Author: Nancy, PANews

Once considered the easiest shortcut to wealth in the crypto industry, the airdrop track has quietly passed its golden age. As the certainty bonus fades, the strategic threshold rises significantly, and market trust is continuously eroded, this on-chain gold rush game that has lasted for several years is beginning to enter a more complex and differentiated new phase.

At this turning point, whether airdrops still hold value and how ordinary players should adjust their strategies have become pressing real-world issues. Recently, PANews interviewed several veteran players in the airdrop market, sharing their practical reviews and coping strategies. Their personal experiences are a true reflection of the entire airdrop culture's shift from fervor to harsh reality.

Veteran players' real-world analysis: those who got rich quick but were still just there for the ride.

Sam was one of the earliest players to enter the "plucking fur" (or "fur-grooming") market.

He revealed to PANews that the highest return from a single airdrop project over the years had reached 4 million yuan. In the past few years, the average annual return has remained above 500,000 yuan, a figure exceeding the income of many white-collar workers in first-tier cities and even approaching the upper limit of some middle-to-high-income industries.

Back in 2018 when Sam entered the market, airdrops were far from being a standardized concept. The rules were extremely simple: register an email or phone number, fill in a wallet address, or even complete an on-chain zero-transfer test to receive a reward. Participants were mainly retail investors, strategies were not yet fully developed, and returns depended primarily on entering early and participating extensively.

The real turning point came in 2020. Uniswap, with a textbook airdrop, not only launched a vampire-like counterattack against its competitors but also unexpectedly ignited an explosion of the entire airdrop-hunting culture. Since then, airdrop hunting has become a replicable strategy, with a large number of users creating wallets in bulk and repeatedly interacting with them.

Especially as airdrop rewards have been continuously amplified, the practice of exploiting airdrops has gradually been replaced by systematization and large-scale operations. Methods such as multi-wallet management, script automation, multi-IP environments, and batch interaction have become widespread, and previously scattered individual players have been gradually replaced by organized studios.

During this phase, Sam transitioned from individual, manual operation to a team-based approach, and began using scripts for large-scale account farming. However, as the project began to focus on real users and long-term contributions, almost all of the hundreds of accounts he invested in popular projects like Starknet and LayerZero were wiped out. Nevertheless, the returns from the few successful accounts were still enough to cover the overall costs.

In the past two years, the project team has continuously upgraded its anti-Syllabus mechanisms, while internal insider trading has become rampant, leading to a continuous increase in the overall cost for airdrop participants and a significant decrease in the success rate. Sam's airdrop profits have also shrunk considerably. He admitted that the most severe losses were in script-based and testnet-type projects. Since last year, he has significantly reduced his investment and has switched to participating only when the opportunity arises. The meager profits of just over 100,000 yuan this year all came from projects he participated in in the previous two years.

Another player, "Ice Cream God of War," also stated that "reverse exploitation" has become the norm. "Some projects can't even cover the registration costs, resulting in pure losses. But for a few excellent infrastructure projects, the returns are another matter entirely."

For him, the biggest change wasn't the returns themselves; time became the most irreversible and difficult-to-hedge cost in this game. Over the past year, he participated in hundreds of projects and completed hundreds of on-chain interactions, and whether he could ultimately break even depended entirely on the quality of the projects he chose.

Christine is a typical latecomer to the "drop-in" craze. She entered the market in 2023, just in time for a new round of airdrops, represented by Layer 2.

Besides L2 projects like zkSync and Linea, she has capitalized on many trending topics in the past two years, achieving good results with projects such as Friend.Tech, Pizza, Blast, Ethena, Resolv, and Reveal. However, she has also faced setbacks, such as with projects like OpenMind, Backpack, and edgeX.

“The real big profits only account for 10%, the small profits are about 20%, and the remaining 60% to 70% are basically break-even or even losses,” she said while flipping through her notebook.

Veteran players like Sam and Christine typically establish a detailed record-keeping system, covering key data such as project name, interaction details, and investment costs. This is not just an operation log, but also a tool for continuous review and strategy adjustment, and to some extent, it witnesses the evolution of the entire "bargain hunting" (or "bargain hunting" in the industry) sector.

Airdrops have become a tool for profiteering; a bear market is the true test of a project's potential.

Airdrops were once a proven shortcut to wealth. Today, they have evolved from an early marketing and community incentive tool for cold starts into a means of creating false prosperity, and are now seen by many as a tool for reverse screening or even exploitation.

"The problem of insider trading by project teams has become quite common now. The logic is actually very simple: airdrops are going to be issued eventually, so why not send them to their own people first? They collect a lot of fees through various interactions to cover all their airdrop costs, and then they start endlessly manipulating users. There are almost no projects that genuinely want to do airdrops and give money to users anymore. Most projects are set up by institutions, and their essence is to harvest profits," Sam said bluntly in the interview.

In his view, it's becoming increasingly difficult to make money from airdrops these days. Project teams no longer genuinely want to airdrop, nor do they see users as long-term ecosystem builders; instead, they treat airdrops more as a tool for profiting.

Ice Cream God bluntly stated that many project teams never intended to develop a proper product. Currently, CT (Crypto Twitter)'s traffic pool is essentially a pool of low-quality traffic, while KOL pricing is becoming increasingly outrageous, making the entire marketing ecosystem somewhat unhealthy. If project teams truly want to achieve a successful cold start, the core issue must be returning to product strength. Users acquired through airdrops are not actually used by the product, resulting in near-zero retention. The next time a new project airdrops, they will leave without hesitation.

This is why, in his KOL marketing strategy, he positioned himself as a beacon, focusing on adjusting the incentive structure to a prize pool model. Those who write well and produce high-quality content receive payment, rather than simply paying per post. This change allows project budgets to truly acquire high-quality, in-depth content, rather than a bunch of mechanically copied, assembly-line-style posts. But ultimately, if the project's product is weak, marketing only accelerates its demise.

Christine holds a similar view: "Many projects lack real revenue and user base, relying more on airdrops to create fake traffic, then hastily issue tokens and list them on exchanges to cash out and leave. But there are also some projects with good fundamentals, real demand and actual market, which will still attract users to use them even without airdrop incentives."

She believes that bear markets are precisely the best time to sift through high-quality projects. The real big winners often lurk during this period, while bull markets tend to produce shoddy projects, many of which are merely fleeting phenomena. Conversely, projects that thrive in bear markets are those that truly possess patience and long-term development potential.

Survival Rules in the New Cycle: A Three-Step Approach of Investment Research, Stock Selection, and Low Cost

The gold rush game of "fleecing the market" that lasted for several years is now long past its golden age. This means that opportunities with certainty are becoming increasingly scarce, and the survival space for ordinary players is shrinking.

"I'm not optimistic about any projects that haven't issued their own tokens yet; I think they're all garbage. I probably won't be participating in airdrop farming anymore," Sam mentioned in an interview. Compared to his friends who can simultaneously engage in arbitrage strategies and obtain low-risk airdrop rewards, the cost-effectiveness of airdrops has significantly decreased. For ordinary people, perhaps the only remaining option is to participate in lower-barrier-to-entry activities like Binance Alpha.

Some players also bluntly stated in interviews, "The days of playing the game are over, there's nothing to talk about now."

Of course, some voices on social media still argue that this is a viable business opportunity, provided one is willing to screen projects, invest in research, and treat it as part of a long-term strategy. Opportunities still exist in a few high-quality projects.

Christine is one of them. In an interview, she revealed that she will continue to participate in airdrop interactions, but will significantly reduce the frequency and budget of her participation.

Strategically, Christine prefers to heavily invest in and deeply participate in investment research. "The goal of investment research is not to make a lot of money, but to avoid pitfalls. We should interact with products with the aim of profitability, rather than blindly chasing hot topics or believing in VC endorsements. Good projects must come from first-principles judgments."

She summarized the criteria for judgment into four points:

First, the team: The founders need to be intelligent, have strong execution skills, and be kind enough. Many founders only shout slogans on Twitter and lack genuine insight into the industry. However, most people who exploit loopholes rarely get to know the true nature of a project team.

Second, the product: It must have Product-Market Fit (PMF) and demonstrate that the team consistently delivers and takes the product seriously. "If a project has absolutely no revenue, the tokens it issues are essentially liabilities, and it's highly likely to go bankrupt. But if it has stable revenue, it at least shows that it has the ability to buy back its tokens."

Third, choose relatively emerging sectors that have not yet been disproven and enjoy a higher valuation premium. It's necessary to assess whether this narrative has room for hype in Web3, and also to determine whether it's a hot investment area in Web2.

Fourthly, time and cost: It is necessary to judge whether the current market sentiment is extremely FOMO or extremely pessimistic, and whether the cost of participation is low or high.

However, she emphasized that "exploiting" (or "exploiting" in the online marketplace) is an industry that requires both brainpower and hands-on skills. If ordinary players lack both the diligence and the willingness to learn professional knowledge, they will most likely only become the ones who get exploited.

Ice Cream God of War also offered a similar strategy: in the current market environment, selective investment is better than broad investment. For ordinary players without strong project selection skills, this phase really requires less action and more observation; the more you do, the more mistakes you make, and the less you do, the fewer mistakes you make, avoiding blindly casting a wide net. Web3 still offers life-changing opportunities, but surviving the bear market is paramount.

Ice Cream God of War also suggested several low-cost methods suitable for ordinary airdrop hunters: First, exchange transaction fees for points, such as on some DEXs or prediction market platforms. If you already have trading needs, you can accumulate potential airdrop eligibility at almost zero cost. However, if you're purely aiming for airdrops, you need to carefully assess your expected returns. Second, participate in various activities on CEXs (centralized exchanges). These have almost no time cost, but you can basically get a decent amount of money. Third, use stablecoin investments as a safety net, but nowadays, minimizing losses is key; proper risk control is fundamental.