Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
“xxx sent you a cash red envelope!”
After the cash red envelope event started on February 1, many long-dead project/research groups have completely transformed into mutual aid groups for “grabbing red envelopes.”
For people in the crypto space, transitioning from esteemed crypto traders to red envelope grabbers is also a helpless choice.
Starting January 31, the global financial market plummeted, and the previously soaring precious metals quickly collapsed, with spot silver nearly erasing its gains for the year and spot gold once falling below $4,500. The crypto market fared no better, with Bitcoin dropping below the $75,000 support level on February 2, hitting a low of $74,604, ETH dropping to a low of $2,157.14, and SOL even falling below $100, reaching a low of $95.95.
According to Coinglass data, the total liquidation amount in the crypto market reached $2.5615 billion on January 31, setting a record for the highest single-day liquidation volume since the “1011 crash.” As a result, “losing to the point of not wanting to talk” has become the true psychological state of many in the crypto space (for example, the now-silent Yi Lihua).
For those who have just experienced a bloodbath in the crypto market, while grabbing red envelopes may be a drop in the bucket in terms of recovering losses, it can still provide some psychological comfort, allowing them to temporarily escape the harsh reality of the market.
Jokes in the group chat
Crypto Airdrops: From Silent Losses to Passionate Rights Protection
Saying that the cash red envelope from Yuanbao is the biggest airdrop for people in the crypto space today is not just a gimmick.
The cash red envelope amount that Yuanbao can distribute to each user is not large, mostly ranging from a few to several dozen RMB, but the value lies in its simple interaction and true no-cost nature. Users only need to spend a little time recruiting others and following the product experience step-by-step to receive cash red envelopes, with a short task cycle allowing for quick returns.
In contrast, crypto project airdrops are primarily distributed in token form, and only when the tokens are sold can they be considered real profits. Although the amount seen in hand is often much larger than Yuanbao, how much remains after deducting time, research, opportunity, wear and tear, and potential costs of holding onto the tokens?
A user who accompanied Infinex for 406 days deeply resonated with this. On January 31, the decentralized perpetual contract trading platform Infinex announced its TGE and airdrop claims, with the project team successfully cashing out, but the community was collectively left in the lurch.
One million is just a cat (X: @RXu107) is a typical representative of those left in the lurch. On February 1, he posted that he had spent over $11,900 (equivalent to 82,000 RMB) participating in this project (4,400 U to buy NFTs, 7,500 U to participate in the public offering) and had deeply accompanied the community for 406 days, but on TGE day, not only did he not recover his costs, but he also faced a paper loss of over 100,000 RMB (2,900 U + 11,284 INX that had not yet unlocked).
Faced with being left in the lurch, the blogger had no choice but to repeatedly express his discomfort to friends.
The blogger left in the lurch by Infinex expresses his discomfort to friends
At the time of Infinex's TGE, the fully diluted market cap was only $150 million, while the total investment for Yuanbao's new year red envelope event is approximately $140 million in USD. What does this mean? It’s equivalent to Tencent directly buying Infinex at its maximum valuation and giving it away for free to the entire nation.
In the face of the pain of being left in the lurch and deceived, most people in the community choose to handle it like “one million is just a cat”—suffering in silence, but some choose to stand up and confront the project team.
Crypto blogger Ice Frog (X: @Ice_Frog666666) is a typical representative of this. He originally started by grabbing red envelopes, but ironically, in 2025, Ice Frog is either fighting for airdrop rights or on the path to doing so. He is currently negotiating with the prediction market project Space (Odaily note: Space raised $20 million in a public offering, but the team privately took away $13 million) and has even taken legal action.
Web2 Can Afford Airdrops, Web3 Cannot Afford Promises
The most ironic point is that the current imbalance of “cost-return” in crypto airdrops is not due to the “moral decay” of a single project, but rather a result of a complete structural change in the industry.
In 2020, Uniswap opened the era of crypto project airdrops, and since then, crypto projects have continuously emerged, with stories of airdrops leading to wealth attracting more and more people into the red envelope grabbing race, presenting a beautiful picture of an “industry in an upward phase.”
However, by 2025, everything changed. Market narratives became exhausted, primary financing weakened, and secondary buying pressure was insufficient. Airdrops no longer seemed to share the future with early users but rather appeared to mortgage the future to current data, creating an exit path for the project team or securing the next round of financing. As a result, large profits disappeared, and small profits shrank, with “being left in the lurch” becoming the norm in the industry.
So-called airdrops are merely rewriting advertising budgets into reward pools, establishing growth relationships directly with users, bypassing third parties. Whether it’s the 1 billion RMB offered by Yuanbao in Web2 or the fixed airdrop allocations given by Web3 projects in token economics, the essence is the same logic.
But the difference is that Web2 giants use cash to buy user certainty, while Web3 treats token earnings as a potentially realizable promise, resulting in the same strategy leading to two different fates.
The certainty of Yuanbao's cash red envelope comes from cash flow and a constraint mechanism. Tencent's strong cash flow ensures that Yuanbao can “distribute,” while the mature legal constraints ensure that Yuanbao cannot “default.” Coupled with the “simple and brainless” no-threshold interaction, users naturally perceive it as a “benefit.”
In contrast, people in the crypto space not only bear costs several times higher than Web2 for grabbing red envelopes (such as funds, time, and energy) but also have to worry about witches, token unlocking periods, and ever-changing airdrop rules. The most ironic part is that in the end, the returns they receive are even less than those from Yuanbao.
Therefore, today’s crypto airdrops have long since devolved from direct growth rewards to promises of responsibilities that are constantly deferred or even unfulfilled. If this situation does not change by 2026, what will be sacrificed along with it is user retention.
From Growth to Retention, Airdrop Utility Can Only Support the First Half
Using airdrops for growth has always been the most common and direct means of dealing with strong competitors in the business world.
Tencent's 1 billion RMB cash support for Yuanbao is because its competitor Doubao is strong enough; by the end of 2025, Doubao was the first AI product in China to exceed 100 million daily active users. The same goes for Web3; in the prediction market sector, Polymarket dominates, and to capture users, Opinion, predict.fun, and Limitless have also adopted point airdrop strategies to directly pull users into their products.
In the short term, airdrops can indeed create a massive influx of users, but in the long term, the factors that determine user retention remain product-market fit, user experience, and ecosystem interaction. In the commercial history of Web3, there are numerous cases of projects that were bustling before airdrops but became neglected afterward. Therefore, both Web2 and Web3 face the same “post-airdrop problem”: how to retain users.
Ten years ago, Tencent, a company adept at imitating and then surpassing, used “WeChat red envelopes” to push WeChat Pay into a national-level entry point, proving its familiarity with the chain of “growth → retention → habit.” Whether they can create the miracle of Yuanbao again through the same method is widely debated, but at least they have ample experience in “how to convert airdrops into retention.”
To this end, Odaily Planet Daily contacted an internal Yuanbao staff member to ask how Web3 projects should improve airdrops from a product perspective. The response was very pragmatic:
“As one of the largest internet companies by market value, Tencent may not have direct lessons for Web3 projects, but the core of airdrops as a growth method is still to enhance retention. This requires a series of follow-up actions after the airdrop, such as PR and marketing thinking about how to further spread the gameplay, and the product side also needs to take more actions to achieve this.”
From the perspective of Web3 practitioners, merely discussing traffic strategies feels shallow; it is more worth pondering what functions beyond tokens can retain users.
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