What Airdrops Could be Coming Soon in Crypto?

Airdrops are one of the most lucrative activities in crypto, and have made some people tens of thousands of dollars for simply interacting with certain dApps. Consequently, DeFi users are always on the lookout for the next project to complete an airdrop, and there are many likely candidates in 2022.

The idea of an airdrop is confusing to understand for those coming from the traditional finance world, as projects giving away shares of their company never happens in the real world. However, airdrops make sense for blockchain and web3 projects for multiple reasons. First, they reward users who risked their money on a project and were early adopters of their technology. They also incentivize users to have a stake in the future success of the platform, which is especially critical in the world of blockchain where there may not be a centralized team in charge of progressing the platform. Finally, they are a successful way to distribute tokens to a large quantity of entities, and prevent a project from appearing as centralized and not a true decentralized application. In the traditional finance world, airdrops would be analogous to some event like Facebook giving free shares to their first users as a ‘thank you’ for using their platform, and as an incentive to get those users to get their friends to sign up. 

So far, the most notable airdrops in the cryptocurrency space have been Uniswap and Ethereum Name Service, both of which saw tens of thousands of dollars given in UNI and ENS respectively to the users of those platforms. If there was some way to determine which projects would complete an airdrop next, investors could make massive returns without risking capital, essentially making free money. Let’s take a look at some of these projects and why they have potential to airdrop tokens.

The first project is MetaMask, the Ethereum wallet browser extension. Almost everyone who uses Ethereum and interacts with smart contracts has likely used MetaMask, but not many know they also have a built-in decentralized exchange. Swapping with this decentralized exchange on multiple blockchains, such as Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, and Polygon would be a good way to prove an interaction with MetaMask, and will likely make a user eligible for their airdrop. As the web3 wallet space becomes more competitive, and wallets like Brave Wallet and Coinbase Wallet become more adopted, MetaMask may have to release their own token to stay competitive in this ever-changing landscape. A MASK token was hinted at by founder Joseph Lubin, but far from confirmed, and any release timeline is pure speculation at this point. 

Two other somewhat similar projects that may airdrop tokens are Optimism and Arbitrum. These are layer 2 scaling solutions built for Ethereum that utilize rollup technology to create a low-fee high-performance environment for transactions, and help to solve Ethereum’s scaling problem while retaining all of the security benefits of the Ethereum blockchain. Currently, fees are paid in ETH on these layer 2s. While this makes sense from a user perspective, it does not from a business perspective, and many wonder how Arbitrum and Optimism plan to make money. One possibility would be for them to release their own token that would be used to pay fees going forward. If this happens, it is likely that current users of these platforms would receive some of these tokens as a ‘thank you’ for being an early adopter. The best way to do this is to bridge ETH to Optimism or Abritrum using one of the existing bridges. With gas fees currently at high levels, this may be an expensive process, but could be worth it for the potential to earn thousands of dollars in airdrops.

One final project that could be releasing their own token and airdropping it to users is OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT marketplace. Recently, rumors began to surface that OpenSea was planning to go public in an IPO, which made users of the platform furious as it would mean there would be no airdrop. Competing platforms like Rarible and SuperRare have launched their own tokens, so OpenSea would stick out in a negative way if they chose to follow through with their plans for an IPO. Another possibility is that they release tokens along with their IPO, however this would diminish the value of the tokens compared to a token-only model. Regardless, any buying, selling, or listing on OpenSea could be the way to ensure that users are eligible for an airdrop if it happens.

Though there are no guarantees about what projects will airdrop and how much they will be worth, the requirements are low enough to make these activities low risk with a massive potential reward. In the worst case scenario, users will make a swap or two on MetaMask, bridge to Arbitrum and Optimism, and buy an NFT without receiving thousands of dollars in tokens. In the best case, they could make upwards of ten thousand dollars, if not more, for a minimal effort activity, which could help boost their portfolio during any sort of impending market downturn.

By Lincoln Murr

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