During the DeFi summers of 2020 and 2021, one thing became clear. If you are using a protocol early and to a certain extent good things may come to you. Many dApps opted to give their users an airdrop that is usually been given in the form of the protocol’s native token. The most famous and notable airdrops were those of Uniswap and 1Inch which brought a lot of attention and created wealth for all participants.

How do you participate in an airdrop that might not even happen and why are there airdrops at all?

Airdrops strengthen the DeFi economy

Airdrops play a vital part in the DeFi economy. The purpose of handing out free tokens is twofold. First, there is a notable effect on marketing activities. If there is reason to believe that there is an airdrop going to be available or an airdrop is announced a lot of users will flock to the protocol. Since they almost certainly have to earn it, the transactions on that protocol usually go through the roof.

The same can be observed for social media activity and coverage in crypto media such as blogs or YouTube channels. But there is more than just media exposure. DeFi users will get in touch with the new protocol and eventually discover the benefits that it offers.

A third less important factor is governance. Many of those tokens are also passing on voting rights to the holders. This is nice to have to decentralize governance but since usually a few large stakeholders are already determining the direction that a project is taking, voting rights are usually less attractive to retail investors.

Is there an Arbitrum airdrop?

No, at this point in time there is no evidence that there will be an airdrop. But there is a movement on social media consisting of people who strongly believe that Arbitrum will hold an airdrop in the near future rewarding users who are adopting this particular second-layer technology based on Ethereum.

The idea of these investors is simple: Heavy use of Arbitrum in the weeks to come. Users can swap tokens, optimize or provide liquidity, lend out funds, or trade NFTs. Another factor that could become important is sending funds to Arbitrum and withdrawing them later. That being said, there is no guarantee that any of these activities will bear fruit.

There are several cases now where investors missed airdrops worth millions of dollars because there was a threshold in place. Meaning that they did everything right except that they chose to operate below the required minimum of funds to become eligible for the airdrop. Since this is all speculation no one can tell for sure what the requirements are nor if there is ever going to be an airdrop. But more investors become convinced that there is going to be such an event and remain undisturbed using Arbitrum and even finishing checklists of tasks to reinsure that they become part of something that isn’t even certain.