With 2023 now almost behind us, let’s review the stages of all the crypto airdrops that have taken place this year.
In the last 12 months, real cryptographic ecosystems have been born, which already today boast notoriety and prestige in the world of web3 thanks to the marketing technique of the airdrop.
This practice is increasingly adopted by protocols and emerging infrastructures, as it allows on one hand to attract a lot of traffic on the network (and consequently collect more fees) and on the other hand to obtain the satisfaction and approval of their own stakeholders.
CoinGecko recently provided a report that ranks the best projects that have released a token to their community this year, based on the distributed economic value.
Let’s take stock of the situation by trying to identify what will be the next trends and the best airdrops in 2024.
All the details below.
CoinGecko: the report on the most profitable crypto airdrops of 2023
In 2023 there have been several airdrops that have proven to be extremely profitable for those who managed to seize them, with very interesting rewards.
CoinGecko has recently published a report in which it reviews the projects that have released a token through an airdrop, classifying them based on the total value distributed, taking as reference the maximum price reached by each cryptocurrency.
At the top of the ranking we find Arbitrum, Ethereum’s layer-2 which today represents the 4th blockchain for TVL, behind BNB Chain, Tron, and of course Ethereum itself.
The ARB airdrop, taking into account the crypto’s all-time high of $1.82, had a total value of a whopping $1.96 billion.
It is very interesting to observe how this has been 2.9 times larger than its closest competitor, namely Optimism, which distributed $0.67 billion in $OP on May 31, 2022.
In second place is Celestia, a modular consensus and data network blockchain, which on October 31, 2023 offered a total of TIA tokens valued at 0.73 billion according to the ATH price of $13.99 to all developers and early adopters of their technology, as well as to some users of Ethereum rollups.
TIA is one of the most popular cryptocurrencies at the moment and is integrating its infrastructure with the most important networks in the market.
To close the podium of this year’s airdrops, we see Blur, which ranks third by distributing 0.45 billion dollars in BLUR tokens on February 14, 2023, at the ATH token price of $1.24. The platform’s users, which acts as an aggregator for NFT listings from various markets, were rewarded for their commitment in trading activities.
After this first event, Blur has attracted considerable liquidity and has garnered the interest of crypto-airdrop farmers, laying the groundwork for a subsequent phase of token rewards that has also been very profitable, with an additional $0.19 billion in value distributed to the community.
Arbitrum, Celestia and Blur (first phase) together contributed to 69.9% of the total cryptocurrency airdrops in 2023, which amounts to $4.56 billion.
The largest remaining airdrops of this year range from 16 million dollars to 372 million dollars and include projects like Jito, Worldcoin, Aidoge, Memecoin, Pyth Network, SPACE ID CyberConnect, Arkham, and Maverick Protocol.
Which projects are worth investing in 2024?
For the upcoming year, now just around the corner, crypto airdrop farmers will have to manage their time and resources wisely in order to dedicate themselves to the potentially most promising projects.
In such an evolving web3 landscape, we can observe an excessively vast amount of protocols and cryptographic networks that are presenting themselves to the market with the promise of a reward to their early adopters.
It is therefore advisable to focus on those airdrops that are likely to provide higher token gains.
Among the best in circulation, we see the names of several layer-2 rollups of Ethereum, such as zkSync, Starknet, and Linea.
These 3 infrastructures collectively already have a TVL of 920 million dollars, and promise to continue attracting more and more capital from external investors.
In particular, ZkSync represents the main choice on which to allocate the majority of one’s energies, as the project team has raised funding of up to 458 million dollars, which will most likely be used as an incentive for its users.
Even Starknet, a rapidly growing zk network, could give excitement to its community as it was valued at the astonishing amount of 8 billion dollars a few months ago.
Not to forget absolutely LayerZero, a web3 interoperability protocol, which in 2023 allowed the exchange of several billion dollars among 3.5 million different users, connecting over 50 different blockchains.
Many agree that LayerZero’s airdrop, expected in the first half of 2024, will be the only one able to compete with Zksync’s.
Another trend to keep an eye on is that of liquid staking platforms, whose interest has exploded in recent weeks, especially for those belonging to the Solana ecosystem.
Do you think that the liquid staking sector on Ethereum alone is worth about $28.5 billion.
The most popular LSD project names that could release an airdrop are: EigenLayer, Blast, ether,fi, Swell, and Blaze.
Finally, we should not underestimate all those web3 protocols that have already confirmed their intention to carry out a cryptocurrency airdrop and are experiencing significant success, with growing on-chain metrics.
We are talking about projects like Merkle Trade, Aevo, Dmail, Kinza, Aleo, and Azuro Protocol.