Hello friends, readers, enemies, procrastinators, and that lovely but slightly annoying person who DMs me once a week and asks, "wen article?"
HERE IT IS. PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE NOW.
My laziness has temporarily reduced, my headspace has become clearer, my random bouts of anxiety-induced panic attacks have stopped, and here I am, once again, ready to begin writing mostly meaningless words on the internet to the three of you who feel obliged to read them.
Anyway, pleasantries over, today’s topic is about the new METAGAME.
In competitive gaming, the metagame often refers to the most popular strategy - the one that might not be the most fun but the one that most likely results in you winning.
In Crypto, the metagame shifts quite often, and those that are early to recognise this are able to be maximally efficient (and hopefully very profitable) as they are now competing against the laggards who have yet to realise their old strategy is no longer working as intended.
As time goes by, more and more players become aware of the new meta and adjust their strategy accordingly until there is no edge remaining.
Cobie has a way better article on this than I could ever write, so if you want to learn more, instantly close this page, google Cobie Substack, and spend the next hours of your life learning from someone way smarter than me.
The Game is shifting.
For the past year or two, a very profitable, reasonably low risk strategy has been airdrop farming.
During the bear market, when very few others believed, those that remained, researched, supported, and used good quality projects found themselves very heavily rewarded for their actions.
Blur, Wormhole, Jito, Tensor, ZK Era, Friend Tech, Eigen Layer, Celestia, to name just a few, have all been, or likely will be, between 5 and 6 figure airdrops.
But
I do think the tides are starting to shift.
1) We’re not in a bear market anymore.
People actually believe prices might go up. Celebrities are here. Donald Trump is literally on TV saying he wants to be the Crypto President!
It’s not as early as it once was.
Search trends globally for the word "Airdrop" are back to 2021 levels and reaching all-time highs.
It’s clear now that “airdrop farming” is not a niche strategy. Basically, everyone I speak to online is doing it.
Today you are competing against significantly more users for a shrinking pie, because the number of token launches each month is also increasing, whilst inflows to alts stagnates.
With each airdrop, the players get smarter, and the industrial Sybil farms get harder and harder to spot, meaning the average user gets more and more diluted.
This doesn’t mean airdrops are dead; it just means the skill level required to make exceptional money has increased from literally clicking two buttons and waiting a bit, to actually having to do some research, formulate a plan, invest more time, energy, and effort while also getting far luckier.
In summary, it's gone from difficulty level 2/10 to 6/10.
2) The political winds are shifting
Airdrops have been somewhat of a happy accident, really. When every legal team is advising every new project that the most regulatory secure way of launching is to give away your tokens for free to the community, then that is simply what every team will do, regardless if this makes good business sense or not.
However, with Trump leading heavily in the polls and even the Democrats hinting at shifting their stance towards Crypto, it’s likely we see a friendlier reception within political circles.
Now some of you will be shouting with joy at this, and it is welcomed. However, there are downsides too.
With actual clear regulations and rules around how to issue tokens, is it more or less likely that airdrops continue in the same fashion as today?
I think it’s less likely.
If teams are no longer terrified of having their windows broken and being dragged out onto the streets in shame by Gary Gensler and his gang of vague, angry, legal workers, will they continue rewarding user 7,733, who has spent $3 with them but spent four months shouting at them on Twitter and complaining in their Discord that they haven’t been given free money yet?
Probably not.
While political shifts won’t stop airdrops, I think a lot of the edge we have now as users will reduce when there are clearer guidelines around this stuff.
Teams will get far better at ensuring there is a clear business motivation to issuing an airdrop and want to see returns from that spend - many may even become more predatory and extractive from the average user. (just like how many businesses on earth operate today)
Longer term I suspect will look more like the $10 voucher you get when you sign up to Uber - not a $10,000 token you can immediately market dump and walk away from.
I’ve lived through this once before when matched betting was a thing - betting sites were giving away free money because everyone they thought it would lead to customer retention. Then they all kind of realised that maybe this was dumb and the users were actually just pocketing the money and not remaining loyal - then low and behold they all stopped and now its incredibly tough to make money within that niche.
3) Viable alternatives are cropping up.
The past few months we’ve started to see subtle hints that things are starting to change with new projects being launched in novel ways and teams experimenting with innovative ways of doing sales.
Sanctum is launching their token with an open sale on Jupiter, a separate discounted sale with vesting, AND an airdrop.
Nillion is hosting a community round at the same valuation as the angels and VCs got through Coinlist.
And of course, Cobie has launched Echo.
If you read between the lines too on a lot of the VC-oriented podcasts that I, for some reason, find myself listening to on my runs, the sentiment towards airdrops is gloomy. They speak with sadness about the current meta and make vague but positive-sounding statements around token sales and ICOs coming back into vogue.
FYI - I AM NOT ENDORSING ANY OF THESE SALES OR APPS OR PROJECTS - I’m just pointing out that their mere existence hints at the start of a trend change.
4) Many Airdrop farmers are entitled idiots.
Airdrop recipients don’t really do themselves any favours. I frequently see people receiving tens of thousands of dollars for doing not really much at all whining incessantly because whales got a bit more than them.
I’ve even seen multiple, pretty normal and nice people start to berate devs in group chats I’m in because the website for claiming was too slow and they wanted to dump ASAP! These same people didn’t even realise they were getting this free money until a day or two earlier!?
Then on top of all this, you have the Sybil army, bot swarms, slave labor Twitter accounts parroting misinformation, threatening devs online, harassing founders, and generally being toxic and abusive in an attempt to try and bully their way into getting higher allocation.
I’m pretty certain the final group of people are sophisticated companies with strategy meetings and highly planned, coordinated campaigns.
It’s pretty easy to make a compelling case as a team that you should explore alternative options when no matter how you design the airdrop, you get torrents of abuse.
Hope is not lost
I could rant about this topic for many more pages, as there are a ton of other reasons why I think we are currently at peak airdrop. But I’m lazy and tired and distracted by other things I now want to write about because my attention span is that of a baby goldfish.
So - to summarise:
The difficulty level of obtaining airdrops has increased significantly - due to more users being aware of them - more teams being willing to exploit users with long, drawn out, vague points campaigns - sybils industrialising and becoming more sophisticated and valuations for alts in general declining.
Teams now have a range of other options they can explore as regulations begin to change and the overton window around sales begins to shift more in their favour.
The elephant in the room is getting bigger and bigger as VCs and podcast hosts ask founders - where is the return on that airdrop you did? Did it really drive loyalty?
AAAAAAAAAAA DOES THIS MEAN I’M DESTINED TO STAY POOR AND ALONE FOREVER?
No.
Well, maybe the alone part.
I’m sad too that airdrops are unlikely to remain as easy and lucrative as they have been the past few years. It’s truly been a golden era and I am forever grateful I’ve been able to participate in probably the biggest wealth generation events an average normal, unskilled person like me could have ever experienced.
Never before have so many dumb people made so much money doing so little.
But as one Meta starts to close, a new one opens.
Teams still need to build communities. They still need people to use their products. They still need to market themselves and their business and the best way to do this is still number go up technology. (rather than the number go down technology we’ve seen with most airdrops recently)
so I think what we’ll see is teams begin to shift to a hybrid approach - strictly Linear airdrops to appease the whales, hopefully with some kind of time based halving effect so early people can still win too, and then a secondary community based token sale - likely at a preferential price so it feels more attractive.
This of course makes things more risky for participants as rather than receiving only free money, they now must SPEND money to play - but at least from the teams perspective users are now more aligned with the project and have skin in the game too.
There are other benefits too - in many countries its far better from a tax perspective to buy a token and sell it at a profit than it is to receive an airdrop. (income)
As always, alpha decays the longer the meta goes on, so in the early days it will likely be easy to participate in these sales - maybe they are gated on coinlist and you need to take a discord test to get in? Or maybe teams will handpick people from their communities.
Teams will likely design them in such a way they are designed to go up only to get the marketing benefits early on & the competition will likely be quite slim.
Until, every one truly believes this is the best way to make money now and every new project finds themselves flooded with people trying to sybil and bribe their way into a whitelist position and teams stop giving preferential prices because they don’t have to - and secondary market buyers stop buying because they can just wait for the next one to launch. (like we saw with NFTs)
But this is likely some time off. What we will see next is airdrop farmers becoming angrier and angrier on twitter, most likely missing out on what is likely to be the next high powered Meta.
But for those of us who see things as they are, not what we wish them to be, we can start preparing for this now, because as always, the ones that win are the ones that put in the work.
Maybe I’ll write a post about how I’m preparing next. Or maybe I’ll get distracted again and come back in two months and talk about something else.
(Remember though - buying stuff is never risk free, early stage investing is NOT EASY, it’s not a free money cheat code - you can lose everything - don’t be a moron, use your brain.)
Have a great weekend!
AS ALWAYS NONE OF THIS IS FINANCIAL ADVICE, IF YOU ARE BUYING A PRESALE TOKEN OR SOMETHING BECAUSE OF THIS POST YOU ARE AN IDIOT AND SHOULD HAVE YOUR ACCESS TO THE INTERNET REMOVED AND YOUR BANK ACCOUNTS GIVEN TO A RESPONSIBLE ADULT.
thanks for (non)financial advice happy