The Airdrop Playbook has changed. This is how you need to adapt

We are certainly in a new leg of the cycle

Airdrop Farming in the Bull Market: The Ultimate Playbook

The crypto market is entering a rare, once-in-four-years window = a prime opportunity for airdrop farmers to maximize their returns.

With the bull market heating up, the rules of the game have changed, and adapting your strategy is crucial to capitalizing on the next 6-8 months.

The crypto market is rapidly evolving, and airdrop farming strategies need to adapt.

With cheap transactions and an influx of capital driving competition, success now depends on understanding the “points meta” and aligning with market narratives.

This is your essential guide to navigating the new airdrop farming meta.

Why Airdrops Are Becoming Juicy Again

Two major catalysts are driving the resurgence of lucrative airdrops:

1. High FDVs Are Back in Favor
   Not long ago, the market shunned high Fully Diluted Valuations (FDVs), making airdrops less attractive.

   But now, retail investors are embracing them again. Projects launching at high FDVs, such as $GRASS (which debuted at $1B and soared to $3B+), show that market sentiment is shifting.

   Instead of skepticism, these valuations are fueling excitement, creating prime conditions for airdrops to thrive.

2. Faster Token Generation Events (TGEs)
   In bull markets, timing is everything. Unlike the long, drawn-out farming of previous cycles, TGEs are expected to accelerate, allowing farmers to reap rewards in a few months instead of 8+ months.

   This condensed timeline means faster rotations between projects, giving you more opportunities to capitalize on short-term trends.

How the Airdrop Meta Is Changing

During the bear market, airdrop farming focused heavily on pushing transactions = a time-intensive approach that made sense when trading opportunities were limited.

But in this bull market, time is a luxury you don’t have.

The new airdrop meta revolves around TVL-based farming, where success depends on strategies tied to Total Value Locked (TVL) and point-based systems.

• With Layer 2 (L2) and Layer 1 (L1) networks becoming cheaper post-upgrades, the “arbitrum style” of criteria = transaction volume, unique contracts, total transactions ect is longer the key metric for earning airdrops.

• TVL Farms Are Point-Based: Points are awarded based on a time weight average balance approach = how much you have locked in for how long, often tied to a tiered or linear system.

1. Sybil Smartly and Avoid Overcommitting

• In the new meta, Airdrops will be TVL based instead of pushing transactions ( except the project is more of a Bridge/Interoperability protocol)

• Point meta will always be a mix of " Linear + Tier " for upcoming airdrops.

• The biggest mistake most farmers make is going hard on the point farming trying to compete with whales instead of sybilling it.

  

  How to Win in the Point Meta

  1. Understand the Two Farming Approaches:

  • APY Farming: Linear, designed for whales who can lock millions for consistent rewards.

  • Tier-Based Farming: Ideal for low-capital farmers aiming to hit specific reward tiers with smaller investments (sybil approach).

  2. Don’t Compete with Whales:
  If you’re farming with $1,000 or less, avoid APY farming. Whales dominate this space, and competing with them will diminish your returns. Instead, focus on:

  • Farming early in a project’s lifecycle to rake in easy points.

  • Shifting to sybil farming (multiple wallets) as whales enter and drive up TVL.

  3. Play for ROI:
  Small investments can yield outsized returns in tier-based systems.

  For example, the low capital sybil farmer who deposited $10 got 100 tokens on Eigenlayer, while another spent 10 ETH for only 150 tokens. The smaller investment often wins in these setups (assuming the project has a low threshold amount for the minimum qualification.

• To hedge this risk you could also do it in ties

• Example instead of depositing $25 on 5 wallets and the mon threshold end up being $100 so you get nothing, you could deposit $25, $100, $250, $500 across 4 different wallets to “hedge” your risk of not hitting the minimum threshold.

Should You Focus on Airdrops or Trading?

This is the dilemma most crypto participants face:

• Airdrop Farming: Offers consistent, long-term rewards but requires significant time and planning.

• Trading: Provides faster gains, especially with altcoins poised for explosive growth in this cycle.

To succeed, focus on one strategy at a time. Attempting both simultaneously will dilute your efforts and reduce your returns.

If you’re working with limited capital, a balanced approach is crucial:

• $1,000 for Trading: Focus on short-term gains in altcoins, which are likely to outperform during this cycle.

• $1,000 for Farming: Split this across 4-5 high-conviction projects, reallocating as narratives shift.

The idea is to leverage quick trading profits (Ex. 50-100% gains) and funnel them back into airdrop farming that uses majors (stablecoins , BTC, ETH SOL) for long-term rewards allowing you to maintain exposure while still farming in the background with your profits.

1. Leverage BTC Ecosystem Projects:
Projects in the Bitcoin ecosystem are generally untapped opportunities compared to EVM.

Instead of letting your BTC sit idle on centralized exchanges, put it to work in tokenless projects that reward contributions.

With BTC likely on its way to $100K+, you gain both farming rewards and asset appreciation.

2. Farm with Crypto Holdings, Not Stables:
Use SOL for Solana-based TVL airdrops, ETH for Ethereum-based projects, and so on. This strategy not only earns airdrops but also keeps you exposed to potential altcoin rallies during the bull market.

Why Avoid Hyped Testnets

Testnet farming is significantly less attractive in this market. Projects launching testnets now are likely to release tokens at the end of the bull cycle, reducing potential upside. Moreover, testnets are time-intensive and often diluted due to zero capital required and the potential to get botte into oblivion, making them less worthwhile compared to other opportunities.

Advice for Low-Capital Farmers

If you have little to no portfolio to start with, consider this:

• Earn Capital Offline: Many fortunes in previous cycles were built on $100-$200 investments. Use offline earnings to seed your crypto strategies.

• Develop skills: learning skills that are valuable to people in web3 that you can provide to make extra side income. This could be ghostwriting, graphic design, research reports, video editing, ect.

  Put out valuable and educational content for free or start offering your services for cheap to build your network and resume which will progressively lead you to more opportunities and becoming better at tat skills which you can eventually charge more for

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Bless Network Airdrop guide

TLDR - $8M funding (not public currently), No data-scraping, just launched last week, free and passive to farm, doesn't hog all of your PCs resources

Overview

Bless enables your device to seamlessly share its computing power with the websites, apps, and services you regularly use, all through your browser.

Users get rewarded from the platforms they’re powering, so value flows directly to the people supporting the network, not big corporations.

TLDR: Bless represents the true potential of what grass could have been. Rather than collecting data for big companies, it's replaced them with a community-driven network managed by everyday users, powering the applications and sites they depend on.

How you can get involved

Getting started with Bless is as easy as installing a browser extension, with no complicated Web3 onboarding.

Check out the link to get started https://bless.network/dashboard?ref=YYQY3S

How is this any different from Grass ?
Nodes are run in a secure sandboxed runtime = the nodes have no idea what you’re doing, they only know how much of your CPU is being used up by those other processes.

Unlike Grass which is actively engaged in data-scraping and leveraging users ‘internet’ which necessitates a degree of monitoring Bless only has access to how many apps a user's CPU is running so that their system doesn't get overloaded

SUI Airdrop Playbook

I registered 12 SUI NS domain names like 8 months ago for $5

The recent $NS airdrop was worth ~$110 each = a 20x based on fees spent

Thus we keep digging for the next gem

Is the ENS of SUI worth a $300M MC /FDV (now at $205M)

Hard to say, but it does appear that SUI related projects are getting a premium compared to the 15th new EVM L2 being released this year (Scroll, Mode, ect)

The $DEEP airdrop was also worth around $500-$1000 for most people

Also ~$100 in memecoins airdropped to @Turbos_finance users recently

You get the idea

SUI feels like what Aptos was supposed to be

The goal is to position for multiple potential airdrops on SUI at once, ideally with minimal interaction time required

So lets get started here is the 5 in 1 compound airdrop playbook