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Sigh... I was getting around to doing the Flare airdrop just a moment ago and will finish it off later. Well, if anyone remembers, Flare was the smart contract platform that was piggy-backing off Ripple... and the time snapshot for the airdrop was in 2020 sometime... and the claim period finished in 2021 sometime... and this last couple of weeks, well... the first tranche of the airdrop actually happened! 15% of allocations airdropped immediately, and the rest will be completed depending on the outcome of this first governance proposal.

As I was doing this... well, I was just thinking about how much of a pain in the arse airdrops are... and I'm not really convinced that these are things that actually align airdrop recipients with the long term goals of the project. But I'm pretty sure that most projects already know that... and the airdrops are used to build hype and hit certain metrics.

So, for the Flare airdrop... honestly, I didn't remember anything from two or three years ago. Which wallets had Ripple in them, and where I set claim addresses to... thankfully, it is all visible on the XRP explorer, I've long since said goodbye to most of the Ripple (XRP) tokens... I'm not quite convinced about the project, and it was always a long bet on the success and adoption of private ledgers by existing banks to help replace their SWIFT system... but with a private style blockchain, there wasn't ever a real need to actually have a token like XRP exist in the first place... so, I hung on to the XRP in order to qualify for the snapshot and then dumped most of it (always keeping a moonbag, in case I'm wrong!).

... and I have to say, that is probably the behaviour of most of the people in this space if the industry of airdrop hunting is anything to go by. People chase airdrops, with no real intention of either using or even understanding a protocol's vision. I've stopped doing this quite soon after starting... as airdrops started getting more complicated and they turned into either lockdrops or claimdrops... the idea being that you are expecting a "dedicated" community to actually perform on-chain actions to "prove" that they are dedicated. Well... that sort of thing just gets sybilled to death (same as the original airdrops...), and people just do the minimum to hit the airdrops.

... but my biggest gripe about it all... is the fact that we are just training people to just follow some shady project and start signing and approving transactions and contracts with barely any thought. This is not going to end well... and that is what made me stop looking at most of the air/claim/lock-drops

Sure, I still pick up the nice ones... the ones that I think are actually worthwhile, but I don't bother with most of them. As I had already said, it is just too much of a pain in the arse to keep track of everything (even if you use airdrop trackers like earndrop or earnify).... and more to the point, the danger is too high...

I really loved the first wave of airdrops... Uniswap was amazing, it was the original retrospective airdrop, and it was innovative... but now the game is known, and hunters game the system. It is no fun, and people do things in EXPECTATION of a reward. This is not the community that you will want to be holding your tokens... and this is NOT what crypto is supposed to be about.

... so, in short... use the protocols that you are interested in or share the long-term vision for. Because they are good and useful... if you get an airdrop, super... lucky you... if not, you are using something because you wanted to use it, and not because you HOPED to get something in exchange for supporting or using it.

We are trying to support and build the next generation of society-wide digital tools... not train a generation of freebie-hunters.

I can also be found cross-posting at:
Hive
Steem
Publish0x

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