to investors
The rest is allocated to the founding team and consultants

4. ATOM

ATOM is the governance token of the Cosmos Hub (Cosmos Center), a multi-asset distributed ledger, and the airdrop object is mainly aimed at two types of participants, Stake on the chain and users who provide AMM in Osmosis. It is also recommended to use the official wallet Keplr, which requires at least 5 ATOM to be pledged, and each wallet to pledge more than 100 is safer. Pledged nodes choose between 12–30 nodes, and those who pledge the first ten nodes will not be in the airdrop range.

The total number of ATOM tokens is 200 million. The initial distribution method is:

75% allocated to mass marketing funders
5% allocated to pre-sale funders
10% allocated to Cosmos
10% allocated to cross-chain foundations

What Should We Pay Attention to When Airdrop Culture Prevails?

In fact, the airdrop is good for everyone, but we actually don’t know whether the project side will airdrop, and we can’t know in advance, even if the coins are issued, how, we don’t know how to allocate tokens. So for users, it is important to find a good project and use it unswervingly.

Secondly, many airdrops that make you “rich” may not have much value at first. Most people will also choose to sell at the first time they receive the airdrop, and will not hold it for a long time. When the value rises, they begin to regret it. This is the place where the mentality is tested. Because many airdrops can’t stand the test of time and will slowly return to zero over time, this is another story.

There is also a very important point, not all airdrops are zero cost, DYDX airdrops have a lot of people did not participate, first of all, the project is not well known at the beginning, there is a certain operating threshold, and the interaction requires a fee of tens of dollars, most people think that the fee may be more expensive than this airdrop, so they choose not to participate under consideration, and regret it when the real airdrop rules come out, but unfortunately there is no regret medicine.

Airdrop exposes another wealth opportunity to the public, provided that the project owner needs to be identified and the project information needs to be studied. Perhaps in the end, you will find that an accidental airdrop will make your wealth return far greater than your investment return.

However, from another perspective, for the project side, to launch the airdrop to avoid the emergence of “incentive-based traffic” and “scientists”, they often have hundreds of accounts with a large amount of swipe interaction, and after receiving the airdrop, most of these accounts are no longer active, which is completely contrary to the original intention of the project side airdrop. With the further prevalence of airdrop culture, how the project side to deal with “incentive-based traffic” has become a problem that has to be considered.

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