Airdrop syndrome reappears, introduction and precautions of airdrops in the cryptocurrency circle, don’t expect too much

The recent airdrops of uniswap and MEME have attracted the attention of the entire cryptocurrency circle. Many people suffered huge losses in DeFi, but in the end they made their money back with the uniswap airdrop. Even more people who didn’t get the airdrop were very upset, so an airdrop trend swept the cryptocurrency circle, and it is getting more and more intense. For example, you often see propaganda in some communities: XX DeFi has not issued coins yet, hurry up and experience it, it would be great if you get an airdrop, or you missed uni, don’t miss XX’s big airdrop, or download XX wallet, use the invitation code to get the airdrop, etc. For a time, airdrops became the hottest topic in the cryptocurrency circle, and it also attracted the attention of many people, causing a wave of wool parties outside the circle to accumulate accounts and perform magical operations all night long, in the hope of catching the next uniswap and making themselves rich.

We can think of this as a manifestation of airdrop syndrome. Often after a relatively large airdrop occurs, many people will have a retaliatory mentality of participation after missing out. Some project parties can also grasp this mentality and promote their products at a low cost. For example, Boss Wang of Tiger Fund has been attracting the attention of those who want to get the free stuff because of the airdrop.

Airdrop, originally used in the military, refers to dropping paratroopers or supplies from an airplane and letting them land at will. In modern society, it generally refers to the indiscriminate delivery of daily necessities, such as flood-affected areas. Of course, after the establishment of the cryptocurrency circle, it has been extended to a way of giving away coins for free, and airdrops have gradually grown and developed to a certain scale.

Airdrops in the cryptocurrency world are mainly divided into active airdrops and passive airdrops. Active airdrops refer to participating in an activity, completing the required tasks, and obtaining token rewards, while passive airdrops do not require self-operation. The project party directly sends tokens to eligible addresses on the chain through screening. These two airdrop methods are very popular in the current cryptocurrency world.

The airdropped tokens are usually given away for free by the organizer or project, so they have no value at first. However, this does not mean that the organizer's or project's project has no value. On the contrary, there have been many high-value airdrop activities in the history of airdrops in the cryptocurrency circle, which has made many people very interested in airdrops.

For example, airdrop projects such as Ontology and Avocado were once hyped up to a relatively high price, making some people who received the airdrops instantly rich. These stories of getting rich quickly refreshed the three views of people in the cryptocurrency circle again and again, causing many people to continue to flock to the airdrop market in the hope of encountering the next airdrop token that would increase a hundred or a thousand times.

However, things are not always as expected. Generally speaking, there are only 1-2 airdrops per year for projects with a value of more than 10,000 yuan. For example, the airdrops for Ontology and Avocado in the past few years were very varied. Now the mainstream airdrops are in the following forms:

1. Direct airdrop to non-empty wallets

This was already very popular in 2017, especially on Ethereum. Of course, these wools are relatively small, but they are also very tempting, because some project parties have informed in advance that "we are going to airdrop to non-zero addresses", so many people have broken up their own Ethereum coins, so that they can get more airdrop tokens.

There are still some people who keep a little money in each wallet. For example, I now have 5 Ethereum wallets. Sometimes I receive unknown tokens inexplicably. Of course, now they are basically some advertising coins or worthless zero-coins. There are almost no truly valuable ones. Because this airdrop method of non-empty wallets does not meet the original idea of ​​the project party, it can only make the public not cherish the tokens they get, which makes it easier to cause the coin price to be low.

The above picture shows the coin airdrops I received from a certain project. One coin is for voting on Binance, and the name of the other coin is a website address, the number of coins and the date of June 11, 2018.

Of course, the problem of multiple wallet addresses is also quite prominent. For example, sometimes a coin will be scattered among two or three addresses, so the transfer will consume more handling fees, or when there are many wallets, it is easy to get confused, which also causes troubles in use. After non-zero address airdrops are no longer popular in the currency circle, basically few people will use multiple wallets.

2. Subscribe to email

For example, for Ontology, you only need to leave an email subscription. After the Ontology subscription email received an airdrop of tens of thousands of yuan, many cryptocurrency project parties began to popularize email subscriptions. Some people even tirelessly filled in their email addresses to subscribe to project party messages in order to receive token airdrops. Of course, in fact, most of the project email subscriptions later did not have token airdrop plans, but the number of people who accepted the project party email subscriptions did increase a lot.

The airdrop method of filling in an email address actually has many problems. On the one hand, it is easy to receive emails pushed by various project parties, which makes your mailbox often filled with spam, and normal emails are buried in it, affecting your daily work. Therefore, if you want to try your luck with email subscription, it is best to apply for a dedicated email address again, otherwise you will be very painful.

Of course, on the other hand, email subscription does not necessarily mean you will receive an airdrop from the project party. To put it bluntly, this is just a psychological comfort. At the same time, you cannot leave your email address to others casually, otherwise you may be targeted. For example, the project party may run away and sell the email address list on the black market, and then be targeted by someone with ulterior motives to attack the database or engage in illegal activities, or send advertising emails and phishing virus emails, etc., which may bring you a lot of potential losses.

Fortunately, after the main body, almost no project parties airdropped to users through subscription emails.

3. Register or invite link airdrop

This is relatively more common, and of course this method is also the mainstream now. For the project party, in order to have a certain number of users, payment is understandable, and for users, getting some small rewards is also good, and then combined with the invitation link, the project party's user base can expand rapidly.

Of course, this airdrop method is more troublesome at present, because most of the invitation links basically require real-name authentication to prevent wool-gathering parties. Then a key issue of real-name authentication is who keeps the real-name information. Therefore, some unscrupulous project parties use the reason of airdrops to deceive a large number of users' real-name information, and finally make a lot of money by selling it on the black market. It's just that the users who receive the airdrops suffer. So it's really hard to say whether the users are wool-gathering the project parties or the project parties are wool-gathering the users.

Of course, it is undeniable that there are some good airdrop projects worth participating in. For example, Ripple and Stellar in the early days of the cryptocurrency circle were actually airdropped through GitHub accounts. Last year, you could get Stellar by experiencing keybase. At that time, the streets were deserted and it even gave rise to the business of reselling GitHub accounts.

In addition, there are special blockchain popularization teaching on foreign Coinbase or blockchain online wallet websites. As long as you complete the corresponding tasks, you can get airdrop tokens worth hundreds of dollars. However, this generally has corresponding restrictions on the user's nationality. At present, domestic users cannot participate.

4. 0-turn airdrop and product experience airdrop

0 transfer means transferring 0 Ether to the target address in the Ethereum package, and then triggering the smart contract to automatically issue airdrops to users. The airdrop of the user experience product is to use a certain smart contract, and then you can receive the airdrop.

There are many scams in the 0-turn airdrop method. You can find a lot of them on search websites, mainly similar to the following:

There is also an airdrop that adds addresses. Generally, low-level scams mainly ask users to add a token contract in their wallets, and then they can automatically see the name and amount of the coin. In fact, this is a viral code marketing method. The former FOMO3D team has introduced this, and they have also conducted similar experiments, which has caused a large number of Ethereum addresses to obtain this garbage token. This scam basically does not require coins, but the coins obtained must have no value. More often than not, the names are the same as the well-known currencies on Ethereum, which plays a confusing role. Specifically, it does not have any benefits for the project party or the user. It is purely a spoof mentality.

The other type is a scam, such as asking you to transfer a certain amount of coins to a certain address and then receive HT or OKB. These are all scams and are designed to defraud Ethereum, so users need to be careful here.

In fact, in a formal way like uniswap, you can call the corresponding smart contract on the official website, and then you can get the tokens. Of course, when calling the contract, the accompanying parameters do not need to be set. When sending the transaction, just check that the sent Ethereum is also 0, that's it, because it is similar to the direct 0 transfer mentioned earlier, so you still need to pay special attention here, that is, like uniswap, you can only call the contract on the official website, because the smart contract needs to pass certain parameters, and it is not possible to directly send coins to the contract or make 0 transfers.

Some well-known 0-transfer projects, such as EIDOS, are projects developed by AP, who is also the founder of Avocado. EIDOS once caused the EOS network to be very congested, making normal transfers impossible, thus causing considerable harm.

It is worth noting that when executing the contract, we must carefully check whether the amount of Ethereum transferred is 0. If not, then it is basically a scam. At this time, do not transfer the currency, otherwise it will cause financial losses.

Finally, there are airdrops for other tasks, such as joining a Telegram group, forwarding project promotional ads on Twitter or Facebook, and so on. For example, this time the MEME airdrop was completed in Telegram.

Of course, judging from the current rules, the airdrop routines of various project parties are actually very different. Often, the big wool airdrops basically do not use the previous routines. For example, Ontology uses email subscription to screen users, Uniswap uses product experience before September 1 to screen, and MEME is done in the Telegram group. There is basically no repetition here. After the airdrops of MEME and Uniswap in the past few days, many people are ready to experience all the DEFI applications that have not yet issued coins, in the hope of obtaining airdropped tokens. In fact, we should not have too much hope for this method. The current form of airdrops is actually mainly to catch the public by surprise and produce unexpected effects. If everyone knows about it, even if it is airdropped, it will not have much value.

So, the same thing applies, just keep a normal mind, don’t expect the next ontology, avocado or uni. There are not so many wool in the cryptocurrency circle that can make people rich every day.