Airdrop literally is the act of delivering goods or personnel by dropping them from an aircraft by parachute. In the cryptocurrency world, the term ‘airdrop’ means different things to different people. For some, it signifies financial freedom, for some it is an investment killer, however, on the scale of 1 to 10, 8 will be excited on hearing about airdrops against just 2 who may have mixed feelings about it.
Basically, airdrops are free (in some exceptional cases, almost free) tokens delivered to selected wallets by a project team as a form or reward to the recipient who must have met certain conditions or accomplished some specific tasks.
One question often asked in some quarters is, why do teams airdrop free tokens? More often than not, some of the basic tasks a potential airdrop recipient is expected to accomplish involve tweeting about a project using specific hashtags, among other social media activities. This way, the project receives some substantial amount of publicity online and attention from potential investors and the general crypto-aware population.
Think about a project willing to airdrop 1000 pieces of their token to as many as 5000 participants who are required to tweet about their project using some specific hashtags as advised by the project team. That is cheaper than paid advertising on some renowned cryptocurrency websites.
In some developing and underdeveloped countries, few people who have been privileged to know about cryptocurrency have made a decent living and are able to put food on the table using proceeds from tokens that were airdropped in their wallets as freebies as reward for carrying out some simple tasks.
This revolution has not been without some baggage. Some ‘bad elements’ have taken advantage of the loopholes. Their acts has indeed made airdrop more difficult.
Participants go ahead to have as many accounts as possible just to greedily acquire what belongs to so many people. The cheat behavior is so common, scammers sending out emails so as to get people's private keys, some go as far as using bots to gain more entries, while others even refer those who don't have an idea of what cryptocurrency is to sign up and this is another serious difficulty for the team in charge of the airdrop.
Teams now have to go as far as asking participants to verify their entries with KYC which wouldn't have been the case if the rules weren't gone against.
As good as it is, people take advantage of what's not meant to be taken advantage of.
If rules are followed, there won't be difficulties in giving out what's suppose to be free and fair. Let's do what's right to get the best of Airdrop