Sonic went hard on promoting their airdrop at every opportunity.

Some of their posts even looked like ones that engagement farmers would post (and it shocked me how the official brand account was posting it instead).

I find that the best airdrops come from projects that constantly deny the existence of an airdrop (or they don’t talk about it at all).

These are projects that care more about their product and are looking to constantly improve it, instead of feeding on hype.

And how they structured their airdrop gave me less motivation to interact with it:

I don’t like it when projects share the full formula on how to earn points for their program.

This encourages farming and exploitation, which ultimately dilutes the value of each point.

This also leads to higher expectations of a good drop, especially if the leaderboard ranking and point totals are publicly available.

That’s why I prefer when projects launch point systems without known criteria (similar to Hyperliquid and Abstract):

Points can’t be gamed as the formula dynamically changes every week.

It doesn’t mean that I would skip the airdrop entirely if they have a public points system, but I would allocate less effort there if the system can be easily gamed by Sybils.

And this reason is probably why we saw Sonic all over the timeline:

Tons of airdrop accounts were shilling the Sonic airdrop because they had a referral system:

We could earn 10% of the points our referees earn:

I’m not sure how much these accounts benefited from referrals (since I haven’t seen anyone who was eligible for the drop yet).

But it felt way too over-shilled on the timeline and that made me have less motivation to interact with it.

And of course, they recently launched their Yapper leaderboard too:

I decided to allocate my funds to other airdrops for this reason:

Only 25% of our entire allocation would be available immediately, while the rest are vested within 270 days.

270 days (~ 9 months) is a long time, especially in this space where anything can happen.

There have been some wins with vested airdrops like Solayer, but these are the anomalies.

We need to have full confidence that the team continues to ship, as we’re exposed to it during this period.

And I have less confidence in teams that overpromised but underdelivered:

Many have asked me why I don’t share testnet airdrops, but it’s mainly because there are few that are worth our time.

I would only prioritise testnet airdrops that explicitly state are incentivised.

But even that can be misleading, just like what we saw with Sonic.

I wasn’t following Sonic Arcade closely (as it seemed like another mindless grind), but it looks like they overpromised that it was incentivised.

In the end, it amounted to an insignificant weightage on users’ allocation.

I would be cautious about projects that actively shill their testnet points program, because it’s likely to pad stats over anything else.

Airdrops are becoming harder to get, so we should not solely rely on them:

If we knew where to look on Sonic, we could have earned a decent return on our holdings.

Some protocols provided good yield for stablecoins or ETH:

While airdrops are nice to have, I’m treating them as a bonus:

I don’t want to mindlessly burn fees in hopes for an airdrop.

Instead, I want to make a return based on my activities on the chain and get an airdrop on top of it.

This was something I learned from the Eclipse airdrop:

We can’t afford to waste our resources on airdrops with a poor ROI:

So many airdrops are being sold as ‘free’ opportunities to make 3-4 figures.

But if they involve mindless clicking or other easily repeatable tasks:

It will be heavily botted by Sybils and the returns will be poor.

Projects are no longer rewarding us based on the number of transactions we push on the network.

That playbook died long ago with Arbitrum.

So we have to be smarter and spot the best airdrops based on our capital and time constraints.

I shared the top factors I use here.

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