Sir, wen airdrop?
As you look out your window of our good shuttle the STS CV, you’ll see an amazing amount of natural and technological space sights. To get a better view, you could also go to the observation deck once the captain has turned off the ‘fasten your space belts’ sign. Flying saucers, comets, androids, meteors, planets, stars…
You may be asking why all those coins are dropping like some sort of storm, often near moons...well that’s an airdrop you’re seeing!
The Ethereum community woke up to a great surprise today. News of the ENS airdrop hit, as many had waited years since they originally registered their ETH name domain. You can be sure some had no idea they would be gifted with an airdrop after all this time. But with ETH at ATH what an appropriate opportunity to remind the community that patience and participation pays off!
Airdrops are one of the most exciting aspects of the cryptocurrency industry. Essentially a project will distribute free coins to holders of other tokens, or those who qualify through using the protocol- most notably early adopters.
Projects do this for multiple reasons. It can be purely because of marketing requiring users complete certain tasks (e.g. like and share on Twitter), but more likely it’s a great way to reward and incentivize new or existing community users. Airdrops can also be produced when a hard fork occurs (e.g. When a split in the chain occurs on ideological grounds such as Bitcoin Cash or Ethereum Classic).
The CV in our shuttle name stands for ‘Cryptoverance’ by the way…
CadiaGem 1. ‘Use your Cryptoverance’
Sacrifice now, for future gain with the Crypcadia Formula for success:
Sacrifice time+capital=experience+future reward
By taking the time and effort now to learn, study and grow your knowledge, you will certainly reap the benefits in the future. Staying aware of upcoming events, including airdrops is a great way to achieve this goal. But it’s not quite that simple, as often even the best airdrops aren’t even announced. So it’s always best to DYOR and get in early with new projects. Spend some time and if necessary a small amount of capital on using them.
Because you never know when an airdrop will be announced rewarding the earliest users.
We’ll discuss some great examples of this next.
Examples of Past Airdrops
UNISWAP
Uniswap is the original Ethereum based exchange, and many have directly copied its code and concept of AMM liquidity pools. In Sept. 2020 they wrote on their blog that any address that had interacted with Uniswap V1 and V2 were eligible to receive 400 UNI tokens. This included 12K addresses that had only ever submitted failed transactions! Quite a generous gesture on behalf of the Uniswap team. Those who held on to the UNI token have been well rewarded, from an introductory price of about $5, it reached a high of over $43 in April 2021. At the time of this writing it sits at 12th place by market cap with a price of roughly $23. Holders also are able to vote on governance issues, the more you own the more say you have on any changes and the future of Uniswap platform. There’s also the possibility that in the future the community will take a vote on rewarding all UNI token holders with a percentage of every swap fee!
DYDX
In July 2021 dYdX, the popular crypto derivatives and perpetuals exchange announced that they were airdropping their new DYDX governance token to previous users of the platform who’d achieved certain trading milestones. Some heavy users trading large amounts(200K) across multiple wallets made almost a million dollars from this airdrop even:
Carter on Twitter: "My free $DYDX airdrop is worth $900,000. Good morning." / Twitter
Do always keep an eye out for the details and instructions carefully as eligible users had to claim their airdrop by a certain cutoff date. Each airdrop can have a different eligibility and rules, so this is important to note. DYDX doubled in price within a couple of weeks of launch, and quickly climbed into the top 100 at the time. It has a potentially very bright future with the emergence of DeFi, and evolution of Layer 2’s on Ethereum.
AXIE INFINITY
It’s not only DeFi projects cascading coins from above. Super popular play to earn (P2E) game Axie Infinity has been red hot over the summer of 2021, mostly in the NFT metaverse. They gifted over $60M worth of tokens to early adopters and launched staking capabilities on their platform. This created a dual effect, as the loyal Axie community chose to further support the decentralized game by staking, removing many coins off the open market for the foreseeable future. This caused more scarcity, and the price of $AXS skyrocketed off of this dynamic along with some great publicity and hype as the hottest thing in GameFi at the moment.
Glad you asked that...hey look my friend, we don’t know exactly when the next airdrop equivalent to Uniswap or dYdX will be. Those were announced retroactively to users, especially early adopters, or very active users who got the best results. Just showing it pays to get in early.
With that in mind, we like and suggest Layer 2’s like Arbitrum and Optimism as possible future airdrop candidates. It’s the next logical and potentially huge step in the development of Ethereum. They haven’t announced any token plans yet, but that could change, and those companies would have a lot to gain by doing so. Incentivizing users to their platforms and becoming entrenched as the go-to Layer 2 optimistic rollup are their goals, and a token airdrop would help them achieve that. (Subscribe to the next edition of Crypcadia and we’ll tell you all about these exciting L2’s!)
But Sir, When Airdrop?
Ok if you haven’t realised by now here’s the next CadiaGem:
CadiaGem 2. ‘DYOR for respectable protocols or projects which don’t yet have a token, then use them!’
DEX aggregator Paraswap is a great candidate for a future airdrop. Paraswap searches through multiple DEXs for the best price for your particular trade, similar to 1inch. Even if fees are slightly higher at times (but not always!), don’t let that stop you from testing it out. You could indeed be rewarded with a token in the future according to its founder although no details or dates as given yet.
Even just using your Metamask wallet and swapping crypto funds using their tool could qualify you for a potential future airdrop. When you think how well known and easy to use this wallet is, that’s a pretty exciting thought.
Okay, okay...there is an upcoming airdrop in a few days for Boba Network...this is also a Layer 2 optimistic rollup similar to Arbitrum and Optimism. If you have OMG tokens in your wallet, or any of the listed exchanges by the time they take a snapshot on Nov. 12th, 2021, you’re in line to receive an equal amount of new Boba governance tokens a week later on Nov. 19th. Full details are here: $BOBA Token Airdrop Details
Here are a few other notable blockchain projects that still don’t have their own token and the type of respectable projects you should be looking for when you DYOR:
BTW. We know that last one Cowswap sounds like another crappy code copy of Uniswap on a less than reputable chain, but it’s from the well respected team behind Gnosis protocol and it’s their attempt at tackling miner extractable value (MEV). What’s miner extractable value I hear you say… we’ll explain this in a future edition of Crypcadia!
If some passengers on the STS CV focus their Cryptoverance heavily on airdrops, we can certainly understand why. It’s an exciting and rewarding aspect of the crypto industry especially if you’re time rich, but cash poor. It’s a totally new dynamic that potentially adds immense value to community members and participants. So make sure you use your time wisely to DYOR and if you think it could be worth it, make it happen with the new DApps and technology offerings, as they come about.
You never know, Crypcadians may find themselves benefiting from a Crypcadia airdrop one day ;-) ….