An airdrop is when a project sends free tokens to a list of wallet addresses. Sometimes it is a marketing stunt. Sometimes it is a retroactive reward for people who used a protocol before there was any incentive to. And in the modern version, it is usually both at once — the marketing comes from the press coverage the airdrop generates, and the retroactive framing gives the whole thing a veneer of fairness.
The template for every serious airdrop since was set by Uniswap in September 2020. They announced that anyone who had ever used the protocol before 1 September of that year would receive 400 UNI. At the time that was worth about US$1,200. Within six months it was worth closer to US$10,000. The market noticed, and every protocol since has been under quiet pressure to do something similar.
What They Actually Are Now
The post-Uniswap world looks like this. Protocols launch without a token, spend a year or two building usage, and then snapshot a cutoff date and distribute a governance token to the addresses that showed up. The distribution usually weights heavier users more, tries to filter out obvious sybils, and includes a smaller allocation for the team and investors. If the protocol is good, the token is worth something. If it is not, the token is a short-lived line item on a CoinMarketCap page.
The newer variant is the points programme. Instead of surprising you with a token, the protocol publishes a leaderboard that tracks your activity in real time and promises that points will convert to tokens later. EigenLayer, Blast, Friend.tech and most of the 2024 airdrops followed this template. It front-loads the usage the protocol wants but attracts a much higher percentage of mercenary farmers who leave the moment the token lands.
The older variants — holder snapshots of an existing token, or flat distributions to anyone with a wallet — still happen but are rarer now. They generate less activity per dollar spent, which is the metric everyone cares about.
Why Scams Look Like Airdrops
Because real airdrops are worth real money, the single most common crypto scam is a fake one. You get an email, a Twitter DM, or a notification telling you that you are eligible to claim a token and that you just need to visit a URL and sign a transaction. The URL loads a site that looks identical to a real protocol interface. The transaction you sign is not a claim — it is an approval or a raw transfer that drains your wallet.
Two rules that almost always hold. Real airdrops do not charge you to claim. And real airdrops are announced through the project’s own channels before anywhere else — if you find out about a claim from a Twitter reply or a Telegram DM, it is almost certainly fake. The cost of being wrong about this is the full contents of the wallet you connect.