DeFi Dives: Airdrop Alpha

By Brando_28 | Greener Candles | 4 Jan 2024

Welcome to this week’s DeFi Dives which is a special edition as it’s going to be all about the airdrops.

In my opinion, one of the most beautiful words in the crypto space is airdrop. It has this extremely positive feel to it — a gift slowly falling from the sky.

Airdrops aren’t a new trend and I kept bumping into several ones during the previous bull run but usually, I didn’t bother to participate. They seemed like too much work or the token in question wasn’t something I was interested in.

I won’t make the same mistake again. Instead, while preparing for the upcoming bull run, I’m hunting for airdrops, constantly seeking alpha on multiple platforms.

Why Airdrops?

For two reasons: they usually don’t require any significant extra investment and the potential reward can be massive. You might have heard of the Jito airdrop on Solana which ended a while ago. Those who staked $SOL on the platform early on were rewarded with JTO tokens and even those on the lowest tier got 4–5 figures $ worth JTO.

How?

As mentioned, staking tokens is one of the ways and probably the most common one too. The thing about it though is that since the new launching platforms obviously want to attract active users, they allow only those who have been interacting on other chains to participate. This is done by taking the snapshot way earlier than the actual announcement. This prevents us degens from fooling the system.

Some airdrops can be started after the announcement but they usually require a bit more work such as interacting with the platform or doing Zealy quests.

Safety First

One of my airdrop hunting grounds is X, formerly known as Twitter. As we know, X is full of douchebag scammers who want you to connect your Metamask to malicious sites and then eventually separate you from your assets.

Most scams are easily spotted. For example, all the ones with commenting disabled are scams like the one above.

I don’t have a bulletproof method of detecting these as some might be very well made but what I do is a lot of research which means reading about the project on multiple platforms and of course, reading all the available project docs. Also, some browser extensions such as Guard Wallet can warn you if you are about to sign a suspicious request.

Dymension

Good things shouldn’t never be kept a secret and therefore, in this article, I’m going to share my favourite airdrops with you. As a matter of fact, I’m going to share all of the airdrops I am currently involved with.

Almost a month ago I wrote about the Celestia chain and their native token, TIA, in this article and mentioned the possible airdrops too:

Just one more reason to stake $TIA, and I know, these are only rumours but there might be a possible airdrop on its way for those who participate in staking $TIA on Keplr… Not holding my breath but that would be a nice bonus for sure.

Well, I didn’t have to hold my breath for very long because now the bonus has arrived and it’s called Dymension which is an upcoming modular blockchain designed to secure and interconnect rollups using the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) standard.

To be eligible for the DYM airdrop, you need to have staked on at least one of these chains: Celestia, Cosmos, Ethereum L2s(Arbitrum, Optimism, etc), Solana or hold some NFTs like Pudgy Penguins. There are certain criteria for each chain and how much you needed to hold on December 19th. when the snapshot was taken.

For a TIA staker like myself, the minimum was only 1 TIA and with my 13 staked TIA I managed to secure an airdrop worth 205 DYM tokens that will be sent to my wallet when the chain is launched.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. We obviously don’t know the future value of these tokens but we can always speculate. Being a native token of a new blockchain, DYM can be compared to similar tokens such as OP, TIA, ATOM or SOL. It might also pump or dump a lot at some point after the launch but so have the others.

If we would further speculate on the future valuation of DYM and compare it to ARB($1.83) for example, 205 would still be worth a lot. Compare it to TIA, it’ll be worth even more.

In his YouTube video, Humble Farmer is covering the DYM airdrop first and is also speculating on the valuation of the token:

TLDW; Humble farmer is suggesting the DYM value to be maybe half of TIAs current value which would make 1 DYM to be worth about $6–7. In this video, there is another opinion too putting the valuation at least as high as TIA.

The Dymension airdrop claiming is still live for 17 days so if you have been staking on the chains I mentioned earlier, I highly suggest you go and check your eligibility here. You never know, Dymension could become huge.

As for TIA, I plan to increase my stake in future even though doubt its price will fall that much any time soon. I’m also thinking about acquiring some ATOM and INJ and stake them as well to increase my chances for future drops.

Doki

By the time of writing this, the price of TIA has been pumping like crazy (up 25%/24h) and no wonder as these airdrops just keep popping up. The next on my list is DOKI which is still a bit of a mystery to me mainly because the person communicating with X followers writes like a baby dragon…(sigh). Yes, this it’s a memecoin.

Still, one thing I’ve learned this year is to never underestimate memecoins. We all remember PEPE and BONK and now there is USEDCAR and other super annoying stuff like that flooding the space.

Of course, there’s always room for more. Here are the criteria for DOKI airdrop which is pretty similar to Dymension.

Claiming registration should open on the 6th and is done on their official site where you can more info about the project as well. However, I must warn you that it’s written in a very peculiar style…😅

GRVT

GRVT is a hybrid crypto derivatives exchange (HEX), offering self-custody trading, lightning-fast execution, deep liquidity, capital efficiency, and competitive fees.

This one here is a little bit different. GRVT airdrop is divided into different phases. We are currently in phase 1 (phase 0 is completed) which means we can only collect points that count toward the airdrop by inviting friends along. This is done differently than with most referral programs and Zealy quests as we have just 2 invite codes to use per week.

I think the idea behind this is to make users think hard about who they want to invite as both will be getting points in phase 2 based on their activity. The platform will then have potential active users.

At this point, GRVT airdrop is a very low-risk thing to take part in as we sign up using an email or Google account instead of our wallets.

As it happens, I just got my 2 new invite codes today so if you want to check it out, here’s the invite. Hope you become very active! 😀 Also, there’s this zkSync mystery box you get a shot at in a week if you join.

Bonus Airdrop

Fore is a community drive protocol where you predict the outcome of certain events or create your own. They currently have an ongoing Zealy campaign which you can check out here.

Conclusion

I remember a time just before Solana was launched when I had an opportunity to participate in the SOL airdrop and I did but just couldn’t see the potential of it back then. The distribution of it was just like with TIA, for example, all I needed to do to be eligible was to stake some amount of an asset on a DEX and that would have been it.

At the time I thought it was too much of a hassle or the transaction costs were too high or something like that. To think of it now, taking part in airdrops is actually a win-win if you are feeling bullish about the staked token in the long run — you get the APR on that and a chance score even better in the form of an airdrop.

All things considered, in this crypto game we are all playing, I think airdrop hunting, or farming, is probably one of the safest ways to earn if the research is done properly.

Thank you for reading and happy airdrop farming! 🎈