In 2020, a few lucky people elevated themselves to a new financial level by hodling YFI, the premier yield automation protocol that is now at the center of an entire ecosystem. Each YFI coin now ranges around $30,000.

The crazy part? These coins were airdropped to people for FREE.

Yes, it's true that you can come up on some crazy gains if you get in the right airdrop. I certainly tried to do this my first month in defi. With most of those projects having delivered on their "promises," I can now provide you conclusive findings about my experience.

What I Did

Basically got on Telegram and signed up for every airdrop I saw.

I also signed up for every airdrop site I saw and applied to all of those.

I ended up in 132 different Telegram groups dedicated to a single airdrop or project distributing their coins through an airdrop. (Spoiler alert: They're all deleted now.)

I only signed up for airdrops that didn't require any KYC or referrals. They were on two networks mostly — Ethereum and Tron.

The Experience

While waiting on the airdrops, I tried to integrate myself with the communities on Telegram with results varying from "bad" to "super bad." 

I got kicked out of more groups than I can remember with Telegram suspending all communication privileges multiple times. Yeah, Telegram, you let scammers steal people's money, but if someone says something about it, they get banned. Ok.

But yeah, it was all full of noobs and wen lambo talk, pepe memes and "HODL HODL HODL" before there was even anything to hodl. Also a ton of people asking over and over when the airdrop was. I honestly can't remember any group that was actually discussing tokenomics or crypto markets.

The "projects" themselves did little to promote the actual use cases of their protocols. Admins were scarce, communicating with us only to tell us that the airdrop had been delayed or to just keep participating in the group.

I feel sorry for the people who didn't create a separate email just for this stuff. I started to sense data grab.

What I Learned

There is a such thing as free lunch in crypto — the Uniswap airdrop shows that the technique can be profitable for a lot of people and good for business. But there is no such thing as finding a free lunch for free.

Some of these groups had tens of thousands of people in them. If the airdroppers had only created a decent product, they would have had an opportunity at major adoption.

I had exactly 0 of these projects work out to be something even moderately profitable. My Tron wallet got full of shitcoins that weren't even worth enough to trade for TRX. The Ethereum projects didn't even come through with the shitcoins.

For the Future

Fortunately, I didn't waste any time gathering referrals for these scammers and idiots, so I'm not too mad. The experience taught me a great deal about how to spot a scam. I also learned the importance of community. Even if a project had good marketing for itself, the community could completely tank it. I won't invest in any hillbilly pepe wen lambo projects any more, and it's saved me money and time.

Am I done with airdrops? No, I think that they are still an essential part of distribution in this phase of crypto. However, with the emergence of incubators like YFDai, Duck Dao Dime, Xio and Trustswap, I believe that airdrops will be "membership" efforts more than just free drops. That phase of crypto is over, I believe. It helps to have established, trusted incubators vet a project before that project gets to poop itself all over the market, and I plan on using them a lot more.

I still subscribe to an airdrop site that was giving away what I know to be legit airdrops in the past (I just missed them). I won't go for everything — only projects I truly believe in. You don't have to get every winner in crypto, just a few. And you're much more likely to do that if you stick to the stuff you understand and enjoy.