Bankless: Inventory of the five hottest Airdrop opportunities in the encryption field

Words: Jack Inabinet, Bankless

Compiler: Deng Tong, Golden Finance

When it comes to the hottest airdrop opportunities in cryptocurrency, hunters find themselves caught in an endless loop, constantly planting wallets with new tokens, interacting with applications, patiently waiting (sometimes forever) for their favorite farms to bear fruit…

Over the years, regulatory uncertainty has prevented many crypto companies from launching their own native tokens; Ironically, these circumstances provide the ideal growing conditions for breeding the most lucrative airdrops ever!

Under the leadership of the newly elected President Donald Trump, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of the United States has put the brakes on many of its high-profile cryptocurrency enforcement actions. While the outcomes of many of the cases are yet to be determined, they collectively indicate that US financial regulators are working towards providing a set of rules for digital asset issuance.

Today, we’re going to dive into five of the most mature airdrop opportunities in crypto that could finally emerge in a new era of regulatory certainty.

MetaMask

The OG Ethereum wallet MetaMask has been a leading “airdrop competitor” since the term was first proposed!

Although the uncertainty of crypto regulation has impacted MetaMask’s ability to airdrop in the United States, fortunately, Consensys, the developer of MetaMask, recently reached an agreement with the staff of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in an attempt to dismiss the lawsuit that accuses MetaMask of being an unregistered securities exchange, pending approval by the Commission. This development may foreshadow a relaxation of regulatory tensions, which could pave the way for MetaMask’s airdrops.

MetaMask may charge a fee for using built-in account management features such as “Swap” and “Bridge”, but these tools are still the best way to increase your eligibility for potential MetaMask empty investments.

pump.fun

Although the deployment of new pump.fun pump.fun tokens has slowed down in recent weeks as the crypto market has cooled down, this memecoin launchpad is still one of the most profitable crypto apps in existence!

The pump.fun team seems to be intent on creating more revenue, and recently leaked URLs indicate that the platform will soon launch its own automated market maker (AMM), which may enable it to earn the exchange fees currently earned by Raydium’s AMM.

To clarify the application of regulation to crypto assets, the Corporate Finance Division of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission recently announced that under federal law, memecoins with ‘limited or no utility’ are not considered securities. This decision essentially legitimizes pump.fun’s business model and may enable the platform to airdrop related tokens to early users in the future.

Marginfi

Based on the Solana blockchain, marginfi emerged as a little-known peer-to-peer lending application in early 2023, but rose to fame in the latter half of the year, becoming a top deposit opportunity for Solana, as the airdrop frenzy swept through the crypto industry!

The platform’s initial (and most popular) product is its overcollateralized money market protocol, allowing anyone to borrow or lend assets on Solana; subsequently, marginfi expanded its product lineup, including one-click leverage cycling, internally liquid staked tokens, collateral support for native staked SOL, and a memecoin leverage trading platform.

While marginfi remains a notable opponent of airdrops in the Solana DeFi app, the platform has highlighted a points program that has been around for more than a year, suggesting that it is actively counting early users’ interactions and potentially rewarding them with liquidity tokens in the future.

Bungee

Bungee Exchange is a bridge aggregator that supports token transfer and exchange between multiple popular EVM-compatible chains. The protocol aggregates multiple quotes from different bridge providers for its users, allowing them to choose the route that best suits their fee and time preferences.

Although at the time of writing, there are very few top-tier crypto bridging apps generating or airdropping native tokens, the regulatory relief promised by President Trump’s SEC could open the door to future Bungee-related airdrops.

OpenSea

OpenSea has repeatedly teased upcoming platform updates with grand announcements – which often spark airdrop speculation – but those hopes have been dashed time and time again.

The recently launched OpenSea V2 has introduced an XP point system, following in the footsteps of its competitor NFT market Blur. Although OpenSea has not committed to converting XP into a liquid token, the reward system appears poised to play a key role in any future airdrop distributions.

OpenSea is currently rewarding users who trade NFTs, including platform loyalty reward multipliers. While continued engagement with OpenSea deployed before V2 will not grant XP, interactions with OpenSea prior to the release of V2 may be considered through retrospective point allocation.