I have been watching how retrodrops have become quite an important thing in crypto. It’s not just another mechanism, but it has completely changed how projects interact with their communities.

Basically, a retrodrop is a retroactive airdrop. The project takes its native token and distributes it among users who have already interacted with the platform in the past. It’s their way of saying: hey, we appreciate what you’ve done from the beginning.

The Uniswap case in 2020 was historic. They distributed 400 UNI tokens to every address that had ever used the DEX. That opened everyone’s eyes. Then came Optimism and Arbitrum with their own retrodrops, recognizing users who had been there before the boom.

Now, why do projects do this? The criteria vary. Some reward based on how much liquidity you deposited, others look at transaction volume in dollars, some value the time you spent in the ecosystem. Some projects even give extra points if you voted in their DAOs or if you created multi-signature addresses, indicating you are part of a serious investor group.

Of course, this has generated a parallel phenomenon: retrodrop hunters. These folks anticipate which projects will do retrodrops and start actively interacting with applications on networks like Base, Linea, zkSync, and Starknet, hoping that someday they will turn into multipliers.

And here’s where it gets interesting. Many hunters create multiple addresses to maximize their chances. This is known as multi-accounting or Sybil accounts. For example: in 2023, someone created nearly 22,000 addresses on zkSync. Projects consider this malicious, so now they perform network analysis to detect them. Optimism, for instance, excluded about 17,000 addresses from its OP token retrodrop.

Strategies have evolved. Some use specialized software that automates interactions, allowing the creation of hundreds or thousands of addresses without manual effort. Others prefer the manual approach, which is slower but potentially less detectable. Some combine both tactics to diversify risks. There have been cases where they consolidated ARB tokens worth $3.3 million from nearly 1,500 different wallets.

What’s interesting is that retrodrops have become a professional activity within crypto. It’s not just luck; it’s a strategic participation method in the market.

In conclusion, retrodrops are a mechanism that rewards loyalty and early participation. Projects use them to strengthen communities, and users see them as legitimate opportunities to obtain tokens. Although some try to game the system with multiple accounts, projects are improving their detection systems. In the end, retrodrops have become a crucial aspect of the development of new projects in crypto.