There is no doubt, the season of airdrops is in full swing across the crypto ecosystem. As a reminder, these campaigns aim to reward the first users of a protocol by distributing free tokens to them. A mechanism that will changed many lives with amounts that can reach peaks. However, the airdrop will also have modified methods and behaviors of users and protocols.
Airdrop: $34 billion in magic money
The airdrop phenomenon is not new. Indeed, in September 2020, the decentralized exchange platform Uniswap opened the ball with what remains the largest airdrop to date.
Indeed, Uniswap distributed the insane sum of $6.43 billion in UNI tokens to its users. Faced with the excitement surrounding the maneuver and the marketing repercussions of such distribution, numerous protocols have taken precedence.
According to a report published in March by Coingecko, the 50 largest airdrops distributed $26.6 billion between 2020 and December 2023.
After Uniswap, we find Apecoin with 3.54 billion dollars distributed, dYdX with 2 billion dollars And Arbitrum with $1.96 billion.
Since the start of 2024, the phenomenon has continued and airdrops have multiplied. Thus, many protocols have distributed millions or even billions of dollars to their users. We can, for example, cite Wormhole’s airdrop or the one by EigenLayer.
According to the calculations of our colleagues at TheBlock, 2024 airdrops would bring total paid via airdrops to $34 billion.
And it’s far from over! Just next week, the zkSync protocol will distribute its ZK tokens to the community via an airdrop. With a pre-market value of $0.3/ZK, the zkSync airdrop is estimated to be worth nearly $1 billion.
A trend that transforms uses
However, the airdrops of 2024 are in no way comparable to those of 2020. Indeed, the airdrop is now used as a marketing tool by protocols. Consequently, the latter are much more regulated and most of the time much less lucrative. In some cases, these airdrops take the form of disguised farming campaigns. So, it is increasingly complicated to separate the wheat from the chaff in the midst of all these airdrops.
On the user side, behaviors have also evolved. Thus, during the Uniswap airdrop, the airdrop farmer did not exist. Users were totally surprised to see these thousands of dollars given away for free.
From now on, the various airdrops are stormed by farmers and worse the sybils. As a reminder, sybil is a practice which consists of creating a multitude of wallets in order to be eligible for the same airdrop several times.
The protocols try as best they can to counter this practice. For example, LayerZero has implemented a whistleblowing programwhere informers can recover 10% of the allocation of the sybils wallets they detect.
