What’s better than money? Free money. And if you like crypto, that generally means the “free” digital currencies that land (with varied levels of effort and time on your part) into your crypto wallet via “airdrops”.

Quick reminder you probably didn’t need – not all crypto is built like Bitcoin, with its strictly limited, “hard-money” truly deflationary supply. And, in fact, Bitcoin maxis would hate me even using it in the same sentence as “crypto”. So be it.

Nevertheless, no matter how you view the merits or faults of various altcoins, there are definite opportunities for freebie tokens that have potential to turn a tidy profit, provided you A) know what you’re doing and/or B) can be bothered to learn how to find out what you should do to safely claim them and C) have the patience and time to follow through.

If you fall somewhere into a camp that straddles these three points, then welcome, because that’s where this article is attempting to pitch its tent.

And if you think crypto airdrop hunting sounds like a waste of time or is just too damn complicated and difficult, keep this in mind…

Some of the more rabid crypto opportunists and participants out there were able to bag themselves as much as US$50k worth of Optimism (OP), $30k on Ethereum Name Service (ENS), $18k on Uniswap (UNI) and $6k on Aptos (APT). (Caveat – depending on whether they sold out at the peak or not, of course.)

Let’s go through 12 promising opportunities, and then we’ll wrap this whole thing up with some reminders about general crypto safety.

Note, not all of these are out-and-out guaranteed drops, and not all are guaranteed you’ve made it in time for an airdrop snapshot. However, even catching just one of the bigger ones could be worth your time.

(With source acknowledgements to some highly excellent Crypto Twitter-based airdrop-alpha suppliers, including, in particular: @milesdeutscher and @OlimpioCrypto.)

 

1. MetaMask’s possible token drop

If you’ve been a crypto user/trader/investor for any decent length of time, you’ll very likely know what MetaMask is. But just quickly, it’s a browser extension and mobile app that equips you with a secure login, password(s), token wallet and token exchange.

It’s also a way to connect and use hardware wallets such as Ledgers and Trezors, which are universally accepted as safer places to store crypto than exchanges or even online wallets such as MetaMask itself.

If an airdrop for the long-awaited $MASK token (not to be confused with existing coins by that name) occurs, which seems likely, then this could end up becoming one of the biggest and best airdrops the industry has seen, considering how ubiquitously MetaMask is used across the space.

You may well already have done enough to qualify for a potential MetaMask token drop, but if we were you, we’d quickly do what this bloke, danny.eth recommends, and that’s make use of the “swap” and “bridge” features in your MetaMask account, right away. Even if it’s just using a very small amount of funds.

 

2. LayerZero

From talking with the likes of Apollo Crypto last year, we learned that LayerZero is one of the most exciting pieces of crypto tech around that focuses on a narrative plenty in the space believe needs solving.

And that’s “omnichain” interoperability – technology that allows blockchains to seamlessly communicate and thus further the capabilities of a frictionless and borderless, well-functioned crypto ecosystem.

That’s the basic pitch, but now how to give yourself a chance for an airdrop? We covered this back in October, referencing Miles Deutscher tweets then, but the drop still hasn’t happened and the same methods still apply.

To give yourself the best chance, follow Miles’s advice with DAO voting on Stargate Finance; using various other crypto projects building on LayerZero; using the Aptos bridge; and using the USDC X LayerZero bridge.

Not straightforward, we know, so now you can see why we sometimes put “free” in inverted comments when we refer to airdrops.

 

3. Arbitrum

Like Optimisim (OP) before it, Arbitrum is a layer 2 blockchain designed to help scale Ethereum. Layer 2 scaling is one of this year’s, and next year’s, likely biggest crypto narratives.

The protocol’s ARB or ARBI token is coming, according to those in the know, and it’ll probably be one of the biggest and most lucrative this year. It’s possibly too late to do enough to qualify, but it’d be advisable to have a crack anyway, just in case.

We’ll direct you to expert airdrop hunter Miles Deutscher’s advice on how to give yourself the best qualification shot, which he posted in October last year (see below).

It involves at the very least bridging crypto (e.g. ETH – probably doesn’t have to be much, $20 worth for example) over to the Arbitrum chain and from there, interacting with various Arbitrum-focused applications.

4. Rage Trade

According to Alpha Drops, this one is a yield and perpetual protocol built on both Arbitrum and LayerZero. So the best part about going for this one, is that you might be able to qualify for three promising airdrops in one hit.

Now this requires understanding the protocol and taking part in its DeFi activity. This tweet thread explains how…

 

5. Spin

Spin is a DeFi trading platform built on the Near (NEAR) layer 1 Ethereum blockchain competitor. Near is possibly one of the more underrated or under-the-radar layer 1 chains – well, for those who only tend to look at the top 20 or so coins by market cap anyway.

It has increasingly high levels of development on chain, increasing partnership narratives, and NEAR is up close to 100% in price value over the past month.

This is a confirmed airdrop for which you’ll first need to set yourself up with a Near Wallet and add some NEAR tokens to it.

Then, to give yourself a chance of airdrop qualification, it’s recommended, according to Altcoinbuzz, that you visit Spin’s spot market and complete a few small trades.

Trying out Spin’s perpetual market with a low-level long/short option or two might not be a bad idea, either.

 

6. Vela (DXP)

Here’s one with a coin out already, and one doing particularly well at that. DXP, a decentralised perpetuals exchange token for the Arbitrum blockchain-housed Vela “DEX”, is up 313% over the past 30 days.

Vela’s private beta launch is imminent and then its open beta is launching in about two weeks. The following pirate-themed Twittering details how you might be able to receive a hefty reward of DXP for participating in the right way. 

 

7. Celestia

Celestia is an upcoming “modular” blockchain network, that has some buzz around it, partly due to the fact it’s already managed to raise at least US$55 million for its development plans.

An airdrop is not 100% confirmed, but it’s said to be a good chance.

Olimpio has a strategy that involves: setting up a wallet and getting Testnet tokens, transacting on the Celestia network and running a node. Some of that sounds complicated, but it sounds achievable when you read his outline, in the thread, below.

8. zkSync

As mentioned earlier, layer 2 scaling of Ethereum is seen as a crucial and big crypto narrative. And crypto pumps are all about the narratives (gaming, DeFi, NFTs, metaverse and so on).

ZK (zero knowledge) rollups is a techy narrative within a narrative. (Ed: Heads up, quota limit for the word “narrative” was just exceeded for this article.) 

Miles D reckons it may be too late for this, but it’s one of those still-worth-a-punt potentials.

“Crypto MaMa” has the specifics in this thread:

 

9. Starknet

Like zkSync, Starknet is another major ZK-rollup player and layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution, this one using the IronMan-esque-sounding STARK cryptographic proof system.

Yeah, yeah, how do I qualify for my free money?

The best strategy we’ve seen for this comes via an account called, um, “Headboy”. Follow it, and perhaps you won’t regret it later.

 

10. Sei Network

Sei is an upcoming layer 1 blockchain of sorts, built on Cosmos. Its whole design and purpose is focused on giving exchanges “an unfair advantage”.

It’s been dubbed the “Decentralized NASDAQ” for its focus on enabling a CeFi trading experience with DeFi tools.

According to Miles D and others, an airdrop is confirmed and the project will be distributing 1% of all tokens to its beta testers. How to become a beta tester and receive tokens? Follow this advice from Mingo Airdrop:

 

11. Quai Network

Quai Network is a bit different, and slightly hard to wrap the noggin around, but essentially, it’s a network of layer 1 blockchains that utilises a combination of merged proof-of-work (PoW) mining with the scalability of sharding technology. 

PoW is the cryptographic proof consensus mechanism that Bitcoin and other crypto-mining-based protocols employs, while sharding is a process of blockchain division and organisation into smaller, more manageable networks known as shards. 

Scratching the surface there, quite obviously, but Quai’s airdrop opportunity consists of interacting through five testnet phases. The account known as Corleone has the relatively simple strat… 

 

12. Lens protocol

We’ve stuck this one down the bottom of the list, not because it’s not a good opportunity – it could well be one of the best – but because it actually seems like one of the most difficult to qualify. In any case, let’s explore.

Lens Protocol is a decentralised social network with a a low carbon footprint and a web3 team connected to the highly successful Aave lending and borrowing crypto platform. In fact, Aave founder Stani Kulechov is also the founder of Lens Protocol, which is built on Polygon.

Suffice to say, plenty of crypto heads are bullish on Lens as a decentralised alternative to the likes of Facebook/Twitter et al.

As for the potential/likely $LENS token airdrop, what you need to do is get yourself a Lens Handle by following their Twitter account. Although it’s not as simple as that and will require a bit of a regular visit to see updates on their handle drops.

From there, if you’re able to secure one of those, it would be a good idea to visit (and interact with if possible) various apps already built on the Lens Protocol network.

Airdrop Official lists 31 of those apps here…

As we intimated, there’s a lot of tooling around for this potential airdrop, but, as with all of these potential options, it might just be worth the effort in the end.

 

Final points

You’ll find plenty of other potential airdrop opportunities on some of the Twitter accounts featured in this article.

If you do plan to go ahead with any of these airdrop strategies, we urge you to practise safe crypto activity – always make sure you’re following trusted sources. The ones we’ve referenced should be fine.

For extra security, though, perhaps consider setting up a specific MetaMask wallet with a small amount of funds in it, solely for your airdrop interactions, rather than using a wallet that contains ALL of your funds.

Happy hunting, and good luck.

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