Crypto airdrops have distributed around $4 billion so far this year

Crypto airdrops have continued at full speed into 2024, handing out roughly $4 billion in value so far — with a few major airdrops still to come.

The three biggest airdrops were Jupiter , Starknet and Notcoin each giving out around $1 billion of value, judging by the number of tokens given out and a rough average price across the following months. Behind them were a mix of Solana and Ethereum-based projects, such as Wormhole , Ether.fi , FriendTech and Wen .

Crypto airdrops happen when a project gives out a number of tokens to previous protocol users. Typically they are done when the project hands over control to its community, issuing a governance token that users can vote with. Sometimes airdrops are split up into multiple seasons and they often try to avoid handing out tokens to wallets that have only used the protocol purely in the hope of getting the airdrop.

The biggest airdrops historically have been Uniswap, Apecoin and dYdX, according to a report by CoinGecko . The report claims that the total value of all airdrops — up until December 2023 — was $26.6 billion. This is based on peak prices for each token, which could be far from the actual value that could be realized.

Using CoinGecko’s methodology, and including the airdrops of 2024 valued at their peaks, this would suggest an upper bound of $34 billion across all airdrops so far.

Looking ahead, there are a number of crypto airdrops slated to happen this year.

The Ethereum Layer 2 network ZKsync’s airdrop will take place next week . Solana-based decentralized exchange Zeta Markets’s airdrop is now coming in June. Ethereum restaking protocol EigenLayer’s airdrop has started but the token won’t be transferable until later this year. Plus, cross-chain messaging protocol LayerZero is still gearing up for its airdrop , which has no clear date.

The scourge of airdrop farmers

While airdrops have continued to hand out large sums of money, they are having to deal with the increasing number of people trying to game the system. Airdrop farmers, as they’re known, often use hundreds of wallets to interact with projects that they expect might issue a token at some point. On the other hand, projects try to identify and exclude these wallets from the distribution.

LayerZero is one project that appears to be taking an aggressive stance in rooting out any airdrop farmers. It has an open bounty for anyone to submit reports of potential airdrop farming. The project is currently going through all the reports to address all the possible claims.

Similarly, for ZKsync’s upcoming airdrop, the project rooted out a number of airdrop farmer wallets. Through this process, it removed some wallets that had used ZKsync and met some of its criteria, but did not result in the minimum number of tokens required. It also put a cap on the wallets with the largest expected distributions and recycled some of their tokens back among all recipients.

So, while airdrops can be very lucrative, they are much harder to qualify for these days and even genuine users may get left out.