It had been a large year in crypto for free money. Across blockchain systems, many projects and protocols tried to weather the long lasting bear market by providing bags upon bags of free, native tokens to loyal users via airdrops.
Overall, 2010 50 greatest airdrops distributed some $4.56 billion price of free tokens to crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi) users, based on analysis by CoinGecko.
Here’s phone 2023 airdrops that clocked in towards the top of their email list, in line with the peak worth of each token during the period of this season.
Arbitrum: $1.969 billion
Handily taking gold this season was Ethereum scaler Arbitrum’s massive launch of their native governance token, ARB.
In March, Arbitrum folded out ARB with airdrops that originally infused projects and DAOs built around the layer-2 network with vast sums of dollars price of free tokens. Projects that taken advantage of individuals first airdrops incorporated Treasure DAO, SushiSwap, Dopex, Radiant, Balancer, and Uniswap.
Individuals airdrops passed out almost $2 billion price of ARB tokens to Arbitrum projects and community members—a whopping sum. And also the gambit made an appearance to repay: total value locked (TVL) around the network has almost bending because the airdrops started, to $2.5 billion at writing, based on DeFi Llama.
Further boosting that value continues to be ARB’s recent cost gains. After debuting at $1.35 in March, ARB dropped to within dollar, before riding a current wave of growing prices for Ethereum layer-2 tokens. ARB presently is $1.48, per CoinGecko.
Blur: $818 million
Many airdrops generated excitement over the crypto sector this season. Just one reshaped the NFT industry overnight.
Blur, the upstart Ethereum NFT marketplace, rocked the NFT ecosystem late this past year by promising users gamified benefits according to transaction volume and eliminating creator fees—a once-mandatory tax that guaranteed NFT creators a slice of secondary sales.
When Blur’s hotly anticipated first airdrop to traders launched in Feb, some users—mostly individuals who traded exactly the same NFTs over and again and again, to improve their stats—claimed over $a million worth of tokens each. A second airdrop in November gifted users around $8.4 million worth of BLUR.
All in all, the work doled out $818 million price of tokens to users in 2023. Even though a lot of the game individuals airdrops rewarded seem to be because of what some would call wash buying and selling, or trades made only to grow their rewards, the seismic impact of Blur’s airdrop can’t be understated.
By Feb, Blur rode momentum from the airdrops to overtake OpenSea—the reigning, once-untouchable leader for NFT trades, that has since faced brutal downsizing. Now, creator fees—once a foundation from the NFT ecosystem—are an endangered species.
Celestia: $728 million
Despite an extremely lackluster start for Celestia’s airdrop at the end of October—during that the modular blockchain’s native token, TIA, went unclaimed by nearly all potential recipients, and also the network lagged in activity—TIA has since enjoyed an amazing rally in value.
The token launched on October 31 in a cost of $2.18, based on CoinGecko. Next days, TIA’s cost bending to $4.00, then sprinted past $6.00, $8.00, and $10.00—to its current, outstanding cost of $12.83. It also sprang past $15 on Christmas Eve.
Individuals compounding gains have shot TIA’s market cap as much as $1.88 billion in under two several weeks, and gifted Celestia airdrop recipients among the best returns from the year—despite the truth that the Celestia network’s actual usership still remains fairly anemic.
Jito: $312 million
The very best Solana airdrop of the season came earlier this year, thanks to DeFi platform Jito. Days prior, the work announced its plans to debut a local governance token, JTO, sparking a craze of anticipation within the momentum–gaining Solana ecosystem.
Once the airdrop finally launched on December 7, users rushed to assert the 90 million JTO tokens up for grabs—grabbing $225 million worth in the very first day. That collective value has leaped up to $312 million up to now at peak cost. The Solana DeFi token has continued to be fairly consistent in cost since launching at $2.49—sitting at $2.46 at writing.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
