We have been here before

I remember the early months of 2018 when the ICO craze was raging and each and every MINT student released their own whitepaper, most not even caring (nor knowing) how the solution they were describing could possibly be implemented. What always went along with the paper was an ERC-20 token that you could purchase from them in their Initial Coin Offering (ICO).

I was aware of what was going on expected 99% of these to become worthless sh*tcoins within months. Still, I was hoping for that 1% that would moon and spent many hours participating in airdrop programs on Airdropalert.

Spoiler: I did not receive a token that mooned. I did not get rich from Airdrops.

You’re asking what I did get? Well, most of the campaigns simply never distributed any tokens. Those were usually the ones whose ICOs were running in parallel to the airdrop campaign and after it ended, they just disappeared. Others distributed the tokens, held their ICO and disappeared then. From the latter I got almost 80 different ERC-20 tokens. For the exception of the Livepeer token LPT where the 2 coins I got from the airdrop are now worth over 50 USD (hey, I might actually sell that some day), the remaining 77 drops are worth less than the gas fee it costs to get them out of my wallet.

You see, if you’re talking sh*tcoins, my demand is satisfied. I’m not investing in any dog currencies for that reason, by the way.

What I also got from all those airdrop campaigns was a whole bunch of spam in my email inbox, a telegram flooded by so many scammy groups that it became useless for private chatting and three suspended Twitter accounts.

We are here again

Airdrop programs on Airdropalert are overflowing once more. What has changed is that this time, most drops are BSC-20 tokens instead of ERC-20 and that hosts are not even providing made-up use cases for their coins anymore. All they do now is draw a fancy anime-angry-bird-style animal avatar and proclaim the next best DeFi solution in which you can earn CAKE, BAKE, SAKE, SUSHI, ZUSHI, SISHI (I’m not even making these up) or whatever. The environment is very much like 2018 which is why I still believe the bubble has burst and BTC will see another sharp drop soon.

My experience with airdrops on Airdropalert was not the best, so I refrain from joining in. But at the same time, I noticed that the amount of airdrops on Coinmarketcap is increasing. Surely, airdrops on a renowned site like Coinmarketcap are legitimate?

So, let’s see what’s required to join in. You’ll need to register on Coinmarketcap, fair enough, and then you’ll…

Oh, no! Not this sh** again! I don’t want my Twitter accounts banned again, so I’m not tagging anyone anymore. Not all drops require tagging, however, and even with this one, we can’t be sure. Once we click on “Join this Airdrop”, nobody’s talking about tagging anymore. This is not the only drop where Join conditions are more than ambiguous and instructions are different in different places.

Why I participating at all? Because the new drops are on BSC, so I had hoped to sell some of them with a reasonable gas price and evade the ‘dead coins’ in my wallet problem I encountered with the ERC-20 drops.

When you finally win, they make you pay

So, I went through a couple of these campaigns and when checking my results on ended airdrops, I would usually see this

or this

...waiting for results which seem to never come. BlockSwap Network is among the most ridiculous of all, hosting their second airdrop already while not being able to deliver the results of their first one.

But then, just when I had abandoned the hopes of winning, I must have gotten lucky.

Finally! I went straight to my BSC explorer to check how much my winnings were worth, only to see that I didn’t get anything. Wait, the message said something about clicking a button to claim the winnings. Let’s do that.

Following various links after having clicked that button, I finally made it to the claim site. Only to realize the reason for this process:

The airdrop hosts are too cheap to pay the gas fees for their drops and want you to pay it when claiming it!

C’mon what kind of airdrop is this? I’m not gonna pay 0.003 BNB in gas fees to claim a token that had its Telegram group marked as spam and only trades on one single exchange that I have never heard of before.

Luckily, I won a 2nd giveaway, so I went on to claim that instead.

Dadumm.

So much for my experience with social media campaign airdrops in 2021. I’m going to quit all those Telegram groups now, abandon the Coinmarketcap just as I have abandoned the Airdropalert airdrops and will instead spend my time stacking Splinterlands rewards for a better standing in their SPS token airdrop. I have a feeling that one will be H.U.G.E.

Disclaimer: No financial advice included in this article. Just sharing my personal experience. Do your own research!

Some links in the article might be referral links, feel free to use other sign-up methods.

Images courtesy of Unsplash.com / screenshots taken myself.

This is a re-published version from my account on the HIVE blockchain.