What are airdrops and how can I make a lot of money with them and the cryptocurrencies they give away?

The airdrops are gifts, Than the developers often use them to reward the first to support a project , while calling attention to attract more support. Taking part in these launches is part strategy and part luck.

These gifts can be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars. One of the largest was Uniswap , which in September 2020 released 400 of its UNI cryptocurrencies to addresses that had used Uniswap v1 or v2 contracts.

Lucas Dimos , a cryptocurrency investor since 2017, has been lucky enough to receive quite a few airdrops , including one from Uniswap. That gift is now worth about 6,632$USD , based on UNI's exchange price today, about 16.58$ , almost three times its value on delivery.

This is free money that we gave, unfortunately, you no longer have access: you do not remember your password and you cannot enter your old electronic wallet.

Since that experience, he has realized the value that some of these releases can achieve and has been attentive to where and when they can happen again.

You recently received an airdrop from Ethereum Name Service , a platform used to register Ethereum cryptocurrency addresses, for using their protocol. That delivery is now worth about 2,000 $, based on ENS's exchange price , which was about 36 $.

He has received three more airdrops , worth about $ 800 altogether, according to his Etherscan portfolio.

The values ​​of these launches vary and are based on the exchange price of each cryptocurrency . Wallet holders can also receive different amounts based on how long and how often they have used a protocol.

"This is one of the advantages of using a decentralized platform," explained Dimos.

" Instead of rewarding venture capitalists and big tech companies for using the product, the user is often rewarded with a governance token or utility token for using that protocol," he says.

Dimos is constantly investing in early stage blockchain projects for which it sees strong use cases . He discloses his investment and shares his views on Twitter and TikTok, where he has more than 500,000 followers.

How to maximize the chance of getting an airdrop - and avoid scams -
New projects often don't announce airdrops in advance because of something called a sibylline attack , Dimos explains. This occurs when a person or an institution creates more than one account or node, in this case to abuse an airdrop by creating a bunch of fictitious accounts to maximize what they receive.

Venture capital firms have even tried this strategy; the best known incident has been that of the cryptocurrency company Divergence Ventures and the launch of Ribbon Finance.

So it's very much a guessing game. To get started, Dimos recommends getting a MetaMask account , which is a web wallet that connects to your browser.

Next, the cryptocurrency expert recommends looking for decentralized finance projects that were born last year and that have not yet launched an airdrop . "If you can use their platform as it was conceived, chances are you will get a token," he explains.

"A lot of this is speculation," confesses Dimos. " The best way I could tell someone to get into airdrops is to actually go use the Web3 applications , because essentially what you are doing if you are investing your time and maybe spending a little money to make it work."

Like most things in life, airdrops aren't a free lunch. Interacting with some of these protocols may require some money. For example, the Ethereum Name Service platform requires you to pay the network a fee when you sign up.

"The Ethereum Naming Service airdrop was something that I imagined would come at some point," says Dimos, who confesses that even then "I didn't know it would be that big." "I would have invested more if I knew," he explains.

Although Dimos hasn't had any bad experiences with airdrops , he cautions against their risks. " There are as many scams as there are opportunities," he explains. Some people have reported phishing scams after seeing unusual tokens in their wallets.

The best way to stay safe is not to interact with any protocol that you don't understand. "If you receive tokens from a project that you are not familiar with, or a project that has an anonymous team behind it and has no reputation, be careful," he warns. "Doing things like navigating to the token's website and connecting to its page could end up emptying your wallet," he says.

" A good rule of thumb is if you don't know where it comes from, don't touch it."

As for the upcoming releases, he has speculated with some.

One is from Fees.wtf, a simple platform that tells you how much you have spent on Ethereum fees. His unverified Twitter account recently suggested that there might be an airdrop later this week and posted the requirements to qualify for one.

The other is from MetaMask. Joseph Lubin, founder of ConsenSys, which owns MetaMask, responded to a tweet in November hinting that a launch might be coming.

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