Back in January, I took part in CoinGecko's Access Protocol airdrop - transferring some of my hard-earned CoinGecko Candy Rewards for a code to receive 5,000 ACS tokens:

I didn't give it much more thought after that, because as the Airdrop FAQ said:

"ACS received from this airdrop will be non-transferable and instantly staked in CoinGecko’s pool for 1 year, granting access to Gecko Ramblings newsletter."

(Access Protocol enables people to support their favourite digital content creators and gain access to premium content by staking ACS in creators' pools. This generates ACS rewards which are then split between creators and supporters.)

I started getting the Gecko Ramblings newsletter from February, so I was confident the airdrop has worked. No ACS showed up in my wallet (Trust wallet in this case), but I wasn't expecting it to as it would be locked in the CoinGecko pool.

Then very recently I needed to check my SOL balance for a completely unrelated reason - so I ran my wallet address through the Solscan website (a Solana blockchain explorer). Imagine my surprise when I saw:

That's right, 17,432 ACS tokens freely available in my wallet! (And not much SOL, but that's a different story...)

It turns out that the ACS airdrop also included an additional liquid airdrop. As CoinGecko explains:

"This is a bonus airdrop for CoinGecko users, verified for the locked airdrop with ACS staked in our creator pool for a year. This means you should receive a liquid airdrop on top of your locked ACS redeemed via Candy Rewards."

I didn't see this in my wallet for more than three months because I hadn't added ACS as a custom token in Trust. So it was there, of course, but not listed among my holdings.

I have very mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand, I've received quite a large amount of ACS unexpectedly - great! On the other hand, I could have been staking that ACS to support creators and gain some additional rewards over the past three months. Instead I've just left it sitting in my wallet doing nothing.

I'll take it as a reminder to be more curious and to follow up on any airdrops I enter. Oh, and to use blockchain explorers periodically to check what I'm actually holding.

Of course, if you also entered the CoinGecko ACS airdrop, you might want to run your own wallet address through Solscan...