Look, I know what you’re thinking — really? another airdrop guide? And I get it, I swear that half of my feed on twitter is all about different airdrops, rumored or confirmed that are speculated to come out. But hear me out, there’s a lot of people made huge profits off of the Optimism airdrop and that was only 5% of the total token supply. With still 14% left allocated for future airdrops, it makes sense to me to at least consider whether or not it’s worth pursuing:

In the case of Arbitrum — they are really the only major layer 2 that doesn’t have its own native token, so I would say it’s really only a matter of time before we hear some concrete news about a potential $ARB or $ARBI token coming out soon.

Given that both have the safety and security of Ethereum, and given how cheap and efficient to operate on both Arbitrum and Optimism, in my opinion it’s a relatively low-risk play. In fact, because I absolutely hate mainnnet’s horrendous gas fees, most of the action I do is now on layer 2’s anyway.

Let’s get into the nuts and bolts shall we?

Optimism

I’m starting with Optimism because they have probably the clearest roadmap of tasks you can do to prove that you’ve explored and used the Optimism ecosystem. If you take a look at Quests on Optimism, there’s a total 18 different quests you can complete in order to be able to mint, resulting in 18 different NFTs:

The cool part about these NFTs (and with Optimism in general) is that they literally only take cents to mint, and many of the tasks can be completed in less than a day.

You’ll also notice that most of the claimable periods for many of these NFTs are for January 17th, 2023, meaning that you have at least a couple of months to get these quests completed. To my knowledge the next airdrop date has not been announced, but it would make sense to me for them to start taking snapshots around that date.

In addition to the NFTs, there’s a couple of themes that you can parse from the breakdown of Airdrop #1 which may provide clues to what other criteria that they’re looking for in future airdrops. These include:

1. Repeat Optimism Users — taken straight from the docs, this was a criterion from Airdrop #1:

Address is an ‘Optimism User’ and made at least 1 transaction with an Optimism application across four or more distinct weeks. This selects for the top 20% of ‘Optimism Users’.

2. Voting/Delegating — It was clear that from Airdrop #1 that the Optimism team wanted to foster and reward active members in the community, so it makes sense that they went to big DAO voters such as on Maker and Aave. Therefore, it makes sense going forward that they reward active members of their own community, meaning that if you are delegating (or delegating to yourself) on Optimism, I would expect that this would probably increase your chances of proving that you are indeed, part of the Optimism community.

Arbitrum

Unlike Optimism, there has not been an airdrop announced, but seeing how it’s the last major layer 2 that doesn’t have its own native token, many are speculating that it’s only a matter of time until an $ARBI token becomes available. You may have heard of the “Arbitrum Odyssey” — a campaign on galxe.com to allow users to gain NFTS as they complete various tasks:

If you’re feeling FOMO because you’ve already missed out on the “Enter the Odyssey” NFT, there’s a ton of them on sale for pretty cheap on opensea. Keep in mind however that it’s total speculation whether or not buying (as opposed to earning) the NFT will make someone eligible for an airdrop.

As you’ll see in the graphic above, the Odyssey is paused, and it has been since last June as the team wanted to first complete the Nitro upgrade:

The Nitro upgrade was completed in late August, but unfortunately there was no associated news with the Arbitrum Odyssey being resumed:

The Arbitrium Odyssey was speculated as one of the most probable qualifiers if they were to do an airdrop, but seeing as it’s still paused, many have speculated that Arbitrum’s guild quests will act as a qualifier as well. Published in August, by completing each of their 18 guild quests, you obtain roles via their discord server:

Once again, the completion of any of the quests leading to an airdrop is pure speculation, as is the airdrop of an $ARBI token itself. However looking at general themes of both the guild and odyssey quests that have been released so far, it’s clear that they are trying to encourage people to engage with the Arbitrum ecosystem, so regardless if you’ve completed these quests or not, I imagine what will be more important is whether or not your on-chain address has interacted regularly with its most popular protocols.

If we’re associating popularity with TVL, then I would go through and start looking through defi llama’s list of different Arbitrum-native platforms:

With its relatively cheap gas fees, I don’t think it would hurt to poke around, do some swaps, join some LPs, and maybe profit at the same time you’re checking Arbitrum out.

Conclusion:

With much cheaper gas fees and the same Eth-security standards, I probably conduct 90~ something percent of my activity on layer 2’s as opposed to Ethereum Mainnet. More and more from what I’m seeing, Ethereum Mainnet only really makes sense if you’re moving around at least 4–5 figures worth in transactions, otherwise, you might be paying more than $100 dollars to move $100 dollars worth of token (especially when the gas prices get ridiculously high!).

Therefore apart from the airdrops, I highly recommend that people check out layer 2’s for the cost efficacy as well as all the remarkable things they’re building there.

And lastly, I imagine that as time progresses there may be more/changing information and details of when/if the next airdrop occurs, so be sure to follow me on twitter (https://twitter.com/CryptosWith) to get all my latest updates.

Disclaimer: And as a final reminder, this is not financial advice and this is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please as always, do your own research and find what investments are best for you. Stay safe everyone!