Why paratrooper farmers will have a harder time “killing” in 2025 – DL News

Airdrops, where crypto projects distribute valuable tokens to their early adopters, have offered enterprising DeFi enthusiasts the opportunity to make millions.

But according to CC2Ventures, a pseudonymous crypto personality who claims to have made more than seven figures from airdrops, it is increasingly difficult for newcomers to replicate its success.

“Airdrops are here to stay, but only a few will be printed and it will be increasingly difficult to kill them,” he said. DL News.

Value Compression

Throughout 2023 and 2024, DeFi users who held on through the crypto winter were rewarded with several lucrative airdrops.

In October 2023, modular blockchain Celestia airdropped 60 million of its TIA token – worth $1.2 billion at its peak valuation – to users of Ethereum and Cosmos, among others.

Later that year, Solana project Jito launched its JTO token and distributed 10% of it to early adopters. At the JTO token’s peak valuation, those who received the smallest allocations could sell their stash for over $20,000.

But in recent months, many hopeful airdrop chasers have felt shortchanged.

When Ethereum layer 2’s Scroll and ZKsync airdropped their tokens in late 2024, users complained about paltry allocations or being left out of airdrops altogether.

“Farmers received millions of tokens from ZKsync,” said Farea, a pseudonymous self-described airdrop hunter. DL News in June. “But people who did this for two years only got 1,200 (tokens).”

Many of those who obtained tokens chose to sell them, as highlighted by the poor performance of Scroll’s SCR and ZKsync’s ZKS tokens compared to Celestia and Jito’s tokens.

“The market as a whole has improved.”

— CC2Adventures

CC2Ventures said the growing number of similar projects launching tokens – such as Layer 2s – was leading to valuation compression.

“Previously there were only two or three layer 2s with a token: Optimism, Arbitrum, Immutable; now there are more than 20,” he said.

Simply put, the more projects launch tokens, the harder it is for the market to maintain high valuations for each of them.

Ousted

In 2020, leading decentralized exchange Uniswap was among the first DeFi protocols to perform an airdrop, rewarding early users who traded on the platform with UNI tokens.

Because the Uniswap airdrop and other similar early airdrops were unexpected and occurred when DeFi was a smaller sector, they rewarded a smaller number of users. This meant larger payments for each person.

But five years later, this dynamic has changed significantly.

Institutions, venture capitalists and other big players have joined the airdrop farming game, lured by the lucrative returns, CC2Ventures said. And with greater awareness, tokens distributed by projects are distributed among more people.

“The market as a whole has improved,” CC2Ventures said.

The often predictable eligibility criteria that projects use to decide who will receive an airdrop and who will not have not allowed airdrop farmers, especially organized ones, to ensure that they get a payment.

Silver lining

Even though many recent airdrops haven’t lived up to previous ones, that doesn’t mean they all will.

“There will always be outliers that print massively due to the market overlooking the opportunity early on,” CC2Ventures said.

Such a situation could arise, he said, when a DeFi project begins to attract a large number of users and capital after a long period of operation.

Perpetual exchange Hyperliquid, which dropped its HYPE token in November, is an example of this phenomenon. It launched its airdrop “points” campaign in November 2023, when the platform was tiny compared to its competitors.

But predicting the next Hyperliquide is easier said than done. CC2Ventures takes no risks.

“A spray-and-pray approach — growing them all — works best,” he said.

Tim Craig is DL News’ DeFi correspondent based in Edinburgh. Contact us with advice at tim@dlnews.com.