Airdrop Hunters Aren't Users, They Never Were
The millions of impressions are real, but the audience is not.
No other industry requires you to build a real product and run constant reward campaigns where strangers always expect money in return.
But the millions of users and impressions crypto projects get work for vanity metrics, so here we are.
The 2020 airdrop era set unrealistic expectations
In 2020, Uniswap airdropped a minimum of 400 UNI to about 250k wallets. At the time, that was $1,200 minimum per user and long-term holders saw that turn into mid five figures.
Uniswap pioneered the DeFi airdrop model and proved that rewarding users for actually using your app drove real adoption. But the problem is that it also set a precedent that broke everyone’s brains.
Everyone started hunting new apps, new projects, and designed automated systems to maximize rewards by creating multiple identities.
DYDX, Arbitrum, Hyperliquid, Jupiter followed, each one bigger than the last. Hyperliquid averaged $20,000 per address at launch. Even one wallet got $4M.
But in reality, most airdrops weren’t that big, though. And once people realized they were clicking for $10 bucks, many stopped showing up.
The ones who stayed were the ones gaming the system, and optimizing for the next big drop, not the ones who actually cared about the product.
Then came quests campaigns
Zealy, Galxe and Snag. Some of the most popular quest apps for web3 projects right now
Airdrops require specific in-app actions, but points and quests campaigns are simpler: follow these accounts, engage with these posts, invite three friends, watch a video, etc.
With a lower entry barrier, projects could guarantee a much lower rewards, but users kept their expectations high.
Say you have a $50k marketing campaign budget to to distribute, which is a common figure for small and mid-sized projects. With an airdrop model you get a few hundred participants because the requirements are harder to meet and you can distribute something meaningful.
But with a points campaign, you can get 100k participants in a few days.
Are you giving $0.5 to each? Haha nope, everyone will be furious.
So projects that launch point campaigns need to build complex criteria to select a smaller sample and distribute a reasonable amount.
But it’s never fair to 90% of participants, it can’t be.
And this is where it gets ugly
When the campaign ends, airdrop hunters leave, and those who didn’t make the cut call the project a scam. And the guy who finished first on the leaderboard is already writing a thread about how you scammed him out of his $5 bucks.
Negative posts flood every channel because these bounty hunters were never users, and most will never touch the product.
Worse, these campaigns contribute almost nothing to genuine user acquisition.
Even for Hyperliquid, widely considered one of the best-performing examples: it still only retained 20% of its top users after six months.
In crypto, that 20% is actually top-tier, but for most projects, the real number is far lower.
So for a few bucks, projects get buried in resentment from strangers who expected a salary for clicking buttons.
And while the millions of impressions look great on paper and the engagement numbers are real, the audience is not.
There must be an interesting solution to make these quest campaigns more efficient.
Who’s building it?