A Brief Guide to Airdrop Farming in 2023

So I've spent the last year understanding airdrop farming and have decided to create a post about the current projects and general consensus within the community.

The ARB airdrop got people very excited about the potential upcoming airdrops, however that hype faded away. We know that airdrops attempt to reward actual users, so it's very interesting how quickly people lost interest in these projects. The criteria that ARB used to determine users is now the standard people use to farm, likely as it was the most recent large airdrop.

https://preview.redd.it/q2rnek57kyob1.png?1874&format=png&auto=webp&s=be7bfcf8ad80288b113c655ee4efdc0f5826f49a

So where is the main interest at the moment? The top 3 are:

Layerzero - not a chain, however the project has the largest valuation at $3bn (www.reuters.com › technology › layerzero-labs-valuedLayerZero Labs valued at $3 billion after latest fund-raise) and no token. The ZRO token has been mentioned by the team, and recently confirmed for a second time due to FTX launching a lawsuit against them.

How to farm:

- Bridge to as many chains on stargate.finance as you can

- Stake STG token and vote on proposals

- Find daaps using layerzero to bridge (there are plenty)

ZkSync - Layer2 with high valuation and high capital raised during funding (3 times higher than `ARB). Built on ETH. While there is no hints from the team at a token, it is highly speculated.

How to farm:

- Make transactions using syncswap.io

- Provide liquidity on syncswap.io

- Interact with as many daaps as you can find.

- Bridge from a L1 to ZkSync (https://portal.zksync.io/bridge/)

- Interact with their testnet, zksync lite

Starknet - Layer2 valued at 8bn (https://www.coingecko.com/learn/starknet-airdrop). They have had 2 leaks recently hinting at the airdrop coming soon, or at least some kind of STARK token.

How to farm:

- Set up a wallet on either Braavos/ Argent X

- Bridge from L1 using https://starkgate.starknet.io/ or L2 using orbiter.finance

- Use daaps on the network, build transactions over time.

The reason these have such high speculation to airdrop is because they have raised funds from investors, and they need to be compensated for their investments. A token is the way that crypto companies do this.

A new issue with farming these is that there are services for farming. They charge around 0.3eth per month and the ability to farm these 3 for a month, on up to 100 different wallets. Some speculate that the new airdrops will require front-end interaction to qualify, which would solve this issue but this is a new issue so it is uncertain.

Other smaller projects have been going almost under the radar by these major farmers such as scroll, linea, polyhedra, zetachain, venom network and the polygon zkEVM. These are definitely worth getting familiar with and interacting with a few times a month. Scroll and Venom are great places to start as they are only testnets at the moment, so you wont have to worry about fees.

Websites like 10kdrop.com have emerged allowing people to check their ranking against other wallets, however the criteria is mostly based on the ARB airdrop as previously mentioned.

In the last few months, there have been no massive airdrops with both the SUI and SEI launches being unfavourable toward the community. This may discourage a lot of farmers.

There has been a shift from the farming community to only focusing on chain airdrops. People are forgetting about how massive the UNI airdrop was. Personally, I use https://defillama.com/airdrops to identify new projects that have been launched without a token. Generally, looking for less than 3months old with high TVL on a chain that is relatively new to the mainnet. This is not spoken on much but could be a good play with tokenless DEXs or Farms such as Syncswap on ZkSync.

Avoid low TVL projects as they can disappear quite quickly