After 3 months of farming, only received $10: Should we cancel airdrops?

The way airdrops are supposed to be is to give loyal users a pleasant surprise subsidy.

Written by: OxTochi

Translated by: Chopper, Foresight News

I still remember the first time I received a crypto airdrop, as if it happened just yesterday. It was 2020, and I was busy completing bounty tasks on Bitcointalk. One morning, I was woken up by a WhatsApp notification—it was a message from a friend.

"Have you used Uniswap?" he asked. I replied, "Yes," and then he said, "Then you should be able to claim 400 UNI tokens, which are now worth over $1,000." I immediately went to Uniswap's Twitter page to find the claim link, and after claiming, I sold them right away.

It was that simple—"free money" falling from the sky. No forms to fill out, no grinding levels on Discord, and none of those "must contribute to qualify" restrictions.

Looking back, that moment defined what an airdrop should be: a surprise "subsidy" for users who love and are actively using the product, not the worthless junk activities we see today.

The Golden Age of Airdrops

Later, I received the 1Inch airdrop. At the time, any wallet eligible for UNI could also claim 1Inch. But what truly changed my perception of "airdrop mechanics" was the dYdX airdrop.

To participate, I had to bridge ETH to the dYdX protocol. Back then, most Layer2s were still just whitepapers, and cross-chain fees were sky-high. I did a few trades to generate some volume—not much—and then bridged my assets back out. Just one day of activity, and I ended up with a five-figure (USD) airdrop. Thinking back, it still feels unbelievable.

The total value of all the airdrops I received peaked at over $20,000. To be honest, I sold half of it along the way—after all, it was "free money," and cashing out is the norm.

The dYdX airdrop gave me my first decent principal, which I immediately invested in DeFi. During the "DeFi Summer," I did liquidity mining on Juldswap, earning about $250 a day. Honestly, I really miss those days.

The Decline of Airdrops

Of course, those good times couldn't last forever. After dYdX, I participated in airdrops from Scroll, Arbitrum, Optimism, and zkSync, with zkSync marking the start of my "bad airdrop experiences."

However, I will never forget the Scroll airdrop. Expectations were sky-high, and even though co-founder Sandy posted the famous "lower your expectations" tweet, it didn't dampen anyone's enthusiasm.

People kept raising their expectations until disappointment finally hit. The Scroll airdrop allocation was absurdly low—a complete joke. The crypto community's mood instantly plummeted from excitement to despair. Honestly, that airdrop left a shadow on me, and I swore I'd never participate in Layer2 airdrop "mining" again.

If it were just Scroll, maybe I could accept it. But what really bothered me was realizing that such "low-quality airdrops" would become the norm in the future.

The Current Chaos of Airdrops

Fast forward to today, and the airdrop scene is a complete mess. What used to be "surprise airdrops" have long since turned into an "industrialized, Sybil attack-style airdrop farming" business.

You have to spend months, even years, interacting with various protocols: bridging, adding liquidity, burning gas fees, and building so-called "user loyalty." In the end, whether you get an airdrop is pure luck, and even if you do, the allocation is pitiful. What's even more outrageous is the emergence of "airdrop claim windows open for only 48 hours"—I think Sunrise was the first to do this.

Even if you finally make it to claim day, you'll find the allocation doesn't match the time and cost you invested, and it often comes with a ridiculously harsh vesting schedule. For example, the 0G Labs airdrop unlocks quarterly over 48 months—48 months, a full four years!

There are so many of these issues now that whenever I see those "airdrop Alpha" tweets, my first reaction is: "Ha, here comes another 'mosquito leg' airdrop."

The Game Between Projects and Users

The reality is this: in recent years, users have become purely "utilitarian"—there's no need to sugarcoat it. Now, people use a product just to get rewards; no one is going to spend hours clicking around or contributing to the community for the sake of so-called ecosystem culture.

And what about the project teams? They do want loyal users, but what they want even more are "impressive metrics" to show VCs—like high user numbers and large community size. These numbers are enough to boost valuations when preparing fundraising PPTs. As a result, it becomes a game of "farming metrics" versus "preventing metric farming" between users and projects.

The result: neither side is happy. Users feel played, and projects face the challenge of retaining users.

What Should Airdrops Be Like?

If I were to redesign airdrops, I'd probably go back to the Uniswap model: no hype, no leaderboards—just a surprise subsidy for loyal users one day. This alone would reduce "industrialized airdrop farming" and lower users' unrealistic expectations.

Alternatively, you could learn from Sui's "presale-style airdrop" model: set a reasonable fully diluted valuation (FDV) and give early contributors and users the chance to buy tokens at a discount.

The closest to this model now are probably Cysic and Boundless. They use a "level system" to reward users with presale discounts based on their contributions to the ecosystem.

Or, just cancel airdrops altogether and focus on building truly usable products: create something with real product-market fit and a solid revenue model, instead of copy-pasting the same thing 200 times. Honestly, this approach is more in line with the long-term interests of the crypto community.

Conclusion

The current state of airdrops is downright terrible. It fails both the users who spend time "grinding" for airdrops and the project teams trying to build real communities.

The end result is that everyone feels used. Maybe canceling airdrops and focusing on building products that let everyone make money is the better choice?