Did you fade airdrops in 2023? You missed out on multiple opportunities to easily earn five-figure paydays by simply interacting with crypto applications!
From the Arbitrum airdrop in March that distributed nearly $1.5B in ARB to the community to the recent Jito airdrop that rewarded even its smallest recipients with $20k in JTO tokens, 2023 has certainly been a fruitful year for Airdrop Hunters.
With multiple crypto projects, including Starknet and LayerZero, giving updated information on their token distribution plans in recent weeks and numerous promising Solana projects in the midst of their points programs, 2024 is gearing to be equally promising!
Front-run next year’s airdrop opportunity today by getting started with these 5 airdrop opportunities👇
🏦 marginfi
Website | Twitter
Sector: Lending
Chain: Solana
About:
Intentionally branded in all lowercase, marginfi aims to become a suite of smart contracts that create a DeFi prime brokerage, facilitating peer-to-peer lending and portfolio management across blockchains. Users can access marginfi via a desktop browser or install it as a PWA on mobile devices!
The platform’s initial (and most popular) product, mrgnlend, is an overcollateralized money market protocol that allows anyone to lend or borrow assets on Solana. In September, marginfi extended its product line with the introduction of LST, a SOL liquid staking token with 0% commission offering depositors yields from network rewards and MEV extraction.
Why we’re watching:
marginfi has an ongoing points program, rewarding early users for lending, borrowing, and referring others to the platform! Protocols often implement a points system as a precursor to an airdrop to help identify accounts contributing towards their success.
Maximize your eligibility by:
- Lending to marginfi
- Borrowing from marginfi
- Minting marginfi’s LST
- Shilling your marginfi referral link
🥩 EigenLayer
Website | Twitter
Sector: Restaking
Chain: Ethereum
About:
EigenLayer is bringing restaking – a novel primitive in crypto-economic security – to Ethereum! There are two ways to retake with EigenLayer. Easily restake whitelisted liquid staking derivatives (rETH, stETH, and cbETH) with EigenLayer or spin up an EigenPod to run your own validator while restaking.
Staked ETH can be rehypothecated to secure a wider variety of applications and accrue additional rewards. EigenLayer will create a marketplace for the security of these applications and bring capital efficiency to staking by allowing one source of capital to secure multiple applications in tandem!
Just as the magnitude of Jito’s airdrop caught many by surprise, EigenLayer’s airdrop and the restaking meta the protocol unlocks could be transformative for Ethereum. EigenLayer’s LST caps will be raised on December 18th, so mark your calendar to deposit and position yourself for this airdrop opportunity!
Why we’re watching:
EigenLayer has not confirmed whether it will have a token, but the eventual decentralization of the protocol’s governance control is crucial to its success.
By choosing to distribute tokens back to the community via an airdrop, EigenLayer would further align itself with Ethereum’s values, helping to establish favor within a community deeply concerned about potential risks created by the rehypothecation of stake.
Depositing to EigenLayer could also make you eligible for an airdrop from the projects building a wide range of restaking applications on top of the protocol.
Maximize your eligibility by:
- Depositing LSTs to EigenLayer on December 18th
- Restaking native ETH with EigenLayer
- Purchasing EigenLayer's World Builders NFT
- Purchasing EigenLayer's EigenWorlds NFT
🟣 zkSync
Website | Twitter
Sector: L2
Chain: Ethereum
About:
zkSync’s latest iteration of the L2, Era, is a general-purpose rollup that not only seeks to increase Ethereum's throughput and lower transaction fees but to fully preserve the chain’s foundational values of freedom, self-sovereignty, and decentralization at scale.
Instead of publishing all transaction inputs, like Polygon’s zkEVM, zkSync only publishes the state differences to Ethereum, theoretically lowering fees by further compressing data and reducing storage costs. Account abstraction is native to zkSync Era, opening the doors for tons of cool wallet features, like gasless transactions and flexible security rules.
Why we’re watching:
The Matter Labs Chief Product Officer told CoinDesk that while zkSync will likely be one of the last zero-knowledge rollups to launch a token, two-thirds of the tokens distributed will go toward the zkSync ecosystem, meaning that this drop will likely be meaningful for early users.
It's unclear exactly how or to whom those funds would be disbursed, but we expect to see an airdrop used to allocate a large percentage of these tokens. Failure to do so would break from L2 precedent and would risk irreparable harm to the relationship between zkSync and the chain’s community.
Maximize your eligibility by:
- Bridging to zkSync with Orbiter
- Swapping assets with SyncSwap
- Providing liquidity to Maverick
- Registering a domain name on zkSync
🎨 Tensor
Website | Twitter
Sector: NFT Marketplace
Chain: Solana
About:
Tensor is an NFT marketplace on Solana with support for Solana inscriptions. The marketplace is focused on NFT traders, like Blur, but the team is moving to increase the appeal of their platform for retail traders as well.
Tensorians are a collection of 10k NFTs that play a core role in the Tensor ecosystem, offering a 1.5x boost in their points program and a passive 20% point yield!
Why we’re watching:
Tensor has an active points program. Crypto projects use points programs to identify early users, often with the intention of rewarding those contributing to the success of the protocol with tokens, making it highly likely that Tensor will pursue an airdrop!
Maximize your eligibility by:
📨 LayerZero
Website | Twitter
Sector: Cross-Chain Messaging
Chain: Numerous
About:
LayerZero is an omnichain interoperability protocol that enables developers to securely send data of any kind across blockchains.
The protocol aims to enable trustless, direct transactions of any type between chains, and the generalizability of its messaging technology allows LayerZero to be used as a building block for a wide variety of inter-chain use cases, from cross-chain governance to NFT marketplace applications.
Implications of the further progression and adoption of generalized messaging technology are numerous, from a simplified onchain user experience to a reduction in liquidity fragmentation.
Why we’re watching:
LayerZero confirmed a token will launch during the first half of 2024 in a December 7th Tweet, stating they are "committed to getting [its distribution] right." Given longstanding precedent for crypto protocols to airdrop tokens to their users at TGE, getting the distribution right likely includes an airdrop to LayerZero ecosystem participants!
An LZO airdrop would likely help attract additional attention to and bootstrap further liquidity for the LayerZero ecosystem, producing similar network effects as an L2 airdrop, making it increasingly likely that LayerZero will choose to airdrop tokens as part of their distribution.