The Ultimate Framework for Identifying the Highest-Quality Airdrops Part 1/2

Be the farmer not the crop

The Ultimate Framework for Identifying the Highest-Quality Airdrops

If you are a farmer, some of the most common questions you’ll end up asking yourself are:

Is interacting with this project worth the time and capital cost required?

How do I prioritize which airdrop to focus on?

With so many tokenless protocols out there, some could be life-changing, while others might be a complete waste of time.

Since time is your most valuable asset, it must be preserved.

Here is the framework and factors I use to cut through the noise and zero in on high-quality airdrops to decide whether a project is worth engaging with.

I use these 9 factors to determine how underfarmed a project is:

1/ Perceived/actual Friction

2/ Task types (Social, Game, Testnet, Mainnet)

3/ On-chain task types

4/ Fees incurred

5/ Ease of bridging to new chains

6/ User experience

7/ Participant count

8/ Leaderboard Ranking Difficulty

9/ Twitter mentions

1/ Perceived/Actual Friction

High Perceived Friction:
Typically, higher friction means a higher likelihood of a valuable airdrop due to the project being less diluted and underfarmed. The higher barriers to entry and active participation means that, in general, fewer people participate.

“Barriers to entry” can refer to:

• requiring higher capital cost

• higher complexity of the interactions

• The quantity of users or TVL is capped or gatekept

• having to download a new wallet or interact with a new chain (typically non-EVM)

Example: Those who used the phantom wallet and bridged funds to and from SOL using Wormhole got a significantly larger $W airdrop than those who only used Wormhole between EVM chains.

Low Perceived Friction:
If tasks are generally easy to manually complete or automate, require no to little capital cost, this attracts a large number of participants (and bots), leading to an overly diluted (small $ value) airdrop.

This is why almost all testnet or social tasks (Galxe, Zealy, Layer 3 ect) have historically not amounted to anything financially to justify committing your time to these interactions.

Example: I completely faded (ignored) the Berachain Testnet Galxe quests for several reasons:

• there were over 4M participants (not possibly to meaningfully reward that many users)

• interacting with the testnet costs $0

• If tasks are semi or fully automatable you will be at a significant disadvantage to bot. farms, making the time spent grinding through the manual interactions not worth it.

• If there is going to be an airdrop, it has to go to something with much higher friction, such as owning a NFT from one of the many primary Berachain NFTs that range from 0.3 to 30 ETH. 

Note that there is technically a difference between perceived and actual friction, despite both of these being highly correlated. Most Web3 users perceive friction as anything new or not mainstream consensus, when in reality the actual friction may be considerably lower.

Ex. Bridging to a new chain and creating a new wallet (using phantom wallet on SOL for Wormhole Bridging), requires some level of effort, weeding out many farmers. The actual friction is not that high. 

An example of actual friction would be that there is no public information on how you would interact. Users have to dig into the documents or Discord to find out how to get access. Another example would be poor UI or infrastructure, making it harder to actually complete your interactions.  

Ideally, you have something that is both perceived and actual friction to narrow the competition.

2/ Task types (Social, Game, Testnet, Mainnet)

The following task types will be ordered (lowest first) relative to the amount of friction associated with them. 

2.1/ Social Tasks

Campaigns focused solely on social tasks should be avoided.

Examples include Portal and essentially every subsequent social farming airdrop campaign that followed a similar playbook.

As a quick reminder, with Portal you received points based on the cumulative engagement across posts that used specific hashtags and @ mentions associated with Portal.

While social media made it seem that a large number of people made massive profits on this, in reality there is a large amount of selection and survivorship bias in this.  

The only way to receive a decent allocation was by spamming posts and promoting your referral code, or by joining closed Twitter or Discord groups where the sole purpose was to coordinate engagement farming between Portal airdrop grinders. 

This often meant that those without a large following received minimal rewards while facing the risk of having their Twitter accounts banned for spam.

Since creating a Twitter account and posting is easy, there are no significant barriers to entry, making these campaigns a likely waste of time.

A similar issue occurred with the Mocaverse drop, where the oversaturation of social tasks (due to ease of completion) led to a change in distribution. They added a requirement of 1,500 RP to qualify for the MOCA airdrop to address the problem.

Airdrops based solely on social tasks are likely to be disappointing due to one of two scenarios:

• They include all participants, leading to minimal rewards for everyone.

• They set a high threshold for qualification, resulting in many participants being excluded, with only those of high rank receiving rewards.

2.2 Testnet Tasks

While testnet tasks can offer significant returns on investment, their value has diminished as airdrops become more mainstream. For instance, Omni’s campaign provided a decent reward for completing all quests on Galxe, but such opportunities are now much rarer.

I’ve largely stopped participating in testnet campaigns because most have become a waste of time. They are often overrun by bots, making the process of claiming testnet funds cumbersome due to various anti-bot measures. Additionally, the low barrier to entry usually means these campaigns are disappointing.

Several examples of disappointing testnet airdrops include:

• DOP: Despite backing from Binance Labs, it turned out to be underwhelming.

• Venom: Hype was driven by its $1 billion ecosystem fund, but most participants received minimal rewards.

• Taiko: Frustrated their users by claiming Galxe campaigns were merely for 'fun and education,' excluding most participants.

• Sui: Fulfilled their promise of no airdrop by conducting a presale exclusively for Discord members.

• Sei: Upset the community with poor allocations even for significant contributors.

• 5ire Chain: Provided disappointing rewards for task completion.

• Metis: Offered buggy testnet experiences and unfulfilling allocations, with vested rewards adding to the frustration.

• ZetaChain: Took an early snapshot on August 20, 2023, causing many to miss out despite months of effort.

Worse than a disappointing testnet airdrop is a buggy network with frequently failing transactions or high testnet fund requirements. Metis was problematic, but Linea’s 2023 testnet was even more challenging, with each transaction costing 1 ETH and a daily faucet allocation of only a small amount of ETH.

The only worthwhile testnet campaigns typically involve some barriers to entry.

2.3 Games