Recently, I’ve noticed more and more people in the community discussing how to “farm” airdrops, so I took some time to summarize the gameplay. Honestly, airdrops are indeed one of the lowest-cost ways to get into crypto—sometimes even at zero cost—yet the returns can be quite substantial.

First, let’s talk about what an airdrop is. The English term is “Airdrop.” Simply put, it means the project team distributes tokens for free to users. The purpose is usually to promote the project and build a community. Tracing back to the Bitcoin era, all it took was sharing Bitcoin on social media to earn rewards. Nowadays, project requirements are more complex: users are generally required to prove value through actions like staking and interactions, and only then can they receive an airdrop.

Why would project teams do this? It might look like they’re losing money, but the logic is clear. Giving out tokens for free helps with promotion, quickly accumulating users and reputation—benefiting the ecosystem’s long-term growth. Take Arbitrum as an example: they airdropped 1.162 billion ARB tokens to 625,000 wallet addresses, averaging 1,859 tokens per address. The wealth effect from this airdrop really sparked chaos in the community, but more importantly, after the airdrop, Arbitrum’s ecosystem user count and engagement didn’t decline—instead, they continued to grow.

When it comes to whether you can make money, my answer is yes. Although returns vary from project to project, overall, airdrops are low-investment—sometimes zero-investment—with high output. The most famous historical airdrop cases show this clearly. When Uniswap distributed UNI in September 2020, each eligible user received 400 UNI, worth about $1,200 at the time. At its peak, the value of those tokens exceeded $10,000. When Apecoin was airdropped in March 2022, a single account received about 1,500 APE tokens; selling them directly could yield $9,000 to $10,500. Arbitrum’s ARB airdrop also brought nearly $3,000 in profit to a single account. Of course, not all airdrops are this aggressive, but gains ranging from dozens to hundreds of dollars are still fairly common.

So how can you participate in airdrops effectively? There are too many crypto projects—you can’t try them all, so you need a set of methodology. The first and most critical point is to evaluate the project’s scale and the intensity of its airdrop. This mainly depends on the project’s funding situation. Generally, projects that raise over hundreds of millions of dollars will almost always issue tokens, and the probability of an airdrop is also high. For projects with funding under tens of millions, if they don’t have support from major players, they may be cash-strapped, and the airdrop intensity may be limited. You can learn about project backgrounds through funding databases, Twitter, and other channels. Following some professional airdrop-focused influencers can help you get information and guides as early as possible.

Once you’ve identified a project, you should develop interaction methods based on the project’s specific characteristics. For testnet projects, active interaction is usually enough. For mainnet projects, you should choose approaches according to the situation. Common methods include task-based reposting and liking, interaction-based spot trading/crypto swaps and cross-chain activities, and staking-based single-token or dual-token staking, as well as composite strategies. One thing to note is that these are not one-time actions—project teams increasingly care about the frequency and time span of interactions. If you plan to use multiple accounts, make sure to isolate them properly; otherwise, if an account is flagged as a sybil account, you may have your eligibility for the airdrop revoked.

Now let’s look at current airdrop opportunities. The trend right now is that airdrops place more emphasis on real users’ actual contributions, rather than simply boosting activity through trading volume. There are plenty of potential airdrop opportunities across tracks such as modular blockchains, cross-chain protocols, and DeFi innovations. Ecosystem frontrunners like Starknet and Solana, as well as emerging public chains like Monad and Berachain, are also worth paying attention to. Project teams are now more inclined to require identity binding or on-chain reputation systems to prevent sybil attacks. Airdrop distribution is no longer one-size-fits-all; instead, it is dynamically adjusted based on the depth of users’ interactions.

Overall, airdrops have become an important way for many people to obtain excessive returns. Even though the difficulty is increasing, opportunities have not decreased—many high-quality projects will still allow you to profit by participating in their airdrops. The key is to have patience and a strategy, and to truly engage in building the ecosystem rather than just thinking about “farming rewards.” Only then can you seize the real opportunities in the wave of airdrops.