Crypto users were blessed with yet another generous airdrop last week, as the Ethereum Name Service protocol generously distributed governance tokens to early adopters.
ENS adopters get a five-figure payday
Who would have thought that buying the domain rekt.eth might yield a five-figure sum? But something happened last week (although we don’t know whether that particular domain owner received such a large sum). The popular Ethereum Name Service protocol distributed a retroactive airdrop that rewarded many users with a generous amount of ENS tokens.
ENS, which issues NFTs doubling as Ethereum addresses and domains, had long been expected to launch a token, and its price duly skyrocketed upon launch. From a low of around $17, the ENS token logged an all-time high of $84 on November 10, resulting in a fully diluted market cap of over $5 billion and instantly putting ENS in the top 100 cryptocurrencies. The price has retreated since, but even at the current valuation, ]it’s now worth well over $10,000, with the most active ENS participants having received six-figure sums.
DYDX another lucrative airdrop
ENS was far from the only generous airdrop in 2021. In fact, it was not even the most generous, as DYDX, a decentralised futures exchange, airdropped well over six figures to some of its early adopters in September. The exchange determined the number of tokens received by each user according to their activity on the platform before the snapshot was taken. Users that had deposited and made at least one trade received the biggest share of the airdrop, but a few users that clocked trading volumes of over $1 million got almost 10,000 DYDX tokens per user, worth up to $130,000 at that time. On average, users received around $16,000. Making the switch from more familiar centralised exchanges was well worth it in that case.
Paraswap next in line
The decentralised exchange aggregator Paraswap is next, as the DEX plans to distribute 7.5% of its total supply to about 20,000 active early users. How much that airdrop will be worth is yet unclear, but the platform made the decision to filter eligible users based on their activity and only selected 20,000 out of a possible 1.2 million that had used Paraswap. Therefore, chances are those lucky 20,000 will walk away with a tidy sum of the native PSP token.
How to get in on the airdrop craze?
If airdrops sound like free money, it is because they are. Protocols distribute them as a way of rewarding early adopters and fostering a sense of ownership. So how to get your share of that?
It’s pretty straightforward: try out as many new protocols as possible and be as active as possible. Almost every protocol airdrops some share of its tokens to early adopters, but not every airdrop is as lucrative as ENS or DYDX. Identifying “the good ones” is almost impossible, so it pays to be curious and try it all out. Especially DeFi protocols tend to airdrop quite liberally, and users are aware of that rush into new protocols, boosting TVL in the process. It will require a bit of work, but the reward is well worth it in this case.