Introduction

In the crypto world, airdrops are no longer the “money is just waiting to be earned” game they once were, but have turned into a battle between projects and users. Five years after Uniswap’s large-scale airdrop, the airdrop landscape has undergone a complete transformation—ranging from a constant stream of airdrop projects to ever-changing airdrop rules, from ruthless sybil hunts to project insider trading despised by the community. No one knows if users are waiting for a simple pig’s feet meal, a miraculous wealth rush, or just an empty wait.

However, faced with an endless stream of airdrop projects, how to identify those with real potential and capable of meeting airdrop expectations is a question for every user. This article will help you deeply understand the essence and success factors of airdrops, and, through industry cases, accurately identify the next quality airdrop worth participating in. Whether you’re a crypto newbie or a veteran, you’ll find your answer here.

The Origin and Development of Airdrops

The concept of “airdrop” refers to the distribution of free tokens by a project to a specific user group to promote a new project or reward early supporters. This method dates back to March 2014, when Iceland’s Auroracoin project distributed tokens for free to all citizens, initially giving each person 31.8 AUR, which was later increased to 318 and 636 AUR, aiming to promote the use of this cryptocurrency in Iceland.

With the gradual development of blockchain technology and the rise of the ICO boom, airdrops have also undergone various transformations.

• In the early stages of airdrops, everything was still in an exploratory phase, with almost no complicated requirements. Users could easily claim tokens with just a wallet address. (For example, Stellar conducted a large-scale airdrop in 2019, distributing over 1.2 billion XLM tokens to users worldwide.)
• However, with the rise of liquidity mining, users were attracted by liquidity mining rewards, and the growth of TVL came with more mature strategies for mining, staking, and selling.
• Then, the arrival of the Uniswap airdrop marked the beginning of a new era for airdrops. Airdrops thus officially became a key method to attract users, raise funds, and list tokens, giving rise to a special group of “airdrop farmers” who explored unique strategies in this field.
• However, after the large-scale anti-farming efforts in 2024 by projects like ZKsync and LayerZero, the airdrop sector experienced a brief cooling period. Nonetheless, many “airdrop farmers” are still exploring potential airdrop projects.

Former Popular Airdrop Projects

To make accurate moves in today’s highly competitive airdrop market, it’s essential to review the airdrop projects that once gained immense popularity. These projects left behind stories of sudden wealth and valuable experiences and lessons.

Sunshine for All—Optimism

Optimism is a Layer 2 scaling network on Ethereum that uses Optimistic Rollup technology to enable faster and cheaper transactions on Ethereum. It significantly reduces transaction fees, increases transaction speed, while maintaining the security of the Ethereum mainnet.

The airdrop rules of Optimism became a very successful airdrop case. Optimism mainly distributed tokens to six types of users:

Source: Airdrop 1

Its success lies in the significant difference based on user activity and contribution: the more active a user’s on-chain behavior, the more airdrop tokens they receive. In addition, there was a “stacking reward” design, where the more deeply users interacted, the more substantial the airdrop they ultimately received. Moreover, the entire distribution process was conducted in stages, keeping users engaged and turning the airdrop into a tool for activating the community and driving project growth.

This airdrop event also provided “airdrop farmers” with a new approach—premium accounts with deep interactions and basic accounts that met minimal requirements. Users who engaged briefly with Optimism received a small amount of airdrop, but those who used Optimism more deeply over time received much more than basic accounts that only interacted a few times. As a result, many subsequent blockchain airdrop rules have somewhat modeled their airdrop strategies after Optimism’s approach.

Airdrop Giants—Arbitrum

Arbitrum is also a Layer 2 scaling solution based on Ethereum, designed to solve Ethereum’s issues with slow transaction speeds and high fees. It uses the Optimistic Rollup technology to batch many transactions in Layer 2 and submit the results to the Ethereum mainnet, ensuring security through the “optimistic assumption” and “fraud proofs” mechanisms. Arbitrum offers high scalability, low fees, and full compatibility with Ethereum.

Due to the wealth effect of Optimism, Arbitrum’s snapshot saw nearly 2.3 million addresses. To distribute the airdrop more fairly, Arbitrum continued Optimism’s strategy of distinguishing between different types of users but added a point system and stricter sybil-hunt checks. According to Nansen data, of the nearly 2.3 million Arbitrum wallet addresses, only 625,000 (about 28%) scored over 3 points and successfully qualified for the ARB airdrop. The remaining approximately 70% of addresses were eliminated, with only about 135,000 truly being weeded out for being “Sybils” (cheating addresses), a relatively low proportion. This airdrop focused more on penalizing low-tier accounts with just a few interactions and rewarding highly active, continuously operating premium accounts. The airdrop rules for Arbitrum are as follows:

For detailed rules, please refer to: $ARB airdrop eligibility and distribution specifications | Arbitrum DAO - Governance docs

Many “airdrop farmers” made their first fortune through the Arbitrum airdrop, and even more people, spurred by the wealth made from the Arbitrum airdrop, officially embarked on the “airdrop farming” path. Even now, whenever a project implements “anti-farming,” I can’t help but think back to that generous Arbitrum airdrop.

The Strictest Sybil Hunt—LayerZero

LayerZero is a cross-chain communication protocol designed to enable secure and efficient interoperability between different blockchains. By providing a unified interface, LayerZero allows assets, information, and messages to flow across different chains, promoting interconnectedness within the blockchain ecosystem.

Starting with LayerZero, the airdrop path of 2024 began to take a turn towards “anti-farming.” Due to LayerZero’s high funding and valuation, “airdrop farmers” had high expectations for the airdrop. Both individual users and professional studios flocked to participate in LayerZero’s airdrop, and social media was flooded with various airdrop tutorials, causing the number of transactions on LayerZero to exceed 200,000 per day. Because of the surge in on-chain transactions and addresses, LayerZero’s co-founder Bryan Pellegrino launched the largest-ever “sybil hunt” operation the day after announcing the snapshot (May 3, 2024). Users were presented with three options: proactively disclose sybil addresses, ensuring they are recognized during the project’s screening process, thus retaining 15% of the airdrop allocation; wait for the project’s screening without proactively reporting sybil addresses, completely relying on the internal screening mechanism of the project, but this could result in receiving no tokens; or introduce a reporting mechanism, allowing users to report others’ “sybil” addresses. Successful reports would earn the reporter 10% of the tokens allocated to the reported account. Ultimately, LayerZero confiscated 10 million tokens originally allocated to the sybil addresses. While the team has not yet released the final sybil list, it is estimated that at least 1 million addresses were involved, making it the largest-ever sybil database in history.

LayerZero’s airdrop rules:

• Transaction behavior: The number of transactions, transaction amounts, and transaction types (such as liquidity provision or NFT transfers) all affect airdrop eligibility.
• Early user rewards: Active early users will receive additional rewards.
• Protocol fee contribution: The fees paid by users will be considered, with higher fee contributors potentially receiving greater rewards.

This sybil-hunt action was criticized by LayerZero’s community users. Many expressed that while they could accept the strict sybil rules, mutual reporting ultimately harms everyone in the long run. LayerZero took advantage of human nature, turning “airdrop farming” into a battleground between users, while the project team reaped the benefits.

“Rat Trading” Project—ZKsync

ZKsync, developed by Matter Labs, is an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution that aims to increase Ethereum’s transaction throughput and reduce transaction fees through Zero-Knowledge Rollups (zk-Rollups) while maintaining network security and decentralization.

Compared to LayerZero, ZKsync initially listened to the community’s feedback, ensuring the transparency of token distribution and sybil-hunting actions. However, the ZKsync team clearly lacked community consensus during the token distribution process, ignoring user feedback and allegedly using internal addresses to pre-arrange a distribution that favored certain parties. Many NFT holders who had not actively participated in the ZKsync ecosystem, such as Pudgy Penguins, Milady Maker, and Degen, still received airdrops, and the amounts exceeded those of many active users. These “non-compliant airdrop recipients” diluted the rewards for actual users, causing widespread dissatisfaction. Social media was filled with voices demanding justice, and even some project teams within the ZKsync ecosystem joined in the protests.

ZKsync’s airdrop rules:

Source: ZK Airdrop | ZK Nation

Due to the unfair distribution by the ZKsync project, some “airdrop hunters” gradually lost confidence in airdrop projects, causing it to fall from being a “top-tier” blockchain to a “declining” blockchain.

How to Select and Participate in the Right Airdrop Projects?

Understand the Basic Information of the Project

• Track Classification: When analyzing a specific project, categorize it into the relevant track and focus on the mainstream ones. First, understand the mainstream tracks and form a basic understanding, then analyze the projects in the ecosystem in a ranked manner.
• Project Background: After confirming the project, it’s essential to understand the core philosophy, technical architecture, and roadmap. Assess whether the project is innovative, aligns with market demand, and has unique competitive advantages.
• Current Status: Check the project’s development progress, operational status, and whether there is an official release plan. Pay attention to the project’s stage (e.g., startup, seed round, development phase) and confirm the TGE date, node plans, and economic details.
• Team Identity Verification: Learn about the founding team members, verify their identities and work experience. Investigate whether the team members have relevant industry experience and technical backgrounds.
• Team Industry Reputation: Investigate the team’s reputation in the industry, whether they are highly recognized in blockchain or related fields, whether they have been involved in other successful projects, or whether they have worked in important tech companies or investment institutions.
• Historical Legal Issues: Pay special attention to whether the project or its members have any legal lawsuits or improper behaviors, whether fraud or other negative events are involved.
• Social Media Account Investigation: For projects that have renamed or involve expired accounts, carefully investigate the reasons and background of these changes, especially if the project has a history related to “zero” or a failed project.
• Funding Rounds and Amount: Investigate whether the project has completed any funding rounds and whether well-known or angel investors are involved. Confirm the project’s funding status, including the total amount raised, participating investors, and funding stages (e.g., seed round, A round, B round).
• Valuation Analysis: Based on the project’s technical capabilities, team background, and funding situation, perform an initial valuation analysis. You can use the seed round funding amount, current market demand, and market valuation of similar projects to make a reasonable prediction.
• Comparative Analysis of Similar Projects: Compare the valuations of similar projects in the industry to analyze the project’s competitiveness in the same track. Understand the market feedback and user interest in similar projects to determine the project’s value.
• Core Approach: When analyzing a project, first categorize it into the relevant track, understand its highlights, verify the team members’ identities, analyze market activity strategies, and especially adopt the project team’s perspective, exploring from multiple angles and dimensions.

Core Idea: When analyzing a project, first categorize it into the relevant track, understand its highlights, verify the team members’ identities, analyze the market activity strategies, and especially adopt the project’s perspective, exploring from multiple angles and dimensions.

Confirm Airdrop Opportunities for Projects

• Participation Cost of Tasks: Tasks like the Galaxy Task, which only require following Twitter, joining Discord, and engaging in social activities, are relatively low-cost and have a low barrier to entry. Testnet interactions, on the other hand, require installing specific wallets and engaging with the platform, which makes them slightly more challenging. However, interactions on the mainnet are often the key factor in receiving substantial rewards.
• Reward Expectations and Risks: Calculating the ratio of reward to cost helps assess potential returns and risks. This ratio is essential to determine whether the effort required is worth the potential rewards.
• Duration of the Activity and Changes in Participation: Evaluating the duration of the activity and the fluctuation in participation numbers can help predict the popularity of the task and potential changes in reward distribution. Monitoring these trends can give insight into the competitive task and whether it’s worth investing time in.
• Clear Commitment of Rewards by the Project: It’s important to check whether the project clearly states its reward distribution method, expected returns, and allocation rules. For example, tasks like Galaxy Missions and testnet interactions often provide clear guidelines for distributing rewards, making it easier for participants to understand what they can expect.
• Start and End Time of the Activity: Confirming the start and end dates of the activity is essential. Knowing these timeframes helps determine whether it’s worth investing time in participating and avoids missing key time windows. For example, knowing the precise participation timeline for Galaxy tasks and testnet interactions is critical for participants to decide whether to engage.

How to Maximize Airdrop Earnings

• Creating Premium Accounts:

A premium account, as the name suggests, is an account with high-quality behavior from a real user. Each account should exhibit authentic on-chain behavior, independent actions, reasonable on-chain asset distribution, and even a certain amount of gas fees spent. Key factors to focus on include: fund retention, on-chain activity, asset diversity, on-chain identity, project loyalty, mainnet data, etc., to enhance the account’s “profile.” This is because, in some projects, account activity can affect future airdrop allocations or the probability of other opportunities. In short, a premium account should perform similar actions as a real account would.

For activities where the project team clearly defines the reward criteria, such as Galaxy missions, testnets, and node tests, you can simply perform the interactions as required by the activity.

For projects without specific activity requirements, you can refer to the rules of past popular airdrop projects for interaction. In summary, the key dimensions are: time span and interaction amount.

• Multi-Account Strategy:

The core of the multi-account strategy lies in risk diversification, with the main goal being to prevent a single account from missing out on an airdrop or being flagged as a “sybil.” However, it’s important to emphasize that multi-account operations are not the same as sybil attacks. On the contrary, as long as proper isolation is maintained, the risks of a multi-account strategy are actually controllable. The strategy follows the principles of the law of large numbers and broad coverage, meaning that by using multiple accounts, the overall success probability is increased. In contrast, investing all resources into a single account can present higher uncertainty, and the returns may not be superior to a multi-account strategy.

During the account setup phase, basic fund flow principles should be followed to ensure account validity and differentiation. First, fund sources should be diversified as much as possible, avoiding all accounts injecting funds at the same time or in the same manner to reduce the risk of being flagged. Additionally, large concentrated deposits or withdrawals should be avoided, and it’s crucial to ensure that multi-account funds are not stored in the same address, making the fund flow appear more natural. At the same time, interaction times and amounts should be randomized to avoid mechanical operations, reducing the likelihood of detection. Multi-chain deployment is also key, as it leaves authentic user traces on different chains, making the accounts appear more natural and credible.

During the account nurturing and interaction phase, each account should maintain independent behavior, avoiding bulk actions at the same time. Interaction amounts, transaction order, and combinations of different protocols should be randomized to avoid linear operations. The multi-chain deployment should continue to be expanded to ensure independent interaction paths, thereby increasing the account’s credibility. Additionally, holding different assets, participating in DAO votes, NFT minting, DeFi staking, and other activities can help enhance account weight and create a high-quality user profile. Finally, during interactions, DeFi strategies should be integrated to carry out embedded interactions, ensuring gas fees are used effectively, thereby improving overall returns and security.

• Avoiding “Sybils”:

In airdrop rules, “Sybils” refer to behaviors that involve using abnormal methods to mass acquire airdrops. Projects typically justify sybil hunts with the reasoning of “protecting the community,” so don’t assume you won’t be screened.

If your account has been involved in the following behaviors, it’s advised to start interacting with new accounts as soon as possible:

• Known sybil List: Addresses that have been included in historical sybil lists by projects like HOP, ZZ, L0, etc., may be directly excluded. Abnormal
• Interaction Patterns: If the interaction behaviors of multiple wallets are highly similar, follow a fixed order, or only interact with the project’s related protocols, it increases the risk of being flagged.
• Abnormal Fund Flow: If there are obvious batch operations like fund distribution or aggregation between multiple wallets, it may be judged as sybil behavior.
• Address Clustering Analysis: Projects use clustering algorithms and community detection techniques, analyzing transaction graphs to filter out potential sybil addresses.

Conclusion

In the future, the airdrop market will continue to evolve, and whether it’s the big rewards for “hair-pulling” users or the limited time left for project parties to engage in PUA, the window is closing. Blind participation will only waste time and cost, while making accurate moves is the key to success. By deeply researching project backgrounds, keeping an eye on industry trends, and understanding the distribution logic of the project parties, you can seize the initiative amidst increasingly complex airdrop rules, avoid being “counter-pulled,” and truly maximize profits. I hope this article helps you avoid detours in the world of airdrops and accurately capture the next potential wealth secret.