The Ultimate Airdrop Farming Framework

By The Max, translated and adapted by Auri

This article will cover my personal framework for approaching airdrop farming. Without any introductions, let’s get into it!

The list of contents is rather simple:

• What are these airdrops, and why do they exist? 

• Primary criteria for airdrop distribution

• How to find projects with potential airdrops? 

• How to build your strategy?

• When ripping benefits? (soon)

Airdrops and why do projects launch them? 

An airdrop is a free distribution of project tokens to its community for various actions at an early stage. In other words, good projects always remember their early adopters, rewarding them for supporting the project at the start.

A person who hasn't been deep into the era of large drops may ask a very logical question: "Why does a project give away tokens for free?". Well, there are several answers to this:

- Attracting attention

- Legal problems

- Good manners 

Attracting attention. Everyone understands what's and why's of hype, so I'll not go into details; instead, let's look at the example of how it works.

Aptos had about 30,000 mentions on Twitter at the time of the approaching TGE. It only took distribution of one airdrop to 100k+ people, when the number of mentions immediately grew to several hundred thousand and continued to grow daily, causing a feeling of FOMO among Twitter degens. Quite a good boost in such a short time, isn't it?

Attention is significant for every project because it is both a) additional liquidity and b) justification of the project's value and its appreciation by the community. Large projects with hundreds of millions of dollars in investments are often ready to allocate enormous budgets for airdrop distribution because the hype at the time of TGE is a valuable indicator of the project's market success.

Legal Problems. SEC or the "US Securities and Exchange Commission" can bury a project if it finds something to dig into. One of the most common violations for which the SEC has pressured projects and conducted serious investigations is equating a token with securities. That's why part of the projects abandon token sales in favor of an airdrop token distribution or other types of reward for their users.

Again, let's take a look at Aptos. Due to legal concerns, Aptos used several mechanics to distribute tokens to the community: rewarded its testnet participants, distributed several percent of the total supply to all participants who passed KYC on their platform, and to those who minted a special NFT and linked email / Discord. Thus, the guys avoided a critical problem because, as has been said, SEC can destroy any project, no matter how cool.

Good manners. Every self-respecting project appreciates its community, allocating tens of millions for various distributions. When developing tokenomics in the early stages, the team usually allocates some percent of the total token supply to encourage their followers, thereby gaining a good reputation within the community. In the current realities, a large project that does not appreciate its "early birds" is immediately poured with FUD from all sides.

How much could you earn by participating in airdrops?

I wouldn't say I like making people feel FOMO, but the stats below can have such an effect. 

Let's imagine a not-so-fictitious character, Vasya, who had a small deposit and focused on finding airdrop activities for two years. Indeed, you can't keep track of every project, but the most successful cases and cases where participation wasn't "gated" allow Vasya to pump his deposit up to at least a six-figure amount on the following projects:

2021

— Ens Domains (≈1k-15k$)

— DYDX (≈5k-100k$)

— Biconomy (≈8k-25k$)

— Paraswap (≈5k-15k$)

— Notional Finance (≈7k-30k$)

2022

— Project Galaxy (≈500-6k$)

— Goldfinch (≈1k-12k$)

— Optimism (≈1k-7k$)

— Hashflow (≈500-20k$)

— Aptos (≈1k-3k$)

It is worth mentioning that the value extracted differs for every single case simply because people sell at different prices while some decide to hodl. In addition, the calculations above represent participation from one address. You can easily project the possible profit yourself for X number of wallets. 

What are the main criteria for projects to distribute an airdrop?

After going through a decent portion of FOMO, let's figure out how to get an airdrop: what criteria do teams have in mind when developing tokenomics and planning airdrops?

Below are the criteria I identified while analyzing dozens of projects. Although they will be a handy tool for each reader, remember that the criteria constantly evolve, with more filters and sophisticated screening methods added:

1. The "activity" of your wallet: when distributing a drop, many projects guide their selection based on a relatively apparent parameter - activity in various EVM networks.

2. Contributions at a very early stage of project development: here goes the boost of the Discord server, swaps in alpha product versions, filling out feedback forms, and participating in community calls.

3. The amount of activity in a particular project: Optimism set this trend up with their "Repeat OP Users" criterion, which implies that the wallet had N number of activities on Optimism at different time intervals before the snapshot. Think of it like monthly Cohort analysis; loyal wallets get more.

4. Participation in the ecosystem (specifically important for L1 blockchains/L2 solutions): interaction with various applications (dApps), establishing yourself as an active user (lots of random on-chain transactions), and proving yourself to be an actual human. Typical airdrop hunter behavior is easy to track.

5. The number of users: let's recall Paraswap and their massive research (you can read it here), which tells how they filtered wallets for a final airdrop out of > 1'300'000 users/abusers. By the way, I recommend reading the entire research; you will likely find quite a few exciting things.

6. The value of the project for the crypto-ecosystem: if we compare a dapp to a blockchain, it is rather apparent who is the bigger fish. Blockchains have much more space in their tokenomics for the community (for example, Aptos and Sui allocated over 50% of the total number of tokens), so there are many opportunities to participate in various activities/events of state-of-the-art L1.

How do I find and analyze projects for potential airdrops?

There are a lot of methods for searching for projects on the market now, and I want to share with you some of the points I use myself.

First of all, the largest and richest (based on funding) projects can easily accommodate a vast number of people and fairly reward their adopters. That's why I never ran after the so-called "alpha" in search of a project that launched a couple of days ago, has five followers on Twitter, and 0 track record. Instead, I see an obvious opportunity to upgrade my accounts in the most significant projects by catching non-obvious multipliers. From experience, never trust “we are not planning an airdrop” message.

Now I will introduce you to some essential tools in my research.

• Dune - I give first place to this GEM; I can't find other words to describe it. Here you can find information that will help you understand the REAL number of users, their volumes, the most popular actions, and everything that may be important when analyzing the potential drop you plan to do. I'll show you an example of the research a little later. 

• Regional crypto aggregators - my tactic is insanely simple: I put the keyword into the Telegram search, and magic happens. Dozens of publications from various researchers who shoveled a ton of information: social networks, documentation, official project chats, and brought knowledge on a silver platter for their subscribers. It's good to quickly examine the publications and understand what various influencers focus on. By studying this information, you should find some non-obvious parts not mentioned in most posts and guides, increasing your possible multiplier/chance for an airdrop. If I see some "advice," like making 10+ transactions from many places, I do 20+, thereby beating most people.

• VC investment aggregator - this data helps keep track of where investors' money flows. Sometimes, projects that close a round don't even have social networks -> you find possible gems in the early stages. I use the following sources: Table by Messari | Crypto Fundraising (Telegram, Website) | ICO Analytics

• Twitter is the last but not least tool that helps study the opinion of various foreign influencers about an event. There is no need to teach you how to use it, but I'll still tell you a little about how I use Twitter. We put some topic we want to find in the search box (for example, "project_name" airdrop strategy) -> look at the most popular tweets on this topic, then do the same with the "Recent" category -> remember the previous paragraph and try to beat the influencer and their audience by making slightly more contributions than they recommend -> profit.

You expected to see dozens of unnecessary critical links and sources, didn't you? Believe me, the ones I mentioned will be enough to thoroughly analyze most projects and develop your strategy for working with this or that activity.

Practicing project analysis

Now I will show how exactly I do the project analysis. It is worth mentioning right away that each project always has its own approach, but there is always an overarching pattern to airdrop logic. 

Experience is a critical parameter that you cannot master immediately. Having an experience, it takes me 10 minutes to understand the essence of the activity from scratch, review all the information and think over an approximate strategy. But experience is the totality of your knowledge, which grows time after time, so be active in researching projects by yourself instead of using ready-made step-by-step guides. The more projects you analyze, the richer your experience will become.

As an example, I propose to consider my favorite and, at the same time, a very anticipated event, which, I hope, will happen in 2023 - the full launch of zkSync. 

Let's go!

1) We go to the official site, where the quality of VCs that supported the project catches the eye.

2) We go to Dune -> we type in the name of our project, then we look at the most popular dashboards. One metric that immediately interested me was the number and volume of transfers through the official bridge. It's easy to see what kind of alpha is here because to beat 70%+ people, you need to deposit through the official bridge of more than 0.1 ETH. Think about it - one parameter can cut off almost half a million people.

3) Dune helped us calculate one of the possible parameters. Now we can start searching for guides either in aggregators or on Twitter because we need to find out as much information as possible about the available activities on the network and analyze it later. These are the activities that caught my eye:

1. Gitcoin donations (projects are closely related to each other because it is possible to pay contributions through zkSync), so in each round, I threw small amounts (<$5) to various projects.

2. Use the mainnet with a single dApp - ZigZag Echange. This is how you look like an "active" user for the project. In other words, you create several transactions a couple of times in a few weeks. It sounds a little weird to do swaps back and forth, but sorry, DeFi and other exciting apps are still not on the mainnet.

3. Mint NFT - the zkSync wallet presents the functionality to Mint NFTs on its main page, possibly for a reason. Therefore, it is advisable to take a few NFTs, which I did.

4. Having some funds in L1 + L2 accounts is wise. I started following this parameter after Paraswap made it one of the criteria to have a small amount on the wallet to consider it an "active user." I agree it sounds a little crazy; we must reckon with the idea since the project has implemented it.

5. It won't hurt to mention a few activities that I don't believe in as an airdrop multiplier, but for anti-fomo sake DYOR:

•  Participate in Crew3 quests;

• Mint Citizen ID from the game Tevaera and be active there;

• Easily accessible roles in Discord.

All the information was found in public sources by request "‎zksync airdrop," so keep an eye on your info and beat the typical airdrop hunter. 

One of the most critical alphas I accidentally found on Twitter searching the request "‎zksync alpha" back in 2021 is the picture below with the answer to an exciting question from a team member.

Of course, everything can change instantly (especially in crypto), so you need to understand the project in detail to have the edge. By the way, many projects in the early stages can give out something "extra." In other words, following the answers of team members / their publications in social networks, especially at the initial stage of development, is a good thing.

On this beautiful note, the research comes to an end. Whether to do zkSync now is a rhetorical question because none of us knows whether a snapshot has been completed. Any interactions from scratch on the project now are at your own risk, Do Your Own Research!

After years of experience, I found some distinguishing features worth looking at when deciding whether to participate in an activity or skip it.

BUT this is not a call to evaluate every first project according to these criteria. It would be best to make the critical choice independently, based on experience and personal research.

So, I usually look at the following:

• Funds and investment volume  — VCs often act as a clear indicator because they play a crucial role in developing a project.

• Experience — I couldn't help mentioning this parameter because it allows me to spend just a few minutes determining the chances of an airdrop. As mentioned earlier, the sooner you start researching projects on your own, studying success/failure stories, the broader your understanding of what you should pay attention to will be. Therefore, I strongly advise all beginners to review the previous airdrops: ways of distributing coins, cutting off abusers, and main multipliers. 

• Unjustified hype is especially relevant at the current time. After the recent FOMO drop stories from Aptos and Hashflow, people saw the possibility of an airdrop in absolutely all projects, driving thousands of accounts into it, often getting unnecessary POAP, OAT, and similar garbage in return. I avoid such stories as I understand that the project cannot accommodate tens or hundreds of thousands of people. Often good airdrop is possible only when the project has a substantial use case (for example, blockchains, L2 networks) and makes the product not for a narrow circle of people but for "mass adoption."

• The team's attitude towards the community - this item is more likely to come in handy if you have decided to participate in this or that activity. It would help if you studied the project's social networks - usually Twitter or Discord. In various tweets, you can find hints to help you understand which direction to move.

  

• Intuition or gut - with its help, you can catch your life change literally on one project. This parameter is closely related to your experience because guessing a project where you will earn big money is challenging. I always tell everyone that I do not need to participate in dozens and hundreds of projects in a year because it will be enough for me to "guess" just 2-3 ideas to beat all those chasing quantity, not quality.

• Don't spray - If you are experienced enough and ready to bear the risk of guessing and ending up with nothing - take a chance and look for the gem that will pay back all the previous stories tenfold. The strategy to do a lot of activities, but not at the maximum quality, also takes place. I like to completely immerse myself in several projects, knowing all the details, thereby constantly convincing and motivating myself to choose the right one.

The list of parameters comes to an end. Study them and add them to your research because the more parameters you look at, the more accurately and deeply you will understand the project.

What airdrops do I bet on?

In general, I advise you to approach any activity without high expectations because if something does not go according to plan, hopes will collapse, significantly damaging the mental state. Throw rods in different projects, and do not go ALL IN. This rule applies not only to trading but also to the search for potential airdrops.

Whether to participate in activities now or not is your matter. I can't guarantee anything. Therefore, as they say, Do Your Own Research + Not Financial Advice.

My list of gems:

zkSync | Arbitrum | Layerzero | StarkNet |

MetaMask (ConsenSys) | Sui | Fuel | Sei |

Optimism* | Aztec | Scroll | Golden |

*the project has a token, but there is hope for new rounds of drops.

Auri’s additions (lower priority, do only after completing the above)

Azuro Protocol | Perennial Finance | Connext |

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Original research published by https://t.me/themaxblog, translated and adapted by Auri_0x

Thank you, dear reader! Let me know what you want me to write about next.

Yours truly,

Auri