Looking Out For the Next Airdrop

$ENS stole the spotlight with the mother of all airdrops this week, with most users receiving well over $7,000 USD in value, and long-time users receiving upwards of $40,000 in value for an average 170$ purchase of an ENS name. ENS, or the Ethereum Name Service, allows users to acquire a Web 3.0 username, a name for cryptocurrency addresses and decentralised website addresses. The organization that oversees ENS decided to jump into tokenization and reward users with free tokens.  The concept of airdropping free tokens to existing users started back in 2020’s DeFi summer, when Uniswap awarded prior users with a $UNI token airdrop, even for failed transactions. 1inch followed Uniswap’s path with an airdrop of its own in December 2020 and, ever since, it has become a norm within the world of Ethereum projects.

Given the potential value of receiving free tokens, I’ve considered how you can maximize your chances of getting some tokens from existing projects that are yet to release their own governance or utility tokens. The primary assumption is that, sooner or later, most dApps will decentralize and eventually will have a token that allows users to interact with the ecosystem. NFT markets are relatively new compared to their DeFi counterparts, but there is some history of awarding users, beginning with Rarible’s launch of its $RARI token to reward early users, followed by SuperRare launching its own token, $RARE. On that note, we still have many well known projects without a protocol governance or utility token, including Opensea, Known Origin, Foundation and Zora. On top of that, there are a number of DeFi and cross-chain bridging protocols that are yet to release a token, including MetaMask, Matcha, Paraswap, Sudoswap, Zapper and Zerion.

Anyone can check if they have any pending airdrop left to claim from https://earni.fi/ with just their wallet public address.

We have Layer 2 rollups like, Arbitrum, Optimism and zkSync without an on-chain governance, hence there is an opportunity in L2 space and the gas per transaction is much cheaper with inherent security from Ethereum mainnet. There is a surge in TVL growth and most of the projects are migrating to rollups. 

In addition to simply using various markets and interacting with protocols, being part of an active community, including through Discord, can potentially be rewarding, as is getting involved in community calls, AMAs and even being a contributor in any capacity. Community is proving to be the essential element in most Web 3.0 projects, and involvement is rewarded.