I've noticed there seems to be no consistent specification on how a standard airdrop is supposed to be. I recently participated in an airdrop of Hivecoin that was everyting you could hope for: 10 000 HVN with no committment at all, simply as a reward for downloading the wallet of the coin itself.

If I would have wanted to, I could have sold the coin right away for roughly the equivalent of 10 USDT, but since I'm a hodler of course I decided to stay with the community and earn more through mining and doing various odd tasks for the development team for small HVN rewards. 

In other words, the development team invested in my trust by giving me free crypto with no strings attached. It paid off in the sense that I decided I wanted to help spread awareness of the crypto and dedicated my time to spreading their community.

What I've noticed is that very few newly launched Cryptos do airdrops this way. First of all, they seemingly only do an airdrop for a few percent of the people who apply for it. Secondly, many of them on CoinMarketCap only allow you to participate after doing various tedious tasks. All of them ask you to download and follow their various accounts on Telegram, which is a social media app that fills no need whatsoever but is on the contrary rife with scammers that try to pose as the official representatives of given airdrops.

Second, they ask you to embarass yourself on twitter by retweeting a stupid message and tagging friends that are guaranteed to block you for spamming them. After all of these tasks are done you have the chance to be one of the 1% who might be eligeble for a coin that has the high probabillity of being a classic pump-and-dump. And now they just asked you to put your credibillity on the line to vouch for a coin you don't have the most basic idea about. 

Even worse, there are many airdrops that are presented as such that really involve you investing lots of money in exchange for recievieng some tokens you have no idea about or gaining currency on some dodgy exchange. This is of course nothing you should ever consider unless the exchange is reputable and has existed on the market for a number of years, such as Binance, Kraken, Coinbase or Kucoin. Nevertheless, it annoys me they present this as an airdrop when it obviously is just a marketing gimmick. Many of even reputable exchanges offer you free crypto, such as coinbase learn to earn program where they gave you free cryptocurrencies in exchange for learning about the coin. While the idea itself was a great way for the coins to build awareness and market themselves, the coinbase itself offered so little crypto it wasnt possible to withdraw it to your wallet considering the minimal threshold. Therefore, the basic idea for the exchange was that you would keep the crypto in your wallet account rather than taking it to your own wallet, or with their hopes that you would buy more of the same crypto to be able to move it.

As I said before, the best way to earn free crypto besides from mining is still good ol' publish0x, and I appreciate being part of this community so much!

It would be fun to discover new cryptos and follow their journey to greatness or failure but considering the inconsitency of these airdrops it makes the task quite tedious. Everybody wants to discover the next Bitcoin in its infancy but nobody wants to be the person who gave away BTC before it was worth anything. Perhaps thats why coin creators are protective of their airdrops.

Do you have any recommended airdrops? Let me know in the comments below!