Over the past few years, airdrops have evolved from simple marketing giveaways into complex, multi-layered user engagement mechanisms. Whereas in the past, it was enough to follow a Twitter account and retweet a post to receive tokens, today, projects require participants to interact meaningfully with the product: testing smart contracts, working with testnets, providing feedback, and participating in the ecosystem at early stages. This evolution of airdrops reflects the overall maturation of the crypto industry — a shift from speculative hype toward building sustainable and decentralized communities.
From 2017 to 2026: How Eligibility Criteria Became More Technical
Between 2017 and 2019, airdrops were primarily promotional. The main goal was to quickly attract attention to the project and expand its audience on social media. Participation criteria were kept as simple as possible: following on Twitter or Telegram, retweeting a pinned post, and sometimes filling out a Google Form with a wallet address. The technical barrier to entry was minimal, and the quality of the attracted users rarely mattered.
As the market grew and thousands of new projects emerged, this model quickly became ineffective. The widespread use of bots, multi-accounts, and farming setups made early airdrops unprofitable for teams. By 2020–2021, projects had already begun introducing the first technical filters: the need to make an on-chain transaction, interact with a smart contract, or use a decentralized application at least once.
The next stage of evolution occurred in 2022–2024, when retroactive airdrops (retrodrops) became popular. Instead of pre-announced conditions, teams rewarded users retroactively — for early protocol usage, participation in beta versions, and liquidity provision. Eligibility criteria became noticeably more complex: the number of transactions, volumes, activity duration, use of different product features, and even wallet behavioral patterns were taken into account.
By 2025–2026, selection criteria had taken on an almost engineering-like character. Projects began analyzing deep on-chain activity, behavioral consistency over time, and a user’s contribution to the ecosystem. Requirements emerged for participation in testnets, running nodes, voting in DAOs, testing new modules, and submitting bug reports. Anti-sybil mechanisms are increasingly being applied, including transaction graphs, address clustering, and on-chain identity systems.
Deep On-Chain Activity: Why Volume and Liquidity Are Now Mandatory
As eligibility criteria become more sophisticated, projects increasingly rely on deep on-chain activity as a key indicator of real protocol usage. One-off actions like one swap, one bridge, or a minimal deposit no longer reflect a user’s value to the ecosystem. In the context of mass airdrop farming, such actions are easily automated and do not create long-term value for the product.
Trading volume has become one of the core metrics, as it demonstrates not only the fact of interaction but also its scale. A user who routes significant volume through a protocol takes on market risk, pays fees, and directly supports the project’s economy. Moreover, volume often correlates with consistency — active traders and users return repeatedly, generating a steady flow of on-chain data.
Liquidity, in turn, is perceived by teams as an even stronger signal of engagement. By adding funds to pools, a user effectively lends capital to the protocol, sharing the risks of impermanent loss and volatility.
As a result, participation in airdrops increasingly resembles a full-fledged investment of time and capital. Deep on-chain activity has ceased to be an optional advantage and has become a mandatory condition for receiving meaningful rewards. In this way, projects form a core group of users who do not merely interact with the interface but are part of the financial and economic structure of the protocol.
The Future of Hunting: Technical Contributions and Node Running
As traditional on-chain activity metrics become the standard, airdrop hunting is gradually shifting toward technical contributions. Next-generation projects increasingly view users not only as product consumers but also as infrastructure participants. In this context, running nodes, participating in testnets, and providing technical support to the network become key factors in future token distribution.
Participation in testnets is no longer limited to simply completing a checklist. Teams expect users to maintain stable node operation, perform timely updates, participate in stress tests, and respond correctly to changes in network parameters. These actions require basic DevOps skills, an understanding of network architecture, and responsibility for uptime — precisely the qualities projects seek to reward at early stages.
Running and maintaining a node is seen as a direct contribution to network security and decentralization. A user who invests resources in servers, time in environment setup, and attention to monitoring becomes part of the protocol’s critical infrastructure. Unlike financial activity, such contributions are harder to scale and automate, making them especially valuable in the fight against sybil attacks.
Beyond nodes, technical forms of participation are playing an increasingly important role: bug discovery and reporting, testing new modules, participation in governance experiments, and even contributions to documentation or SDKs. In some cases, projects begin to account for GitHub activity, the quality of feedback, and a user’s ability to interact with the team on a technical level.
Conclusion
The modern airdrop is not a random reward, but the result of systematic work: analyzing protocols, understanding their economics, and being willing to invest time and resources long before the token launch. Under these conditions, individual hunting increasingly gives way to coordinated efforts and collective expertise.
This is where platforms and communities such as Syndicate emerge, helping structure participation in testnets, node operation, and on-chain activities, lowering the barrier to entry without sacrificing quality. The future of airdrops belongs to those who do not simply follow trends but become part of the infrastructure. And it is precisely these participants who will be rewarded in the next cycle of the crypto market’s development.
