The biggest airdrops in history: the numbers that made the genre

Airdrops have distributed tens of billions of dollars to users. Recalling the milestones of the genre and their lessons.

Milestones

• Uniswap (2020): a minimum of 400 UNI per address. Gave birth to the retrodrop genre itself. Those who held saw the token's price rise tenfold within a year of listing.
• ENS (2021): a drop for owning a .eth domain - a reward for early belief in the infrastructure, not for volume.
• Arbitrum (2023): billions of dollars worth of ARB based on behavioral criteria - the first truly massive L2 drop and the first large-scale sybil purge.
• Jupiter (2024): the Solana aggregator distributed JUP to a million wallets - the largest drop in the Solana ecosystem by reach.
• Hyperliquid (2024): HYPE with not a single fund in the cap table - a drop to users as a replacement for a venture round. One of the rare cases where the price rose multiple times after the TGE.

General lesson

For almost all major drops, the chart after the TGE looks the same: a sell off in the first weeks as the "free" tokens seek owners with a thesis. The difference comes later: for products with real revenue (Hyperliquid, Jupiter), the token found demand, while for "reward and forget" projects, it stayed in a downtrend. A drop is a distribution point, not a verdict - the product decides the price's fate. Check the metrics of the coins from this list in the catalog.