For all newbie let me keep this short and sweet. Airdrop is like a lottery game where need to do 100 of projects but 90 will sure scam you and 7 will give you mid profit where as 3 will give you life changing amount. But you may think I wil skip 90 and focus more in those 10, well it not work like this.
Airdrop come with trend, trend will lead market and price along with scammer. There will be 10-15 project in each trend, among them you can easily filter out 10 project are not worthit but 5 project seems best and among 5 project one will give you life changing amount, another will give you mid profit and rest will scam you.
I am talking from retail prespective - for those people who don’t have big capital or influence. Top people will always win even in scam project either by investing big capital or by referral and promotional content.
The trend of L2 project
The trend of L2 start with optimism airdrop and then arb airdrop to more than 625000 user, where each user earn 300$ to 4000$ easily. Then lot of L2 pop up in market with big funding like 50 million to 30 million. Then manta gave decent airdrop just for NFT and galxe task. After this the rest L2 project all rugged like Linea, zksync, starknet , scroll and lot more.
The L1 trend
The trend start with aptos airdrop in oct 2022 where user earn 1200$ on an average in free of cost. Then in 2023 celestia $TIA drop another airdrop where user earn 500$ to 5000$ easily. Later many L1 project like monad, berachain, 5irechain, aleo came in market and scam their community.
The Socifi trend 1.O
The first wave of socifi “post to earn” trend lead by tipcoin gave thousand dollar airdrop just to post some tweet about tipcoin and then lot of other project like posttech, friendtech appear and scam the community.
The solana ecosystem
The most success airdrop come from solana ecosytem. Every year 2-5 project from solana ecosystem drop the airdrop but yes scam project also join the hype and rugged their community. Project like jupiter, wen meme coin, Pudgy penguins drop the best airdrop to maximim number of user. Active defi tarder got 4 figure money from jito, fluxbot, drift protocol. Many project like kamino, parcel, sonic and lot more again scam their community.
The sui ecosystem
Sui eosystem play differently. People who staked sui, did some trx in defi protocol get nice airdrop from deep, bluefin and walrus protocol. Later on many project join the hype like ikadot, MMTfinance, kriya but they did not cooked well.
The telegram bot trend
Back in 2024 notcoin gave the biggest airdrop in term of user and amount. The task was easy you just need to do tap-tap on screen like mining, many people used to troll tg bot hunter but it really cooked well. Later on CEO of telegram also launch new telegram bot project name dogs. The task was same referal your friend + daily check in and this was also on of the biggest airdrop in term of amount and user. Then things start getting out of hand, when project like hamster combat, tomato, blum, catizen launched their tap-tap program and scam more than 50 million user.
The node run trend
node run projects which considered as most usefull contribution for web3 projects but also the worst trend. This trend was no lead by any projects but yes some project like Aptos, Nillion, boundless gave good airdrop but maximum project brugged the communuty. It is considered as worst trend because node run is one of the high investment and diffuicult task where we need to have some sorts of programming skills. Many projects like allora, pipe, 0glab, aztech did not reward the node runner. LINK
The info-fi trend in web3
Many of you newbies think info-fi trend is new meta but all of you are wrong. First thing, info-fi is the best marketing tool for web3 projects. You know why? Social-fi already existed before Kaito, but neither project nor the community got benefits.
I am talking about Galxe, Zealy, and other social-fi campaign platforms. How many of you got big rewards by engaging in Galxe and Zealy campaigns? Talking about myself, I earned $300 in last 4 years.
In Galxe, projects decide what users need to do as social-fi tasks, but in Kaito users decide what they will do for marketing of their fav project, and I like this approach because we all have different talents and yapping about same stuff in same way is meaningless. Some are good at art, some can build mini projects, whereas some are expert in video content.
The death of Kaito, Wallchain, Xeet is because of AI slop, engagement farming and of course centralized social media platforms. Let’s not exaggerate this topic again but my main point is info-fi platforms may change but info-fi will not.
Remember Tip Coin? Where you can earn $TIP just by tagging their ID in your post and reply.
Remember Arkham? All you need to do is share referral link on social media and print money.
Remember inscription where we just need to post on X and for that we got token and swap it on
By the way one thing is clear, there is always one or two projects which will perform well and drive the trend in market and there will be maximum projects that will fail. Its on us to filter out the best projects from every trend. you need to bet on trend not in solo project. Big player often position themselves in all project of particular trend so even if 90 project will scam they managed to be profitable.