Crypto airdrop: market prospects and emerging trends

The practice of airdrops in the crypto world has now become an integral part of the financial system of digital currencies, with more and more projects ready to release their own token through this incentivization system.

After an excellent 2023 for this market niche with the airdrops of Arbitrum, Blur, Celestia, and Jito dominating the scene, the year 2024 also starts with a bang.

The launch of the DYM crypto, which was only inaugurated a few days ago, represents the beginning of a year that promises strong growth for the airdrop ecosystem.

Let’s see all the details below.

The crypto airdrop market takes off in 2024

2024 is shaping up to be a promising year for crypto airdrop hunters, who have already celebrated the introduction of four new mid-to-high range tokens in the digital asset market in these early months.

The projects Jupiter, xAI, AltLayer, and Dymension and their respective coins JUP, XAI, ALT, and DYM have started the party by distributing over 1.3 billion dollars to their respective user ecosystems, who have been rewarded for their contribution in the crypto space.

In late January, Jupiter stood out for airdropping approximately 700 million dollars in tokens to all early users of its application, confirming itself as one of the top protocols built on Solana.

Dymension, which launched its mainnet this week (with some difficulties), had an overall successful launch by giving away just under 400 million dollars to a list of lucky users, who now have the potential to earn additional airdrops from DYM staking.

Coming from a 2023 where the total value of airdrop payments was approximately $4.6 billion, we can say that we started off on the right foot.

More and more projects tend to allocate a portion of the supply of their new tokens to incentives for users through airdrops, given the results recorded by other ecosystems in terms of traffic and volumes on the blockchain.

Arbitrum, for example, several months after the ARB airdrop, has managed to maintain a high number of transactions and active addresses on the cryptographic network, also leading to an increase in TVL.

The overall outlook of the financial markets would even seem to favor an expansive narrative that would push new cryptocurrencies to take advantage of the momentum and make their debut on the market in the current year, with the Federal Reserve ready to execute the first rate cut on securities by June.

In a context like this, 2024 could bring immense satisfaction to those who are now positioning themselves with their address in various emerging blockchains and protocols, sometimes even if they do not have large capital to lock up.

With the bull market on the horizon, there are all the conditions to surpass last year’s numbers

The new emerging trends: here are the best airdrops to focus on

In a stimulating scenario like the one just described, new promising projects are just waiting for the right moment to bring their own crypto to life, with an airdrop attached to the communities.

A few days ago, the cross-chain transfer protocol Wormhole decided to take advantage of the hype generated by the DYM airdrop, announcing the allocation of 17% of the supply of the new token “W” to all those who have used bridging technology.

While staying within the theme of interoperability, in the coming months we can expect the launch of LayerZero and its associated currency: the total value of the incentive that will be paid to platform users could be one of the highest of this year, considering the incredible on-chain trading volumes.

Other emerging trends in the context of cryptocurrency airdrops include the world of Ethereum restaking, zk rollup layer-2, and gaming applications.

In detail, EigenLayer is dominating the Ethereum staking landscape, with 4.5 billion dollars in ETH locked on the platform by users.

The airdrop hunters have stormed the restaking pools of the protocol in an attempt to take advantage of the yield boost from staking and to qualify simultaneously for the EIGEN airdrop and other affiliated projects such as Etherfi, Swell, Puffer, and KelpDAO.

The requirement to obtain the reward is to stake your eth, native or liquid, and accumulate a minimum of 720 Restaked Points (which are obtained on average by locking 1 eth for one month).

Another very hot trend at the moment is that of Ethereum layer-2 zk-rollup: successful infrastructures like Zksync, Starknet, Scroll, and Linea have already planned an airdrop for all members of their respective ecosystems, with significant investments VC behind them and with on-chain metrics boosted by the fomo for the launch of new cryptocurrencies.

In all four cases mentioned, in order to participate in the distribution of funds, it is necessary to aim to increase indicators such as activity period, number of transactions, trading volume, and interaction with smart contracts.

You can view your progress through ” airdrop checker ” tools, where you can check the progress of your metrics for each cryptographic address.

Finally, we can highlight how gaming protocols that offer gaming experiences to their users are increasingly adopting the practice of airdrops to incentivize user traffic.

A few days ago, the well-known game Pixels Online, built on the Ronin sidechain of Axie Infinity, announced the launch of its own token after concluding its “play-to-airdrop” campaign on January 19th.

Approximately 8000 players in the ranking have qualified for the tokens, after an anti-sybil check to eliminate the presence of any bots that manipulated the airdrop ranking.
In addition to Pixel, many other similar projects plan to launch their own crypto by the end of the year.

Among the most promising ones we find Heroes of Mavia, Saga, Nifty Island, Nyan Heroes, Apeiron.

It is also worth noting that several DeFi projects that have introduced gamification elements within their platforms, such as Aleo and Merkle Trade, have organized incentive campaigns in which they will reward users who achieve the highest scores.