Two retrospective airdrops of DeFi tokens are taking place this week. Retrospective airdrops were first popularised with the now legendary Uniswap drop. They reward loyal and existing users of protocols over the drop hunters as they are often based on historical snapshots.

I do prefer this story of arrangement, as the 2027 ICO airdrops proved that funking free tokens for everyone was not a way to build a loyal user base. All it did was to generate a temporary buzz and uptick in treasure hunters and dumpers with no loyalty or interest in the underlying project.

The past years of using varies protocols before DeFi was cool is now starting to pay off with some nice bonuses. If course, at the time I used these things, I had no expectation of anything other than a completed trade or swap... Or some governance interest.

The first of these retrospective drops is the phase 1 for OpenOcean. OpenOcean is a DeFi swap Aggregator that incorporates the best prices across a number of chains (including Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain) on both DEXs and CEXs. The Claim portal is open already for viewing (not actual claims yet), so you can always go to OpenOcean to see if you have gotten lucky! Of course, if you have never used OpenOcean before, it is pretty unlikely that you will have received the drop!

If you have any experience with DeFi, it is clear that you can get easily locked into a single protocol due to lack of knowledge, apathy or unwillingness to continually authorise spending. OpenOcean serves a one stop shop for all your swaps as it compares prices across all the various protocols and you only need to authorise OpenOcean for spending! Much better than scouring the mess of protocols manually!

For most of my swaps, it has been my goto protocol for getting those nice prices and ease of use. So, I'm quite happy that they have decided to reward past users with their OOE drop.

There are supposed to be further rounds of OOE drops, but I suspect these ones will be geared towards attracting new users.

The second drop is one that is less known to me. By participating in on-chain governance voting, I have found that I've been eligible for some pretty nice retrospective drops as well. Often, these are protocols with which I've not had direct interaction with but they are looking to drop their governance tokens to prove who have proven past interest in actually participation.

ForceDAO describes itself as an Ethereum based decentralised hedge fund that aims to scout out and capitalise on alpha bets across all chains. It is an interesting concept, and the strategies that they use will be community proposed. It is something that I will keep an eye on, I'm not 100% sure if community based strategies are the best way to find alpha... as we get things like Safemoon and weird pump and dump alphas... but who knows in this space?

Anyway, it is something that I will make a claim for... and keep a close eye on to see if there is a good reason to park some crypto with this particular DAO. Seeing as I'm not one to go hunting for alpha myself, it would be handy to park and forget!

Handy Crypto Tools

Ledger Nano S/X: Keep your crypto safe and offline with the leading hardware wallet provider. Not your keys, not your crypto!
Binance: My first choice of centralised exchange, featuring a wide variety of crypto and savings products.
Kucoin: My second choice in exchanges, many tokens listed here that you can't get on Binance!
Coinbase: If you need a regulated and safe environment to trade, this is the first exchange for most newcomers!
Crypto.com: Mixed feelings, but they have the BEST looking VISA debit card in existence! Seriously, it is beautiful!
CoinList: Access to early investor and crowdsale of vetted and reserached projects.
Cointracking: Automated or manual tracking of crypto for accounting and taxation reports.