The current state of airdrops is simply terrible.

Written by: OxTochi

Translated by: Chopper, Foresight News

I still remember the scene when I first received a cryptocurrency airdrop, as if it happened yesterday. It was in 2020, when I was busy completing bounty tasks on Bitcointalk. One morning, I was woken up by the notification sound from WhatsApp; it was a message from a friend.

"Have you used Uniswap?" he asked. I replied, "Yes," and then he said, "You should have 400 UNI tokens to claim, which are now worth over $1,000." I immediately went to Uniswap's Twitter page to find the claim link, and after claiming, I sold them right away.

It was that simple, free money falling from the sky. No need to fill out forms, no leveling up on Discord, and none of those "contributions required to earn" restrictions.

Looking back, that moment defined what airdrops should be: a surprise "subsidy" for users who love and actively use the product, rather than the worthless junk activities we see today.

The Golden Age of Airdrops

Later, I received an airdrop from 1Inch, where any wallet eligible for UNI could claim 1Inch. What truly changed my perception of "airdrop mechanics" was the dYdX airdrop.

At that time, to participate, I had to cross-chain ETH into the dYdX protocol. Most Layer 2 solutions were still in the whitepaper stage, and cross-chain fees were frighteningly high. I made a few trades to boost my trading volume, not much, and then withdrew my assets cross-chain. After a day's operation, I ended up with a five-figure (in USD) airdrop, which still feels unbelievable to think about.

The total value of airdrops I received once exceeded $20,000. To be honest, I sold half of it along the way; after all, it was "free money," and securing it was the norm.

The dYdX airdrop gave me my first decent capital, which I directly invested in the DeFi space. During the "DeFi summer," I was doing liquidity mining on Juldswap, earning about $250 a day. Honestly, I miss those days so much.

The Decline of Airdrops

Of course, such good days couldn't last forever. After dYdX, I participated in airdrop activities from Scroll, Arbitrum, Optimism, and zkSync, with zkSync marking the beginning of my "terrible airdrop experience."

However, I will never forget the Scroll airdrop. At that time, everyone had sky-high expectations, and even though its co-founder Sandy had tweeted that famous "lower expectations" message, it couldn't dampen the enthusiasm.

People kept raising their expectations until disappointment finally set in. The amount of the Scroll airdrop was ridiculously low, almost a joke. The sentiment in the crypto community instantly plummeted from anticipation to despair. To be honest, this airdrop really left a shadow on me, and I vowed never to participate in Layer 2 airdrop "mining" again.

If it were just Scroll, I might have been able to accept it. But what truly upset me was realizing that such "low-quality airdrops" would become the norm in the future.

The Chaos of Today's Airdrops

Fast forward to now, the state of the airdrop scene is simply dismal. Once "surprise airdrops" have long turned into a business of "industrialized witch-hunt style airdrops."

You have to spend months, even years, interacting with various protocols: cross-chain, adding liquidity, burning gas fees, and building so-called "user loyalty." In the end, whether you can claim an airdrop depends entirely on luck, and even if you do, the amount is pitifully small. What's even more ridiculous is that there are now operations like "airdrop claim channels open for only 48 hours," and I remember Sunrise was the first to do this.

Even if you finally wait for the claim day, you'll find that the amount doesn't match the time and cost you invested, and it often comes with an unreasonably harsh unlocking plan. For example, the 0G Labs airdrop is set to unlock over 48 months, quarterly—48 months, a full four years!

There are so many of these ridiculous situations now that when I see those "airdrop Alpha" tweets, my first reaction is, "Oh, here comes another 'mosquito leg' airdrop."

The Game Between Projects and Users

The reality is this: in recent years, users' mindsets have become "utilitarian," and there's no need to sugarcoat it. Nowadays, people use a product merely to earn rewards; no one will spend hours clicking around or contributing to the community just for the sake of so-called ecological culture.

And what about the project teams? They do want loyal users, but they want "pretty data" to show to VCs even more, such as high user numbers and large community sizes. This data is enough to inflate their valuations when preparing financing PPTs. Thus, the relationship between users and project teams has turned into a game of "data manipulation" versus "data prevention."

The result is: neither side is happy. Users feel played, while project teams face the challenge of user retention.

What Should Airdrops Be Like?

If I were to redesign airdrops, I might return to the Uniswap model: no empty promises, no leaderboards, just suddenly giving loyal users a surprise subsidy one day. Just this point could reduce the phenomenon of "industrialized airdrop farming" and lower users' unrealistic expectations.

Alternatively, we could take inspiration from Sui's "pre-sale airdrop" model, setting a reasonable fully diluted valuation (FDV) to allow early contributors and users to buy tokens at favorable conditions.

The closest models to this now are Cysic and Boundless. They use a "tiered system" to reward users with pre-sale discounts based on their contributions to various activities within the ecosystem.

Or, we could simply cancel airdrops altogether and focus on building truly usable products: creating things that have real market fit and establishing a solid revenue model, rather than copying and pasting the same thing 200 times. Honestly, this approach would better serve the long-term interests of the crypto community.

Conclusion

The current state of airdrops is simply terrible. It neither respects those users who spend time "grinding" for airdrops nor helps project teams build a genuine community.

The end result is that everyone feels exploited. Perhaps canceling airdrops and instead creating products that can make everyone money is the better choice?

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