We're in full airdrop season. Some are nicer than others, some will be more useful than others, but, among all, one really stands out.
It's the Evmos Rektdrop.
Short Intro
Evmos - formerly known as Ethermint - is a Cosmos-based project which wants to bring the Ethereum Virtual Machine on the Cosmos ecosystem. That means you can port ANY Ethereum smart contrat to Cosmos, taking advantage of low gas fees (super-low, actually) and real speed. Yeah, all smart contracts, meaning you could mint tokens with the ERC20 specs, NFTs, AMM protocols, you name it. I'm excited about this project since it was announced, about an year ago, and I am even more confident after watching one of the founders at the Cosmoverse conference in Lisbon last month.
Well, this interesting project is about to launch its own token. Only it will do it via a Rektdrop, not an airdrop. Here's where things are getting really interesting.
What's A Rektdrop?
A Rektdrop is an airdrop aimed at people who got rekt on Ethereum. From heavy spenders on gas paid on transactions, up to people who actually lost money in some of the notorious DeFi hacks. There are a few other criteria - some of them quite complex - but that's the main theme of the whole event.
It's the first airdrop in history (at least the first one that I know of) which targets specific users, based on their activity and performance. And, with that, we're going to the core of this article.
Why Is This A Game Changer?
It's the first time I see a project targeting potential users based not on promises about potential future revenue, linked to their current holdings of another token, but about past situations that it - the project - aims to solve better. It's not like they are coming with a shitload of marketing and boast about how they'll conquer the world, but they say: "we know what you tried to do, it was a courageous act, we know at times you got rekt, and we want to reward you for that".
How awesome is this?
And again, I mean how awesome is this not only as a marketing ploy (which really is, too) but from a paradigm shift in the whole crypto industry. It's the first time someone acknowledges the work done by pioneers and tries to create something better for them, not only by offering better tools (that's the whole promise of Evmos) but by putting some tokens in their hands from the very beginning.
Crypto has had enough of the "HODL" pattern, IMHO. It's time to move from the mindset of keeping some bits on some hard drives and just expecting them to appreciate against the dollar, to actually using them in the real word. That usage doesn't mean only spending it. We can use it as some form of collateral in helping bootstrap other projects, or in providing liquidity, or in supporting all those micro-protocols which, together, can create the infrastructure for real self-sovereignty.
Just think about that: if everybody will just HODL, there will be no price discovery. If no token is changing hands, then we wouldn't know how much is it really worth.
Of course, in this process there is risk involved. You can lose those said tokens, you can get scammed, fall victim of zero-day vulnerabilities, a lot can happen.
That's why this type of rektdrop is a game changer. It acknowledges a certain learning process, and, even more, it's willing to reward those who not only get in early, but who also get to act on it a lot.
If you want to know more details about the rektdrop, here's the official link:
(As always, this is not financial advice, DYOR and never invest more than you can afford to lose, even if there will be someone, someday, in the future, willing to compensate you for those losses).
image source: Evmos rektdrop announcement.