3 Airdrop Hunting Power Moves
Navigating the landscape of airdrop hunting can feel overwhelming for newcomers.
Along with the allure of discovering countless tokenless protocols often comes the challenge of optimizing for finite money and time resources, turning the task of maximizing airdrops into an art, demanding strategic maneuvers to secure the most rewarding allocations.
Today, we’re arming you with three airdrop power moves to revolutionize your airdrop hunting approach and elevate the value and number of airdrop allocations that you receive! 👇
🥩 Staking
Staking to secure crypto chains is the top airdrop power move you can’t afford not to incorporate into your hunting routine!
This strategy allows you to put your crypto assets to work earning yield while positioning yourself to receive airdrops from protocols that depend on the security you provide – or from networks that hope to attract you as a staker!
Celestia kicked off the most recent boom for staking-as-a-strategy in September 2023 when it announced it would airdrop 18.5M TIA tokens to ATOM and OSMO stakers.
⚛️🧪 20M TIA to stakers and IBC relayers of Cosmos Hub and Osmosis pic.twitter.com/E6lIy7BEBO
— Celestia (@CelestiaOrg) September 26, 2023
Since the drop, staking to secure Cosmos chains – primarily ATOM, OSMO, INJ, and KUJI – has emerged as a prolific airdrop hunting strategy, one that has helped to propel outsized gains in many of the ecosystem’s top tokens!
Staking to secure Celestia itself has also emerged as a popular airdrop strategy and one that could help participants score airdrops from the numerous blockchains (including Ethereum L2s like Eclipse) that are outsourcing their data availability to the network.
While Ethereum stakers – especially of the solo staker variety – have long been promised airdrops in return for their services to the network, it has been stakers to Cosmos ecosystem chains who have seen the greatest returns from this strategy in recent months.
For Ethereum stakers feeling left out on the meta, fear not, for you can still stake your ETH while gaining exposure to the airdrop meta. Restaking with EigenLayer or through the liquid restaking protocols (LRT) built on top of it (like ether.fi or KelpDAO) will likely position you for potentially lucrative EigenLayer and LRT protocol airdrops.
Resources:
- 📕 The TIA Staking Opp
- 📕 Why are Cosmos Tokens Pumping?
- 🏹 Eclipse - Airdrop Hunter
- 🏹 MilkyWay - Airdrop Hunter
- 🏹 EigenLayer - Airdrop Hunter
⛓️ Bridging
While bridging between chains with a CEX may be convenient, unfortunately, when you are hunting airdrop opportunities on the frontier of crypto, not every chain is supported, meaning you won’t be able to access every opportunity if you stick to centralized exchanges.
Onchain bridging protocols will not only allow you to access airdrop opportunities on exotic chains, but are an important qualifier for many airdrops themselves, as their use establishes your onchain footprint and is often used as explicit qualifier for many modern airdrops.
Furthermore, bridging protocols themselves are core pieces of cryptographic infrastructure that help to connect the various chains and establish interoperability in a fractured landscape; being an early user of their technology could position you to receive an airdrop and a slice of ownership in their multi-billion dollar protocol!
Make sure to send transfer funds between chains using tokenless bridging protocols and aggregators whenever possible to maximize your chance of getting an airdrop allocation!
Resources:
- 🏹 Bungee Exchange - Airdrop Hunter
- 🏹 Jumper Exchange - Airdrop Hunter
- 🏹 Orbiter Finance - Airdrop Hunter
- 🏹 LayerZero - Airdrop Hunter
- 🏹 Wormhole - Airdrop Hunter
💯 Multi-Hunting
Any airdrop hunter’s guiding principle is to maximize the returns they receive from their efforts! Multi-hunting can take different forms depending on the task you are looking to accomplish, but the premise revolves around maximizing your interactions with airdrop candidates.
A great place to start multi-hunting is with your wallet. Done correctly, you’ll be able to turn almost every crypto transaction you make into an action that increases your eligibility for an airdrop!
Are you making transactions through a wallet provider that is offering points? If not, you should consider switching to a wallet that does, like Rainbow!
Make sure to always use your tokenless wallet’s infrastructure for swaps and bridging as you proceed with your DeFi actions! Doing so will allow you to interact with your wallet in a manner traceable onchain and may allow you to hunt multiple airdrops at once.
Phantom’s swap button, for example, routes trades through Jupiter, potentially exposing you not only to a Phantom airdrop, but also to future JUP rounds.