Airdrops Are Here to Stay, but It's Getting Harder to Make Millions From Them

Airdrops, where crypto projects dish out valuable tokens to their early users, have provided enterprising DeFi enthusiasts the opportunity to make millions.

People who got in on the airdrop craze early on, like CC2Ventures, were able to make a lot of money. But as more and more projects launch tokens, it’s getting harder for new entrants to replicate his success.

“Airdrops are here to stay, but only a very select few will print and it will be increasingly hard to make a killing off them,” he said in an interview with DL News.

Throughout 2023 and 2024, DeFi users who stuck it out during the crypto winter were rewarded with several lucrative airdrops.

In October 2023, modularity blockchain Celestia airdropped 60 million of its TIA token — valued at $1.2 billion at its peak — to early Ethereum and Cosmos users, among others.

Later that year, Solana project Jito launched its JTO token and airdropped 10% to early users. At the token’s peak valuation, those who received the smallest allocations could sell their stash for over $20,000.

But in recent months, many hopeful airdrop hunters have been left feeling short-changed.

When Ethereum layer 2s Scroll and ZKsync airdropped their tokens in late 2024, users complained of paltry allocations or being left out of the airdrops entirely.

“The farmers got millions of tokens from ZKsync,” Farea, a pseudonymous self-styled airdrop hunter, told DL News in June. “But the actual people who were doing this for two years only got 1,200 [tokens].”

Many of those who did get tokens chose to sell them, as highlighted by the poor performance of Scroll’s SCR and ZKsync’s ZKS tokens in comparison to Celestia and Jito’s tokens.

According to CC2Ventures, the increased number of similar projects launching tokens — such as layer 2s — is leading to valuation compression.

“Previously there were only two or three layer 2s with a token: Optimism, Arbitrum, Immutable; now there are over 20,” he said.

Simply put, the more projects launch tokens, the harder it is for the market to sustain high valuations for all of them.

In 2020, top decentralised exchange Uniswap was among the first DeFi protocols to conduct an airdrop, rewarding early users who traded on the platform with UNI tokens.

Because the Uniswap airdrop and other early airdrops like it were unexpected, and occurred when DeFi was a smaller sector, they rewarded a smaller number of users. This meant bigger payouts for each person.

But fast forward five years, and that dynamic has changed a lot.

Institutions, VCs, and other large players have joined the airdrop farming game, lured in by the lucrative returns, CC2Ventures said. And with more awareness, the tokens projects give out are getting split among more people.

“The market overall smartened up,” CC2Ventures said.

The often predictable eligibility criteria projects use to decide who gets an airdrop and who doesn’t have made it easy for airdrop farmers, especially organized ones, to ensure they get a payout.

Despite many recent airdrops failing to live up to earlier ones, that doesn’t mean they all will.

“There will always be outliers that will print heavily due to the market early on overlooking the opportunity,” CC2Ventures said.

Such a situation could arise, he said, when a DeFi project starts attracting huge numbers of users and capital after it has been live for a long time.

Perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid, which airdropped its HYPE token in November, is one example of this phenomenon. It launched its airdrop “points” campaign in November 2023 when the platform was tiny compared to its competitors.

But predicting the next Hyperliquid is easier said than done. CC2Ventures isn’t taking any chances.

“A spray-and-pray approach — farming them all — works best,” he said.