Retrodrop: a reward for what you already did - and why there are fewer of them

A retrodrop is a distribution for past actions no one knew would be rewarded. The benchmark is Uniswap in September 2020: at least 400 UNI to every address that had ever made a swap. At the price peak that was thousands of dollars for one transaction made "just because".

Why retrodrops were fair

A reward for unaware actions by definition goes to real users: bots did not farm what had not been announced. The early retrodrops (Uniswap, 1inch, dYdX, ENS) landed in the wallets of people who actually used the product. It was the best marketing in the industry's history: stories like "made two swaps - got enough for an apartment" sold crypto better than any advertising.

Why the genre died

As soon as the market understood the rule "use everything new - they might drop", unawareness disappeared. Every new protocol is farmed from day one by an army of wallets stocking up in advance. Projects responded with points and criteria with cutoff dates in the past - but the "past" is now farmed preemptively too, spread across every promising protocol.

What remains of the genre: snapshot cutoffs in the past still happen and still reward those who used the product early and deeply. The one strategy that has not aged: be an early user of good products. We follow distributions in the section.