Key Takeaways
- 2021 was a big year for airdrops, with leading Ethereum DeFi projects offering generous rewards to early users.
- Layer 2 solutions and bridges look set to take center stage in 2022.
- Experimenting with other ecosystems such as Cosmos, Solana, and Avalanche is also a solid strategy to receive token rewards.
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Those who test out new protocols can often be handsomely rewarded.
DeFi Airdrops in 2021
To say 2021 was a good year for airdrops would be something of an understatement.
In January, Crypto Briefing published a list of 10 DeFi projects that were likely to airdrop tokens to early users. So far, three of the 10 listed have distributed tokens, netting early adopters thousands of dollars worth of digital assets.
In June, Instadapp was the first on our list to reward its users, airdropping 11,000,000 INST tokens to Maker DAO, Compound, and Aave users on Ethereum and Polygon. Next up, the on-chain trading platform dYdX announced its own token in August, dropping 7.5% of the total DYDX token supply to early users. Finally, despite publicly announcing that it wasn’t planning an airdrop, Paraswap dropped 150 million PSP tokens to frequent users in November.
Of the seven that haven’t rewarded users with tokens this year, several still look promising. MetaMask has continually hinted that an airdrop could be coming but has been vague on who will be eligible or when it’s likely to happen. Other picks, such as Zapper and DeFi Saver, have been less vocal but are still favorites for a future airdrop.
As always, with airdrops, nothing is guaranteed because factors like eligibility criteria are so hard to predict, even moreso after a series of Sybil attacks targeting airdrops were discovered earlier this year. However, the previous record of airdrops has proven that those who consistently get involved early are likely to be handsomely rewarded.
Here, we list our top 10 Ethereum-based projects that could airdrop a token in 2022.
zkSync
zkSync is a Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum. It uses ZK-Rollups and is one of several Ethereum scaling projects to make our list. Pioneering users can transfer ETH to the zkSync 1.0 mainnet, where they can mint NFTs or test out dApps preparing to launch on the network.
To qualify for a potential future airdrop, users can try transferring ETH to zkSync’s mainnet wallet and make swaps on the testnet version of UniSync on the zkEVM.
Notably, zkSync has confirmed that it plans to decentralize through a governance token, which many speculate will be distributed through an airdrop to early users.
StarkNet by StarkWare
Like zkSync, StarkNet is another scaling solution built using ZK-Rollups. StarkWare, the company behind StarkNet, provides the technology used to scale several existing DeFi and NFT protocols, such as dYdX, DeversiFi, Sorare, and Immutable X.
The StarkWare team has been tight-lipped on whether it plans to launch a token but has not outright dismissed the idea….
Read More: cryptobriefing.com