For those who’re coming across the word airdrop for the first time, in the crypto world, an airdrop is the distribution of the a token or cryptocurrency (or even NFTs) to wallets, mostly for free.
What are the possible reasons any protocol would want to give away their tokens for free?
The entire theme of crypto digital currencies is about decentralisation and communities. To keep their first adopters and supporters engaged and incentivised to promote the product in hopes of a future token airdrop.
When tokens are launched initially, they need to increase adoption, hence, giving away their tokens are mostly to build traction and increase hype and transactions.
In the scope of this article, we will look at major airdrop activities in the last 6 months from a data lens, and attempt to dig up insights on its impact on the blockchain space.
The Optimism Foundation’s Airdrop #1 rewards those who have been instrumental as early adopters and active users of projects in the Optimism ecosystem.
A total of 248,699 users were eligible for the OP airdrop, out of which 141784 users (~57%) have claimed the airdrop as of now.
About 141.7K users claimed the $OP token airdrop while only → 63.4K (44.75%) still hold the token.
Total $OP holders currently (12PM UTC, 21st June) stand at about 83.5K holders.
https://dune.com/embeds/987242/1710167/72f515aa-310d-4cd8-8f7d-794cc036d478?display=iframe
A large number of airdrop claimers started dumping $OP token in the market.
https://dune.com/embeds/986753/1709460/7de24440-0c2e-43bc-80d0-07cca5ec6816?display=iframe
As we can observe above, around -$8.62Mn of OP was dumped right after airdrop.
In response to the OP token dumping, an Optimism community member, 0xJohn, submitted a governance proposal that would ban sellers of the initial airdrop from receiving future Optimism airdrops.
Only 20.5% of the $OP claimed have been delegated to vote in governance.
https://dune.com/embeds/878289/1534261/39a8a704-f30f-4d5c-acc3-6c327b351643?display=iframe
A large number of $OP tokens were swapped through Uniswap Optimism as we can see via the following visualisations -
https://dune.com/embeds/983555/1709673/b5a15af5-c069-4d12-9cf2-f53de8e337de?display=iframe
Additionally a large amount of $OP tokens were traded on Uniswap right after airdrop, with a sum total of $529Mn and 235K trades to date. Uniswap $OP token trades reached a high of $125Mn on the 1st of June.
https://dune.com/embeds/986917/1709688/0846c679-c19e-49b5-8ed0-adf2dacbb5e7?display=iframe
The increase in trades and swap volume over the period of the airdrop pushed Uniswap Daily Volume Share from an average of ~75% before to highs of over almost 90% on May 31st and 1st June.
https://dune.com/embeds/987353/1710335/14bfd33b-55d4-4218-b193-088528ddc5c2?display=iframe
Link to the dashboard and queries:
I’ve consulted various dashboards (alongside the one above) of these amazing dune wizards to complete my deep-dive article and I would like the space to thank all of them.