TL;DR Airdrops are becoming one of the most important ways to interact with a crypto audience and market a new project. Two smart contracts and tokens platforms, Ethereum and Waves, are leading the pack.

If you’re launching a new crypto project and want to reach a huge tranche of people who represent your core market demographic, there aren’t many better ways to do it than with a token airdrop. The idea is simple: send a small amount of your token to every blockchain address that satisfies the criteria you specify. That could be any address with a non-zero balance, or any address that shows activity within the last six months, or any address that holds another token you consider relevant (for example, any address that holds the token for a bot-trading project might well be interested in other algorithmic trading initiatives). It’s a brilliant marketing strategy: you know these people are enthusiastic about crypto because, well, why else would they own crypto? In terms of targeted advertising, it knocks most other methods out of the park and has become a key means of attracting investors to new ICOs.

Most airdrops take place on Ethereum and Waves. Ethereum, because there’s so much money and interest around the platform. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised on Ethereum, and an airdrop is a good way to tap into that pool of investors. It can be a little slow and expensive – the network backs up if transaction volumes are too high, and tx fees can be high enough to eat into your marketing budget. Fees on Ethereum are currently around $0.40, and back in December peaked at $4. That’s better than bitcoin’s $20 fee high, but still not something you want to spend when making potentially thousands of transactions.

Whilst it doesn’t yet have Ethereum’s eleven-figure market cap, Waves is catching on as the platform to use for airdrops. One recent tweet shows why.

‘Done! Distribution to 59003 wallets took 407 seconds! #WavesPlatform @APIS_Token’

That’s an incredible 145 transactions a second. Previous airdrops using the ‘Mass Transfer’ function have managed 461 tx/s. One Mass Transfer of 100 transfers only counts as one transaction, and many of these can be included in the same block.

Given that airdrops are becoming such a big part of crypto fundraising efforts, expect to see further developments in this space and more custom solutions for really high-volume transactions.

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