Hey folks, so in the past few months you may have heard or read about one of the following news stories:
▹Last December, “Solana developers were gifted 25 billion Bonk tokens as a Christmas gift…” — Assuming that they were able to sell at the top, 25 billion tokens would have been worth more than $6 million dollars:
▹ 7,579 developers were targeted for the Celestia ($TIA) airdrop — a token that’s seen a run up of price of more than 800% over the last 3 months:
Why is this significant?
For similar reasons why airdrops can spur economic activity on different protocols and chains, likewise giving developers free tokens is a pretty smart investment as it’s predicated on the hope that they’ll be attracted to to start building in that respective space. Perhaps a more explicit example is Blast’s “Big Bang” competition where they have 50% of their upcoming $BLAST airdrop targeted just for developers.
For us mere mortals with no developer or coding background, having some activity that mimics developer activity could potentially pay out big, and with relatively little cost. This may not be worth it for the more gas-intensive chains like Ethereum mainnet, but for less than $2 dollars, you could potentially spin up your own ERC-20 smart contract on layer-2s like Base or Scroll in a matter of minutes, if not less.
How to create your own ERC-20 smart contract:
First go to Remix.ethereum.org — essentially a no-setup required smart contract compiler and deployer.
Click 1: Select “ERC20 OpenZepplin” under ‘Project Templates
Click 2: Select “MyToken.Sol” under File Explorer
Click 3: Select the “Solidity Compiler” icon on the far left hand side of the screen.
Click 4: Select “Compile MyToken.sol”
Click 5: Select the “Deploy & run transactions” icon on the far left hand side of the screen
Click 6: Select “Injected Provider — Metamask”
Click 7: Go to your wallet and allow it to connect
Click 8: Select your desired chain for your ERC-20 (In the picture below, you can see that I selected Base)
Click 9: Select “Deploy” on the left hand side of the screen
And Voila! You’ve just created your own ERC-20 smart contract!
In order to verify that your SC was setup successfully, you should be able to see it show towards the bottom of the screen:
Other considerations
Cheap L2s: As I mentioned before, I’d recommend not doing this on Ethereum Mainnet, and in fact, I’d recommend to only do this on a chain where you speculate there might be incentives for developers in the future.
This is highly speculative: There’s absolutely no guarantee that this will make you eligible for any developer incentives, and as with any airdrop-campaign, it’d be wise for protocols to set criteria for people actually adding value to the protocol or chain.
Conclusion
Many of the airdrop guides you’ll find will recommend an endless number of grinding activities to try to simulate increased on-chain activity, or at the very least for you to put up a significant capital requirement where you’re exposing yourself to many high volume transactions. However, with smart contract deployment you can paint yourself as a developer, and literally do this in seconds and for just $1–2 dollars, depending on the gas fees.
Is this really worth it? Maybe not, but for just one or two bucks I’m thinking it’s worth a shot.
And as always, thanks for taking the time to read this and be sure to follow me on twitter (https://twitter.com/CryptosWith) to get all my latest updates. Also, looking for a gift for your Crypto-loving/hating friend? Give them a REKT journal to cheer them up!
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice and this is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please as always, do your own research and find what investments are best for you. Cheers everyone!