AltcoinTrading.NET

In case you are new to crypto airdrops, or indeed to crypto as whole, let’s first explain what are airdrops, bounties and giveaways in crypto.

Crypto airdrop meaning

The meaning of crypto airdrop is fairly straightforward. It is a process where the owner of an alt coin distributes small amounts of that cryptocurrency to its community free of charge, or as part of a marketing campaign. The latter is sometimes called a crypto bounty, because you need to perform some actions such as retweeting or commenting to get the cryptocurrency.

Most upcoming crypto airdrops are announced on the projects’ social media. That’s how the original audience of the project gets the best opportunity to collect the airdrop or bounty, or indeed to get on the bounty whitelist at all.

Sites like AltcoinTrading.NET with its airdrop alerts are here for the rest of the people - those who want to get an airdrop but do not have the time to skim social media for new airdrop opportunities.

Airdrops are also used by new projects to bootstrap their coin’s value and utility by seeding it into the wallets of people who have or might have interest in the project. That’s why some crypto airdrops are delivered to the holders of a different token or cryptocurrency.

Crypto airdrops to holders

The whole crypto airdrop industry started in this way: The first ever airdropped cryptos were Byteball and Stellar Lumens, both of which were airdropped to Bitcoin holders.

The airdrop reward was proportional to the amount of Bitcoins held by each address at the time of snapshot and even back then, larger crypto exchanges like Kraken and Bitfinex participated and distributed the token drop to their users’ exchange wallets.

Blockchain snapshot is a concept unique to crypto airdrops and crypto forks, but you will only get to see it quite rarely these days. It only makes sense to do a snapshot if the campaign is an airdrop to the holders of an existing cryptocurrency, but in reality bounty work rewarded in alt crypto tokens became far more popular.

Crypto bounty campaigns

The rise of bounty airdrops makes all the sense because it leads to potentially far bigger profit for the owner of the new cryptocurrency.

• In an airdrop to crypto holders, the owners of the airdropped coin simply give away their coin to people who may or may not be interested in ever using it. There is no guarantee the new project will receive any attention in return for sending people free tokens.
• In crypto bounty work, people who wish to receive the token reward need to provide social media engagement for the airdropped crypto, or to create web content and publish it on blogs and Youtube. The bounty work is typically recorded in public Google spreadsheets and checked by paid staff - so called “bounty managers”, typically users of online message boards who have excellent reputation in the community.

Running a crypto bounty promo instead of a simple airdrop is a good guarantee for the team behind the new coin that even if their alt coin never takes off, they are not going to walk away with empty hands. At the very least they will have an e-mail list of all the crypto enthusiasts who participated in the campaign.

DeFi airdrops to stakers

There are still old-fashioned airdrops to holders even these days, but they are niched down to provide better reach. With the boom of alt coin trading, decentralized finance, staking and yields, airdrops to dinosaur crypto holders became rare.

These days you are most likely to get a DeFi token airdrop of you are an active staker of another DeFi crypto, because you are more likely to become an active staker of the airdropped token as well.

Crypto exchange airdrops

Another way you can get old fashioned airdrops are alt coin exchanges. Smaller alt coin exchanges will often airdrop new dog money tokens to their users, or give airdrop promos with new token launches.

Best alt coin exchanges for free token airdrops and bonuses:

• Bitforex
• Latoken
• Binance

Best blockchain platforms for airdrops

The best blockchains to collect airdrops are the ones that get most new airdrop campaigns.

• Ethereum
• Binance Smart Chain
• Terra Luna
• Solana - in the past Tron and other trendy coins

Airdrop crypto Binance and Trust Wallet

Free airdrops on Trust Wallet are part of Binance’s strategy, because Trust Wallet is owned by Binance. For airdrops on Binance, and indeed for anything at all on Binance, you need to perform AML/KYC. This is generally not required for token airdrops nor for bounties, not even when they are done on smaller exchanges like Latoken or Bitforex.

BSC Airdrops

The Binance Smart Chain is a blockchain built by Binance itself, and their upcoming airdrops will be built using it. That does not mean that all airdrops by Binance are on BSC though: Binance gets paid for promoting other blockchains, and also generates trading fees from people trading coins from other blockchains directly on Binance.

That’s why Binance does not limit their airdrops to their own BSC chain, and probably never will.

However, Binance smart chain is still one of the most common blockchains we see in airdrop campaigns. If you want to earn money from airdrops, you will certainly need a BSC wallet address.

Terra Luna Airdrops

Terra is a blockchain with unique features like token leasing, and they are big on airdrop marketing.

So far not many tokens have been launched on Terra yet, but this will change as the upcoming EverID dApp will be available for everyone who holds any EOS crypto. Since EverID requires a TRL wallet to function, everybody with hold Tron crypto is eligible for upcoming airdrops and bounties.

Solana Airdrops

Solana is a blockchain with really good scalability, so it’s no wonder they do not mind sending out coins to thousands of people.

You will most likely need an account on the Solana platform if you want to claim upcoming airdrops.

NFT Airdrops

An alternative to token airdrops are NFT airdrops, which are most often used by artists building non fungible token collections with the non-fungible crypto ERC-721 token standards. There is the upcoming crypto standard ERC-1155 getting some share too.

As you certainly know, ETH might be the first blockchain platform to ever get NFTs, but it has certainly not been the last. You can get NFT airdrops on Solana and on BSC too. The ETC blockchain is in its infancy when it comes to NFTs.

If you are looking for a platform for a single platform to collect NFT airdrops without thinking about it too much, you probably want OpenSea.

Beware though - it’s the most popular NFT marketplace which means the OpenSea NFT airdrops might be either of a poor value (as everyone will get them) or hard to get whitelisted for (as the marketplace is so crowded).

One of the first airdrop campaigns that made crypto heads talk about crypto airdrops were those by CryptoPunks, who airdropped their collectible characters shortly after Consensus 2018 as a promotion for Blockfolio app.

What do you need to participate in a crypto airdrop?

1. Airdrop crypto Telegram

   Telegram is an app you will most certainly need. The vast, vast majority of crypto bounty campaigns will require you to join a Telegram chat. Most likely you will need to maintain some level of engagement too. That’s the condition of bounty work.

   Even in plain airdrops and crypto whitelists, the registration often involves a Telegram bot that records your signup.

2. A wallet address to send your token on NFT to

   To receive a token or an NFT airdrop, you always need to submit a wallet address belonging to the respective blockchain.

   Beware that it should not be an exchange address: Airdrops are delivered via smart contracts and crypto exchanges do not support third party smart contract transactions for security reasons.

   If you are serious about collecting crypto airdrops rewards, you will need at the very least an ETH and a BSC address. The easiest way to get both is by the MetaMask wallet which is a browser extension.

3. Social media accounts

   Bounty campaigns will either require you to post on your social media, or they’ll at the very least pay better if you do.

   You should have a Twitter and Facebook account. Having a Reddit account with good karma helps too. Some bounty campaigns reject new social media accounts, or accounts that have too few followers though.

   As for content creation bounty work, the usual blogging platforms like Blogger or Medium are accepted - no need to have your own domain. Most campaigns will accept long-form LinkedIn posts as blog posts.

   A lot of campaigns will require you to post a confirmation to a Bitcointalk thread of the campaign so you will need an account there as well.

4. Dedicated email account

   Most bounty campaigns reuse the e-mail addresses they collected for other marketing purposes. The lists also occasionally leak through a breach, or may be sold. This means you will get a lot of spam and possibly a fair amount of phishing to the email address you have used to sign up to an airdrop or crypto bounty.

   For your own comfort, don’t reuse your usual email address. Use a disposable email account.

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