Cosmos Airdrops

On Cosmos that's all they talk about — the airdrops…

Perhaps this article will be the most belletristic one. A lot of facts, examples, stories, and in the end, emotions, coincidences and eventualities.

I couldn't start to write a story about the Cosmos ecosystem airdrops for a long time, because even after talking to many experienced cosmonauts I couldn't form my final opinion. It would be more correct to tell the story from my perspective, but I'm new in Cosmos, so I'll tell what I've gathered. Is it a fairytale or reality, DYOR. Airdrops (to not drown in all those keywords like, drop, airdrop, fairdrop, rektdrop, etc., let's consider them to be the same throughout the entire article) are a free distribution of a project's coins or tokens after fulfillment of some conditions (Conditions are always conventional. As for the Cosmos eco, it's staking specific coins and thereby securing the network 99.99% of the time). Airdrops are used as a marketing tool to raise awareness about a new project as well as to attract as many people as possible, since many projects conduct an airdrop before ICO´s or token sale. Additionally, airdrops bring value to a token at the start, because many people sell them, thus increasing the trading volume and attracting other participants.

Yet again, Cosmonauts don't really tend to sell right away. Many prefer to hold the coins and stake them. At some point you'll realize that “airdrop” and “staking” are the two of the most commonly used words here 🙂 Usually tokens are dropped to the following categories of the ecosystem participants (It's important to mention here that coins can be sent to your wallet address right away, or they need to be claimed via the project's dApp):

Stakers of $ATOM, $OSMO, $JUNO and other coins delegated to certain validators (Less often tokens are distributed to holders). The choice of a validator to stake is also important. This is a separate topic that will be covered in our other materials. In short, I recommend not delegating to the validators from the top 10. Choose validators with whom you can directly communicate through their online channels. As I mentioned, many validators do drops to their delegators. Also, take a look at the validator commission (Airdrops are rarely distributed to those who delegate to validators with 0% commission, however, high commissions aren't profitable for you too).
Participants of governance votings in the ecosystem. Yeah, sometimes, if you vote on a proposal the way the project wants, it can deliver to you some tokens. Let me again make it clear that it's important to vote. If you don't vote, your validator will vote for you, however, projects appreciate it when you vote yourself.
Liquidity providers. Those who add their tokens in liquidity pools also fall under the category of users eligible for airdrops (but less often). Usually, we're talking about $ATOM/$OSMO and $JUNO/$OSMO pools. Though, superfluid stakers aren't eligible for airdrops yet.

How do I get started with airdrops?

First, you need to download a wallet app and register your public address on the blockchain. All wallets supporting Cosmos can be found here. We also made our own review of Cosmos-related wallets and dashboards, which you're kindly invited to explore. Well now you need to build your own portfolio. Portfolio building is a separate issue, but you should always start with $ATOM. I haven't found any cases when it was bypassed by airdrops. It's important to form your portfolio both by coin types and its quantity. I'll show some statistics to help you understand how different the airdrops conditions can be:

Now tell me, how many coins do you need to be eligible for an airdrop? 🙂 Right, it's not clear. But the more the better. The recent airdrop from Gelotto was rolled out with following conditions:

Such serious demands (I wasn't eligible for the airdrop again) may be associated with the drawdown of coins' valu during the current bear market. Anyway, we have what we have.

$EVMOS was added to that list not so long ago. Now it's also an important part of the ecosystem.

One experienced cosmonaut was asked to share how many airdrops he got in a year. Citadel.one's service allows you to keep such statistics.

Yes, here, too, not everything is transparent and obvious, but you can see that airdrops are distributed regularly and the quantity of coins is pretty different. It's also important to understand that you'll start to get regular airdrops after about six months of staking. Until then, you aren't so fortunate. Projects make snapshots and announce the airdrop much later (as practice shows).

I'm providing you an interesting spreadsheet on airdrops for your own study.

How much money can I make?

Cosmos airdrops can be very generous (and ridiculous too). There are some amazing examples:

You could get 4906 $STARS coins which is equal to $127 at today's rate, for participating in staking and voting in the Stargaze project (https://www.stargaze.zone/airdrop). At the moment of the airdrop the cost was even higher.
Osmosis - about $3,000 for 100 staked $ATOM (the rate fell now).
Juno - at 1:1 ratio tto staked $ATOM. Meaning that if you staked 100 $ATOM, you would get 100 $JUNO (worth around $333 now and was worth $4,000 at the ATH. The maximum you could be reached was $50K, but you can learn more about that in my Juno article).
Neta - around $30,000 for staking 25 $JUNO and participating in at least one governance proposal (again, the price rate has been killed by now).
And finally, a sensational (fat) “rektdrop” from EVMOS, which has been split into four stages. Someone managed to get 500+ $EVMOS at the price above $6 after the launch and until April 29, 2022. Of course, some of the tokens were sold right away, and the rest that was left to be claimed was trading at a lower price. And what is special about this airdrop - Metamask and Ethereum users were eligible for the airdrop too.

The airdrops I claimed (Genesis $L1, ORAI, Diffusion) distributed a penny. I can't tell if it's just my bad luck, the bear market, or if it's a general trend to airdrop cost reduction (I've been in the Cosmos ecosystem since May 5, 2022 and my positions are still very modest).

Today, 21.07.2022, Gelotto is airdropping tokens (token isn't traded and price isn't clear yet).