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Crypto follows no rules, regulations, or constructs of the typical market. It has its own mind, own systems, own set of ethics, and own ecosystem. In the world of crypto, we have concepts such as airdrops. It’s actually giving away free money.
The simplest version of an airdrop is where a user has to register with some basic details and give his Ethereum (or relevant coin) wallet address, and voila! Within a few weeks, the tokens will be in your wallet.
Some airdrops are a bit more sophisticated. Project X is a hard fork of Project Y. Project X wants to distribute free tokens to increase awareness.
As project X is a fork of project Y, they decide to take a snapshot of project Y’s blockchain (balances of all users) The airdrop tokens for project X will be equally distributed among the token holders of project Y.
At last, we have ‘holder airdrops’. To apply for this type of airdrop, all you need to do is to hold the airdrop related crypto asset at a specific time (which is called a snapshot) and you will receive the new coins. Mostly, they take a snapshot of one of the bigger blockchains like Ethereum, Stellar, NEO, …
Let’s take a look at the following tips.
1. Use Telegram Instead of using extra tools, keep it simple and reward new users with some free tokens.
It’s not difficult to create software that monitors your Telegram for new users and sends them some of your project’s tokens.
It also leads to users inviting friends via referral links. An automated system eliminates any scope for human error during the process and creates a more seamless system. 2. User-friendly Consumers know the value of their data, and with ethics and regulation under the spotlight recently (looking at General Data Protection Regulations in Europe), it’s important to take the privacy of your participants into consideration. Airdrop registration should be a simple task with minimal input of personal data required. 3.
Reward Engagement Gabriele Giancola, CEO of blockchain-powered loyalty ecosystem Qiibee, explains her concept of a progressive airdrop model, “the model includes participants getting the opportunity to earn more tokens through engagement. This gives control to participants and acknowledges their interactions and milestones, which is invaluable in building trust”.
4.
Monitor Spam You don’t want to publish and receive a lot of spam because of your airdrop. Managing community channels such as Telegram during the airdrop process often means dealing with increased volumes of spam and trolling. This can be detrimental to your credibility and have a negative impact on engaged participants contributing to the conversation. Using anti-spam and anti-abuse policies in conjunction with sentiment detecting and text recognition technology are simple ways of maintaining high-quality discussions.
5. Earn.
com A disadvantage of ‘just’ doing an airdrop is the fact that you are targeting random individuals. It’s a good idea for increasing awareness among investors, however, you want to maximize the returns of your airdrop. By ‘just’ doing an airdrop, you are mostly targeting bounty hunters and smaller investors.
What if you have an ICO that is building a new smart contract platform for developers. Projects can now use Earn.
com to pay large groups of people in specific categories to fill out surveys, respond to emails, or do more complex tasks.
Here are a few examples: Market Research: Send a paid survey to hundreds of JavaScript developers to validate a new smart contract platform. ICOs: Mass email thousands of digital currency investors with details on a new ICO to find buyers. Community Growth: Ask thousands of investors to join your Telegram channel and ask interesting questions about the project.
Earn.
com is quite unique as they combine large curated groups of verified users, software to send them tasks, and a way to quickly pay them for completed tasks. This combination can speed up community growth dramatically for ICOs. To give you an example, with a budget of $15,000 we were able to grow our Telegram channel by an additional 5000 developers, paying $3 per person. A simple, non-targeted message costs you $1, which is the cheapest service on the platform.
According to Earn.com, projects see response rates in the range of 40-50%, with 90% of respondents usually replying within 24 hours. For reference, these numbers are very high relative to the 1.7% response rate of traditional cold emails.
Problems with Airdrops So-called bounty hunters will try to maximize profits from your ICO project without even investing themselves. The original goal of an airdrop program is receiving ‘free’ marketing, or other tasks that benefit the project. Perhaps early on, this was a very effective marketing tool.
Nowadays, people falsely see bounty programs as a way of getting easy money, to be sold as soon the token gets listed.
This has a negative effect on the long-term token holders as the price of the token immediately drops because of these short-term gold seekers.
In addition, these short-term cash-grabbers do not even visit the project’s website for a prolonged period of time, let alone read their whitepaper, and lack much, if any, understanding of the project. These types of people are toxic to blockchain startup communities and contribute no value to them, unless “when moon” is the type of question you like to read twenty times per day in your Telegram.
Serious ICO investors often decide to wait for the ICO to end so they can grab some cheap tokens when the bounty sell-off happens.
This is not good for ICOs as more and more ICOs struggle to reach their targets. To Sum Up A cryptocurrency airdrop appears to be a very interesting promotional tool. Watch out for bounty hunters as they can ruin a project’s initial token price by massively selling (dumping) the token as soon as it is listed for secondary market trading. Nowadays, it’s not a bad idea to use a more controlled airdrop model or use a service like Earn.
com which turns out to be a very effective marketing tool for targeting users and growing your community. .
