Mikhail Sergachev

The End Game of Token Airdrops Token Airdrops used to be considered a novel technique to reward early contributors a few years back when people used to receive unexpected rewards for using products at an early stage. Uniswap is the perfect example of this, which airdropped 400 UNI to every user who interacted with Uniswap before TGE. DYDX, ENS, and a couple of others followed the same lead and started rewarding early users. People were not even farming these airdrops; they were simply using these products, which they found pretty cool, and token airdrops were basically a genuine reward given to them for being an early adopter, and that was novel. Now, if you look at token airdrops, they've exploded everywhere. The Speculation around airdrops have created this superficial sense of real demand for dapps. In reality, it's just a grifting demand that will move from one chain to other chains, creating a never-ending loop of liquidity fragmentation. That's not healthy for the growth of the ecosystem in any way. Products are using all sorts of techniques to bootstrap the initial demand by introducing points, creating speculation around airdrops, building a community – that's all great. You're getting the initial attention in the ever-growing attention economy, but that will only make sense when you build a cool product that people will keep using even after the airdrop. Airdrops are life-changing for people. I love that fact, but I also agree with the fact that airdrops are also making people toxic. Sometimes they raise their expectations much higher, and when they get tokens below their expectations, they start calling the project a scam. It happened with Sui and SEI in the past. But also, we do have a positive side here. If a project manages to distribute fair incentives to every airdrop hunter, that happened with TIA, ARB, etc. In that case, you build a cult community that helps the project in the long term. I look at airdrops as an incentive to bootstrap initial demand around the product and build a community that should market the product. It'll work all well only if the product is cool enough so people could enjoy it. It should make life easier for people in some way. If they don't like spending high gas fees on ETH, you give them Solana, which could make their life easy and save costs too. So products that increase efficiency, save costs, provide a great user experience, and smooth onboarding will not only retain users after TGE, but they could also get new users, as your community will work as a massive marketing team for you. Building a great web3 product should be the end game for projects, and phased-wise airdrops are a great way to bootstrap the initial demand side.