Dear Bankless Nation,

With the return of a bull market in crypto, the only thing on the rise as much as prices lately? Airdrop opportunities.

The NFT sector’s proving no exception here. A handful of upcoming NFT-related airdrops have already been confirmed for 2024, and we might see more than a dozen projects also throw their chips down here before next year’s end.

Where to be watching right now, then? I’ve got you covered! For today’s post, let’s talk both known and potential airdrops that could make the new year a boom year for us NFTers.

-WMP

Airdrops in NFT Land: Opps to Watch in 2024 💫

Airdrops, in which projects launch and distribute tokens for free to the wallets of their community members, have become the main way to incentivize participation and loyalty in crypto.

These fungible tokens, e.g. Ethereum ERC-20s or Solana SPLs, are typically designed for collective governance, and their launch events can provide big paydays to their recipients.

Yet just because airdrops center around fungible tokens doesn’t mean they can’t be NFT-centric. Indeed, some of the biggest airdrops ever—like APE, ENS, and LOOKS—were via NFT projects. So don’t blink now, because there are currently a handful of confirmed airdrops around the contemporary NFT scene that are on the verge of arriving.

For instance, perhaps the highest-profile example in the NFT space at the moment is Blur. The leading NFT marketplace on Ethereum recently announced plans for its Blast layer-two (L2) scaling solution and unveiled that its Season 3 rewards campaign would conclude in May 2024 with an airdrop of “REDACTED” tokens via Blast.

The general idea? Use Blur, hold $BLUR, earn REDACTED.

In other NFT L2 airdrop news, Frame also just revealed plans for its $FRAME token. The upcoming Arbitrum-powered optimistic rollup will conduct an initial airdrop (followed by further distributions) on January 31st, 2024. Anyone who’s traded an NFT on Ethereum over the past 2 years qualifies for this first allocation, so everyone who reads this newsletter should be able to claim! 😆

As far as other L2s go, you may have previously experimented with NFTs in the onchain gaming scene of Starknet, a rising zk-rollup scaling solution. The Starknet Foundation has already announced plans to release 10 billion STRK tokens, and they recently confirmed that they’ve taken a snapshot for the upcoming airdrop. There’s nothing to do here for now eligibility-wise, then, but keep your eyes peeled if you’ve tried the L2 before.

Another major confirmed airdrop that’s coming next year will be via LayerZero, an interoperability protocol that facilitates cross-chain bridging. And what’s one of the main things you can bridge across chains right now? NFTs!

For example, earlier this year I wrote about Holograph, an NFT platform built atop LayerZero. If you’ve collected, created, or bridged NFTs on Holograph before (and presumably for some time hereafter), then it seems you’ll be in line for the LayerZero airdrop. Additionally, this could end up being a two-for-one maneuver, as Holograph itself already has a points system, suggesting its own native token may be imminent.

But it’s also not all chain and bridge opps around the NFT airdrop landscape lately. At the app layer, there are known prospects ranging from crypto games to NFTfi. Perhaps the highest-profile examples here at the moment are Nifty Island, a metaverse gaming project that just unveiled $ISLAND and a Play-to-Airdrop (P2A) campaign, and NFTfi.com, the NFT liquidity protocol that has an ongoing rewards system ahead of its upcoming token launch.

That said, all the aforementioned projects except Holograph have confirmed token plans. So what about potential opps to be watching out for? What NFT scene airdrops could happen next year but also maybe never?

In my opinion, there are three no-brainer categories to be watching for airdrops right now: chains, marketplaces, and wallets.

For example, concerning chains, I think Coinbase’s Base and Zora’s Zora Network are L2s to watch here. Reportedly, a token is "not something [Coinbase has] ruled out entirely," while a token does indeed appear in line with Zora’s long-term vision. I wouldn’t be shocked if we eventually see both projects dive in here.

Regarding marketplaces, I predict we may see OpenSea launch a token and an L2 to better compete with Blur in 2024. Also, the Bitcoin NFT and Solana NFT scenes are experiencing booms currently and seem like other obvious places to begin. Magic Eden comes to mind, as it’s an increasingly popular tokenless NFT marketplace that supports both Bitcoin and Solana NFTs. The other large Solana NFT market, Tensor, which is similar to Blur on Ethereum, seems like a strong airdrop prospect too since it’s currently running a points system.

When it comes to wallets, there appear to be many NFT-friendly wallets that you could focus on in the weeks ahead. Rainbow just launched Rainbow Points for Ethereum users. Magic Eden has a new wallet. Phantom, a popular multichain wallet, seems poised to go the points route as well. There’s also Backpack for Solana users and Leather for people getting into Bitcoin NFTs.

Beyond these infra projects, one way to hunt around the app scene is by looking for areas where tokenless projects are surrounded by many projects with native tokens. For example, consider the NFTfi sector here. Most of the large lending and liquidity protocols in NFTfi currently have tokens or have announced plans for one, while two that haven’t yet are MetaStreet and Gondi. There’s also good chances that token releases soon extend into areas they haven’t reached yet, like crypto social, as big projects like Lens and Warpcast may potentially eye their own onchain incentive programs sooner or later!