Airdrop Analysis

Detailed guide to crypto Airdrops

1. What are Airdrops?

An airdrop for a cryptocurrency is a procedure of distributing tokens by awarding them to existing holders of a particular blockchain currency, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. It can also be considered a marketing strategy, since its goal is usually to spread the word about a certain product, coin or exchange in the world of cryptocurrencies. Lately this strategy has become increasingly important due to various social networks, most notably Facebook, refusing to allow ads promoting various virtual coins. In the United States, the practice has raised questions about tax liabilities and whether they amount to income or capital gains.

Airdrops are the crypto analog to free samples in the shopping mall.

Projects that are just starting out will oftentimes give out a small amount of free tokens to verified people in order to spread the word about their project. They often do this near the time of their ICO.

Image 1. Airdrop example

2. History of Airdrops

According to Jun Hasegawa, CEO of Omise, the company pioneered the airdrop concept on Ethereum in August 2017, after announcing it would airdrop its “OMG” tokens to every wallet that held more than 0.1 ETH.

Omise decided to conduct an airdrop to raise awareness about the project, but Hasegawa spoke to the broader benefits of the distribution model, writing in an email to CoinDesk — via a spokesperson, “The real value of Ethereum projects doing Airdrops to all ETH holders is that it’s a crypto economic mechanism designed to incentivize Ethereum project communities to maintain alignment with the entire ethereum community.”

After Omise, the trend slowly started to become predominant PR strategy for new projects. Since August 2017, when the average number of monthly Airdrops was 2, there is a significant change in the number of Airdrops released, with the average number of 5 Airdrops DAILY.

Table 1. Airdrop stats for 2017 and 2018

As this table clearly shows, there is an exponential growth in number of Airdrops that come out daily. The similar trend can be seen in the number of emerging ICO’s.

3. Purpose of Airdrops

Cryptocurrencies only hold value because people believe in them and recognize their worth. The more people who own a cryptocurrency, the more likely it is to become widely adopted and rise in value. Airdrops are effective due to the “endowment effect,” a phenomenon in which people will ascribe value to things merely because they own them.

One main reason for doing airdrops, are recent marketing restrictions for ICOs, that are real and painful in equal measure. The companies launching their ICOs can’t use either Facebook or Google to market their projects. So, the best way through which a project can create lasting exposure and hype is airdropping.

There are plenty of reasons why ICO’s give away free tokens in an Airdrop, and here are the main ones:

To Raise Popularity: Getting token to as many wallets and people as possible for building a strong base of active users, who might end up being real customers. Wide range of distribution is typically the important metric, particularly given that many projects are trying to jump-start a network effect. To Raise awareness: A lot of monetary interest is built once the token hits exchanges. To Raise capital: To fund the future development and build-out of the project.

4. Types of Airdrops

Most successful marketing campaigns usually deliver freebies to prospective customers/investors. Well, crypto airdrops are built on a similar concept. In the ICO space, an airdrop happens whenever a blockchain-based startup delivers free tokens to its prospective customers. In the past, many businesses have successfully airdropped their tokens; some of the prominent airdrops are done by Aktie Social, Eligma, and BunnyToken.

There are two types of Airdrops:

Traditional Airdrops — free tokens are distributed to existing holders of a particular blockchain currency, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. They will reward users for simply holding a specific coin without expectation of any reciprocal consideration Bounty Airdrops — which will reward users with free tokens if they complete simple social media tasks (Joining the Telegram group, reposting on Twitter, etc.)

Image 2 — Bounty Airdrops

5. Participating in Airdrops

For participating in Traditional and Bounty Airdrops users will most likely need to have these tools:

Ethereum Wallet — not one that is on an exchange. It has to be a personal address that is ERC20 compatible because most of the tokens that are airdropped are ERC20 tokens, which are or were originally Ethereum-based ICOs. The Ethereum Wallet needs to be ACTIVE. If user’s wallet doesn’t show activity, it might not receive the airdrop. Sometimes, coins will be explicit in what they look for, including some type of balance in the account. A Telegram Account (https://telegram.org/). Telegram is the chatting tool of choice for many of the ICOs. Free tokens are the tool for boosting the audience count. Usually, airdrop tokens will also require participants to sign up for their Telegram accounts. If participants want to receive the token in their Ethereum wallet, they should not leave the Telegram accounts or they risk disqualification for the airdrop. A Twitter Account (https://twitter.com/). Similar to the reasons behind the Telegram account, many of the airdrop tokens will also require participants to follow them on Twitter. Some of them will even ask participants to retweet some tweet. An email address. Sometimes airdrops will ask for participants’ email, too. Referral code — Sometimes, in order to participate in the airdrop, all that participants have to do is sign up through someone’s referral link, which only requires participant’s name and email.

Image 3 — Airdrop example

6. Where to find Airdrops?

There are a few ways to find airdrops:

Bitcointalk — one of the oldest and largest forums for crypto discussion. This is usually the very first place a new project will announce themselves, and is a great place to learn about all of the ICOs going on. Participants can usually get a great history of the project by looking through their initial Bitcointalk thread. Airdrop aggregates — These often do some pre-processing for participants and verify that the airdrops are legitimate and that the projects are likely to actually pay out the coins. Some of the good aggregates are: Airdrops.io, Airdropking.io, Airdrop Alert, Sub-Reddit Airdrops, Sub-Reddit CryptoAirdrops,… Platforms — Some platforms, like Earn.com allow participants to sign up for airdrop lists and have their address publicly available to be airdropped into. All available airdrops will also be available in Tokens Marketplace under the category Airdrops!

7. Future of Airdrops

An internet search for “airdrops” or “free tokens” yields lots of websites, subreddits and Telegram channels that people can follow to gather up crypto tokens. And there’s even a Pokemon Go imitator under development that would allow companies to distribute free tokens to people playing an augmented reality game.

Since August 2017, Airdrops have massively increased in numbers and are labeled as a new PR craze in crypto world. According to the website airdrop alerts, since July 2017 there have been 467 Airdrops and 96 are ongoing at the moment of writing this analysis.

Graph 1 — Airdrops in percentage

Everyday we see approximately 5 new Airdrops listed on websites, and this number is on the rise. Still many advise against airdrops for now.

“In China, many people refer to these offerings as ‘candy’, said Minhui Chen in an interview with Coindesk, a partner at Global Blockchain Innovative Capital (GBIC), continuing: “Low-quality projects are taking advantage of airdrops to make a fake community.”

Brayton Williams of Boost VC, a fund that favors crypto projects with a strong focus on community, thinks issuers could do a better job of targeting with airdrops. For example, he’d like to see issuers focus airdrops on people based on geography, demographics, etc. to cultivate the best market for the future platform.

It is very early to see how this trend will result, but the majority agrees that ICO’s need actual users to have access to the tokens.

And last but certainly not least, a word of advice: BEWARE OF PHISHING SCAMS, and NEVER, under NO CIRMUSTANCES give out your private information, such as your PRIVATE KEYS!!! If you give up your private keys, you are almost definitely going to lose your funds. And always do your research!

Dear readers, this analysis is the product of an extensive research that was carried out in May 2018. Since the world of cryptocurrencies is changing extremely fast, this may not be relevant in the future, but for now, we hope you will find it useful :)

P.S. More educational articles will soon follow!