Airdrop Dos and Don’ts

Airdrops – helpful tips/hints

Airdrops are great and they are essentially free money (usually for doing easy social tasks). Here’s some reminders for things to do/don’t do to protect yourself and try to avoid being taken in by scammers and problems. None of this is official financial advice – reading this is part of doing your own research, thinking through it and choosing to accept/ignore it is the more important part of doing your research.

Do

  1. Use a wallet dedicated for airdrops (or two) – avoid using your primary investing wallet for airdrops – keeping things separate has many benefits from taxes to protecting your primary investments from potential scams
  2. Do Your Own Research – crypto is about personal responsibility – it’s all on you to participate, approve transactions, etc.
  3. Have fun and learn about new projects – you might find some you really think are worth watching and maybe even investing in
  4. Enter as many as you can – any project has potential to go bust, be a scam/rugpull, fail, etc. Many projects are legit, many are poorly thought out. The more diversified you are in the airdrops in which you participate, the better your chances of being in on the most lucrative airdrops.
  5. Specific to selfdrop airdrops – Always verify the transaction amount triggered by the website – many websites have buy buttons that trigger a higher amount, some websites have bugs, and some are trying to scam you out of crypto – be careful and only approve transactions for the amount you intend (airdrops should be 0 BNB).
  6. Plan ahead and stick to your plan – some of these will increase in value significantly in the future and some will drop quickly – decide what you will do with your tokens (sell or hodl) project by project, understanding that if you sell too quickly you may help doom the project. If you hodl, the value may increase significantly over time. For the highest value, it may make sense to hodl the most promising tokens for years and years to come. 

Don’t

  1. NEVER Send money or crypto to receive an airdrop – real airdrops shouldn’t ask you to verify your wallet or any other nonsense – if they can’t afford gas, the project is probably doomed (it is different and okay to pay for gas when directly interacting with a smart contract [approving a 0 BNB/ETH transaction or sending 0 BNB/ETH]) If it tries to trigger a higher amount, even .002 BNB, it’s having you send crypto, not just spend it on gas.
  2. NEVER share your seed phrase or private keys  – it’s like giving your wallet away (if you have to install a new app, just create a new wallet)
  3. NEVER get your hopes up – some of these projects will fall through – don’t waste your emotional energy on these things, move on quickly when some of these become worthless – it may not be a scam, it may just be a failed project because the concept didn’t work out or the leadership wasn’t up to the task.
  4. NEVER enter standard airdrops multiple times – most projects frown on that and will refuse to give you any tokens – most of the time you’re better off referring more people for more rewards. (Many selfdrop airdrops make no such distinctions and you can redeem once from as many wallets as you may have – read the requirements/terms and just play along nicely so you don’t ruin it for everyone else)

Social media and wallets (Trust Wallet, SafePal, and Metamask)

Social media

In order to enter most airdrops, you’ll need to follow/share project info on your social media accounts. If you don’t already have them, create social media accounts on Telegram, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Medium, LinkedIn, YouTube and Reddit.

Wallets

There are many cryptocurrency networks with different tokens on each. In order to enter the greatest number of airdrops, you’ll need wallets on each blockchain. Trust Wallet and SafePal cover most of the networks and often are quick to add newer blockchains – for many people, setting up a wallet (or more than one) on one of these apps will ensure you have wallets for most of the chains. Metamask is a browser extension that allows you to connect to many networks on your desktop computer (there is a phone app too, but I don’t use it much).  There are a number of networks that use similar enough technology that the same address works on all of the networks – so your Ethereum address can be used on the Binance Smart Chain – the same seed phrase translates to the same wallet and private key. As you get more into airdrops, you gradually get to recognize when the address is the same between networks and when it changes. Airdrops are usually pretty good about making it clear which wallet you should provide.

For me it works best when I keep a text file that lists all of my social profiles and all my wallets so that I can copy/paste these quickly.

Common terms and concepts

  • Airdrop – crypto given away – usually done to increase the number of users of a coin/token and promote awareness of and interest in the project. This site focuses on 2 types of airdrops – airdrops based around doing social tasks and selfdrop airdrops where you receive tokens for interacting with a smart contract either by sending 0 BNB to it or triggering it from a website/dapp.  There are many other airdrops going on in the crypto world – but most of those are looking at users already active in specific projects and rewarding them for that participation. (Most recently added airdrops here | Airdrops expiring soonest here |Selfdrop airdrops are listed here)
  • Coin vs. Token – While some people use token/coin interchangeably, most crypto enthusiasts use coin to refer to cryptocurrencies with their own blockchain (BTC, ETH, BNB, XMR, SOL, HT, MATIC, DOGE, etc.) – this is different from tokens which operate as sub-coins on another blockchain (e.g. AGIX is a token of Singularity.net which runs on the Ethereum blockchain.) Coins only have gas/transaction fees in their same cryptocurrency, while tokens usually have gas/transaction fees in their respective blockchain coins cryptocurrency. If I want to send AGIX from one wallet to another, it’ll cost me gas ETH because AGIX is an Ethereum token. I
  • HODL – In the early days of crypto, someone on a crypto message board/forum said they were not planning on selling their crypto but holding it. They misspelled hold as hodl and ever since, misspelling hodl has been partially an inside joke and partially an investment stance/style. People who “hodl” will usually ignore drops/corrections in the belief that overall crypto will continue to increase in value for the future.
  • Gas/transaction fees – Cryptocurrency networks are usually maintained by multiple computers/servers around the world – the people that run those computers/servers only do so because they make money off the process. They make money because every transaction pays a transaction fee of some type. For Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain and others, there are two pieces used to calculate the gas used in a transaction – the gas price and the gas limit. Think of price as cost per gallon and limit as the max number of gallons you’re willing to put in to the transaction. If you want to drive 1,000 miles, you might budget $3/gallon for gas and expect to use 50 gallons. If the entire trip can’t be completed on 50 gallons, you’ll have a problem. If no gas station is willing to sell you gas for only $3, you’ll have a problem. Similarly if the network is paying 20 gwei (gwei = 1 billionth of on ether) (price) and your transaction is going to take 150,000 units (limit), but you’re only willing to spend 18 gwei per unit, your transaction will be pending until someone is willing to accept only 18 gwei or until it times out and the network refuses to process (typically months later). If you set the limit to 100,000, the transaction will process, but fail to complete because it needed more gas (and you’ll be charged some gas, but usually a fraction of what you had committed to). A simple transfer of ETH may need a small gas limit of 21,000, whereas interacting with a complicated smart contract that has transaction taxes, reflexive rewards, etc. may average between 100,000-200,000 in gas limit, but I’ve seen it go as high as 650,000.
    • Get used to paying gas on transactions, it’s the backbone of crypto working
    • Every blockchain may be different, but typically the higher gas price you’re willing to pay, the faster your transaction will process
    • For tokens = the more complicated the smart contract being triggered, the higher the gas limit will be
  • Rugpull – crypto only has value as long as you can exchange it for a well known crypto or fiat. A rugpull occurs when a sufficiently large amount of crypto is sold or exchanged resulting in a steep drop in value/worth. This is typically a scam when done by someone intimate with the project, but can also be done when any holder of the coin/token holds a large quantity (known as a whale) of the coin/token and converts it all at once.
  • Selfdrop airdrop – an airdrop, typically with few or no social tasks, simply redeemed by interacting with a smart contract – either by sending 0 BNB to the smart contract or triggering a 0 BNB transaction via a website (Selfdrop airdrops are listed here)
  • Tokenomics – this refers to the details of the token and how transactions work for the token – things like total max supply of tokens, total circulating supply, how the project plans on initially distributing/making available tokens, when/how/why token burns occur, who owns the smart contract that controls the token, whether there is a transaction tax, any residual tokens earned by hodlers, etc.
  • Whale – anyone who holds a large portion of the available tokens/coins. This is subjective, but for new projects, any single holder/wallet holding more than a few percent of the circulating or max supply could cause a liquidity problem.