Airdrop

An Airdrop is the automatic disbursement of a cryptocurrency to wallets meeting the distribution criteria pre-defined by the founding team.

Initially, Airdrops were viewed as a mechanism to try and build a community around new projects by allocating a portion of the token supply for free to a large number of potential users. This was a common strategy employed by ERC-20 tokens during the ICO boom of 2018.

When it seemed like ETH HODLers woke up to new tokens in their wallet everyday from projects trying to gain the attention of Ethereum’s user base.

In some cases projects are not content to just airdrop tokens to large numbers of users and hope a community develops. Instead requiring direct action to be allocated a portion of the drop. For example tweeting about the project or joining and engaging with the project’s Discord

More recently DeFi projects have been using it to reward early adopters. Uniswap pioneered this approach when they airdropped every user who had interacted with the protocol 400 UNI tokens when it first launched.

Further Reading on Airdrops

CoinMarketCap‘s Listing of Currently Active Airdrops