In today’s newsletter:
🔎An airdrop farming guide + my top airdrop strategies
📊All you need to know about Chintai
😂Crypto meme of the week
🗞️The latest DeFi news
🔎Is airdrop season back?
Last week, Hyperliquid (a popular perpetual DEX), airdropped $3.5 billion in $HYPE tokens to its users, in one of the largest airdrops in DeFi history.
At the time of the writing, the average $HYPE drop is worth over ~$37,000!
You can imagine that this airdrop has been life-changing for many users.
And I think there are some valuable lessons that can be learned from it by both airdrop farmers and tokenless projects.
Later in this issue, I’ll also share some of my favorite airdrop farming strategies.
Without further ado, let’s dive in:
A short analysis of the Hyperliquid airdrop
Most recent airdrops have been highly disappointing.
But as I mentioned above, this was certainly not the case for Hyperliquid.
I believe that its success can be attributed to 3 main factors:
A community-first approach
While most projects choose to airdrop 5-10% of their token supply to their users, Hyperliquid airdropped 31% of the $HYPE supply.
In hindsight, there were a few signs that the Hyperliquid team is interested in rewarding its community and having a community-first approach:
- Earlier this year, its team also airdropped a memecoin called $PURR to Hyperliquid traders, which ended up being another highly successful airdrop
- The project committed to zero external funding from VCs a few months ago
While the huge token allocation to the airdrop couldn’t have been predicted in advance, the commitment to zero VC funding should have been an indication that a high % of the $HYPE supply will be allocated to the community.
Hyperliquid has actually found product-market fit
The issue with many other tokenless projects is that they overly focus on attracting mercenary users through points incentives rather than creating a product people genuinely want to use.
As a consequence, once they release their token, it usually has a small valuation as most users sell it, which also leads to a small airdrop in $ terms.
Higher rewards for early adopters
Hyperliquid’s early users got significantly more Hyperliquid points for their trading activity (hence a higher airdrop) than those who started using the platform after it surged in popularity.
I think this was a great idea as the goal of a protocol that does an airdrop should be to reward especially its most loyal users.
This also encourages early users to continue using Hyperliquid as they’ve been recognized for their support of the platform.
Best airdrops to farm
Based on the things I mentioned above and what I learned over the past years, this is what I’m generally looking for in tokenless projects:
Strong community - Search the name of the project on X to see how many people are talking organically about it
Less than 3 years old - if the team of a dApp didn’t release a token in the first 3 years after its launch, then maybe they don’t even plan to release one
Community-first approach - A team that actively posts on X about its vision and listens to its community’s feedback is a huge green flag for a project
Product-market fit - As I said earlier, I think that one of the reasons why the HYPE token launch and airdrop were so successful is that Hyperliquid built a product that has a lot of genuine users and not just airdrop farmers
Sustainable business model - The token of a project that has the potential to generate a lot of revenue is likely to have a much higher valuation than the token of a project that operates at a loss
High VC funding/TVL ratio (for protocols that raised money in private sales) - The tokens of projects that raised a lot of money from VCs generally have high valuations at launch. A small TVL could also indicate that a certain airdrop opportunity is underfarmed
Projects that meet these criteria tend to be good candidates for airdrop farming.
My top airdrop strategies
• A 6-in-1 airdrops farm (for ETH)
Mantle is one of the largest DeFi projects in the Ethereum ecosystem.
The Mantle Ecosystem includes an Ethereum L2 (Mantle Network), an ETH liquid staking & restaking protocol (mETH Protocol), and Mantle Treasury.
cmETH is Mantle’s receipt token for mETH restaking across a portfolio of positions.
How to farm this airdrop:
➜ Go to the mETH Protocol website
➜ Stake ETH for mETH - Mantle’s liquid staking token
➜ Restake mETH for cmETH (link here)
➜ Bridge cmETH to Mantle L2 (link here)
➜ Provide cmETH as liquidity on Pendle
By doing this, you’ll earn airdrop points from Karak, Symbiotic, Eigenlayer, mETH Protocol, and other sources such as AVS protocols.
What I really like about this strategy is that it gives you exposure to the airdrops of all major ETH restaking protocols.
Before I share a few other airdrop strategies, here’s an overview of Chintai, one of my favorite RWA projects:
Disclaimer: I invested in Chintai via OTC and the open market
The Shopify of Real-World Assets
Tokenization is expected to become a multi-trillion sector by 2030.
But for this to actually happen, institutions need the proper infrastructure in order to be able to easily tokenize their assets.
Instead of having to spend years building their own tokenization app, institutions can use Chintai - an institutional platform built specifically for tokenizing assets.
There are many things that make it stand out:
Chintai is licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (getting this license is currently a very difficult process)
The project already has over 50 clients lined up
Chintai announced a partnership with PowerDime to tokenize $250M+ in renewable assets just a few days ago
Whether we talk about Carbon Credits, Fine Arts, Utility Tokens, or Collectables, all of those can be tokenized using Chintai.
Its token, CHEX, currently has 100% of its supply in circulation.
What’s really interesting is that the token is also deflationary, with a part of the fees collected by Chintai being used to buy & burn CHEX.
In this way, the no. of tokens burned is directly correlated to the success of the Chintai tokenization platform.
For 2025, the project’s goal is to achieve a whopping $10 billion in tokenized assets.
• A 3-in-1 airdrops farm (for SOL)
Solayer is the largest restaking network on Solana.
It currently has $360M in TVL, and its team raised funds from some big VCs including Binance Labs and Polychain.
How to farm this airdrop:
➜ Go to the Solayer website
➜ Restake SOL in exchange for sSOL (a SOL liquid restaking token)
➜ Provide sSOL as liquidity on RateX, a tokenless yield trading protocol on Solana
In this way, you’ll farm the airdrops of Solayer, Sonic, and Ratex, while also earning a ~8% SOL staking yield.
• A 3-in-1 airdrops farm (for stablecoins)
INIT Capital is a novel money market on Mantle L2.
INFINIT is the first DeFi Abstraction Layer, which drastically simplifies the process of building and scaling a DeFi Protocol.
How to farm their airdrops:
➜ Swap USDT/USDC in exchange for USDe stablecoin on Ethena (click ‘buy’)
➜ Bridge USDe to Mantle L2 using Stargate bridge
➜ Go to INIT Capital
➜ Click on Hook → Neutral USDe Looping Hook (link here)
➜ Open a leveraged USDe position by depositing USDe and borrowing USDT against it (I recommend using a low leverage)
➜ Sign up for INIT Capital’s points program on this page
➜ Sign up for INFINIT’s points program on this page
Through this strategy, you’ll farm the airdrops of Ethena, INIT Capital, and INFINIT.
I don’t have very high expectations for the first two - but I think that the INFINIT airdrop could a great one.
A few other interesting airdrop opportunities
Resolv - An innovative delta-neutral stablecoin protocol
➜ Provide liquidity to Resolv Liquidity Pool by buying RLP on Resolv (you’ll also earn 38% APR by doing that on top of the airdrop)
Solv Protocol - A Decentralized Bitcoin Reserve
➜ Deposit WBTC in exchange for SolvBTC (Solv’s BTC Staking Token) and stake it for SolvBTC.BBN on Solv (to farm Solv & Babylon airdrops at once)
Meteora - A dynamic liquidity layer on Solana (built by Jupiter team)
➜ Provide stablecoins or other Solana ecosystem tokens as liquidity on Meteora
pSTAKE Finance - A BTC liquid staking solution
➜ Stake native BTC on pSTAKE Finance and use YBTC liquid staking token ( after it launches in a few weeks) in DeFi (to farm pSTAKE & Babylon airdrops at once)
Polymarket - the largest crypto prediction market
➜ if you enjoy betting on real-world events, I recommend using Polymarket as this is one of the most popular crypto protocols that haven’t launched a token yet
Those are the airdrop strategies that I wanted to cover today.
As general advice, I think it’s a good idea to try to farm as many airdrops as possible at once. (many require only passive liquidity provision)
Because at the end of the day, airdrops are highly speculative plays.
While the odds can be in your favor if you do your research, it’s hard to predict which airdrop will end up being the most rewarding one.
I hope you enjoyed reading this🫡
Crypto Meme😂
The latest developments in DeFi
Bitcoin hit $100K for the first time in history🥂
Pro-Crypto Paul Atkins was nominated as the new SEC Chair
Hyperliquid airdropped ~$3.5 billion worth of tokens to its users
Chintai announced a partnership with PowerDime to tokenize $250M+ in Renewable Energy Assets. Chintai is a licensed tokenization platform
Puffpaw confirmed $VAPE airdrop for Puff Pass NFT holders. 10,000 NFT mint (you can use code “Defin” for a discount) takes place between 9 - 11 Dec, max price 0.133 ETH. First come, first serve
dYdX released its MegaVault, which is generating ~51% APY from trading fees, and a new Instant Market Listings feature. MegaVault acts as a master liquidity pool for all markets on dYdX
Fluid proposed rebranding $INST to $FLUID and launching a buyback program. Up to 100% of the Fluid earnings will be allocated to FLUID buybacks
Mantle announced the deployment of Chainlink CCIP on its L2. This will enhance Mantle's cross-chain capabilities
Nektar Network, a decentralized infrastructure marketplace, launched its token $NEKTAR
Sonic Labs (prev. Fantom) released Blaze, a new Sonic testnet with major performance enhancements
Ethena announced that $sENA stakers will get an airdrop from Derive (formerly Lyra). Derive is the largest on-chain options protocol
Ctrl Wallet, an innovative multichain wallet, went live
Pendle Finance went live on Base L2
Grayscale filed for a spot Solana ETF
That’s all for this week!
Until next time,
The DeFi Investor
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