Crypto Airdrops Distribute Over $4 Billion in Tokens This Year

Since the beginning of the year, participants in the crypto industry have received approximately $4 billion in various tokens through airdrops, according to an assessment by The Block.

The top three airdrops were Jupiter, StarkNet, and Notcoin. Each project distributed around $1 billion based on the number of tokens issued and average prices in the following months.

Following them were airdrops from Wormhole, Ether.fi, Friend.Tech, and Wen.

According to a CoinGecko report, the largest distributions remain Uniswap, Apecoin, and dYdX. By December 2023, teams allocated tokens worth $26.6 billion to the most active participants. This figure is based on peak prices, which may be far from the actual realizable value.

The Block used CoinGecko’s methodology, including airdrops from 2024, arriving at a figure of $34 billion.

Analysts highlighted upcoming distributions from ZKsync, Zeta Markets, and LayerZero.

The token distribution for the L2 network ZKsync faced community criticism, as only 13% of 6 million unique wallets were eligible, many of which were identified as “sybils”.

Earlier, LayerZero Labs CEO Bryan Pellegrino announced a halt in accepting reports on “farming” addresses for participation in the LayerZero protocol airdrop due to an influx of messages. 

Prior to this, owners of over 100,000 “sybil” addresses voluntarily came forward as part of an initiative announced by the team.

In the near future, a token distribution from the L2 project Taiko is expected to occur alongside the mainnet launch.