Few days back when Manta had announced the airdrop eligibility I had written a post about why I stayed away from Manta as their gas fees for bridging and transactions was too high. Another factor was that based on my experience I always stay away from projects that advertise their airdrops heavily before launching the airdrop. Manta was asking people to bridge large amounts of ETH to get their airdrop. This was a clear red flag for me and I decided to stay away from the project. 

Disastrous Launch!

Today the airdrop claim went live and also trading of $Manta started on Binance and some other exchanges. Nobody was able to claim their tokens and the team blamed it on a DDoS attack. The issue has still not been fixed.

Last week Twitter was flooded with people being super bullish on target price for $Manta. People gave the range as pessimistic lower limit of $3-$4, likely range of $5-$6 and optimistic range of $10+. The token is trading for $2 on Binance at the time of posting.

I am not sure if the token price will recover after some days if the network stabilises but I think there could be another major dump in the short term when people are finally able to claim their tokens and as majority of the holders are frustrated they are bound to dump the token the moment they are able to claim it.

NFT Dump!

As part of their airdrop campaign Manta was rewarding people for bridging and transacting more and more on their network. It was giving out NFTs and the more you transact the rarer NFT you get. There was so much of a frenzy that many people spent thousands of $ to buy rare NFTs from secondary market. Now Twitter is flooded with posts of people saying some whale dumped huge number of NFTs in the market and now their NFTs are practically worthless.

The Tweet below captures what exactly played out today. The only people who made a profit were influencers who made their followers bridge high volume of ETH into Manta and received big referrals. 

My Airdrop Strategy for 2024

I see a lot of people FOMO into grinding meaninglessly into airdrops as they see some Twitter influencers boast about the big airdrop they got last year. What people need to realise is that all good airdrops happen in stealth mode without any prior publicity.

You should avoid pre-announced airdrops that ask users to bridge large funds into their networks. 

I am going to focus on projects that reward users who actively participate in test-nets and will completely avoid projects that ask to bridge $1,000 of ETH.

What Will I do With my $Manta?

I have 21 $Manta tokens that I can claim which I was awarded for doing a free quest of Galxe. At $2 a token I don’t see any point in selling it now and might as well hold or stake it.

If the price remains too low I think it will be a better strategy to stake it. The rationale is that Manta was a very highly publicised network built on modular architecture of Celestia. Despite the disastrous launch there might be other projects who will consider $Manta staking as a criteria for their future airdrop.

This kind of piggy-backing airdrops seem to be getting popular now with so many projects rewarding Atom, Celestia stakers. I see the next narrative building on Twitter that SUI stakers will also get big airdrops in the coming months. I will follow my general strategy to keep interacting with the projects I actually like. Let’s see if the big ones like zkSync, LayerZero, Linea or Base finally go ahead with their airdrops. Fingers crossed.

Cheers,

Sam