Author: Jack Inabinet, Bankless; Compiled by: Wu Baht, Golden Finance

In 2024, cryptocurrency developers have mastered the art of airdrops. Many protocol teams have capitalized on the bullish momentum across the industry and attracted a flood of new users chasing airdropped tokens.

From STRK’s disappointing performance to record-breaking hype, each protocol’s differentiated approach to token placement reveals a lot about how token distribution shapes ecosystems, sparks innovation, and catalyzes broader Valuable insights into market trends.

Today, we discuss the impact of five of the most interesting airdrops in 2024.

On January 31, Jupiter’s first airdrop put 1 billion JUP into the hands of early users. This is the first of four annual airdrop events that will end at the end of January 2027 and will distribute a total of 4 billion JUP to the community.

By simply using the Jupiter exchange aggregator before November 2, 2023, personal wallets can receive airdrop allocations ranging from 1k to 100k JUP tokens, meaning every JUP claimant A wallet can receive between $700 and $70,000 in free assets from this airdrop.

Special Features:

The JUP airdrop provides participants with nearly six-figure rewards for simple on-chain activity and solidifies Solana as an airdrop hunter on the target chain status because the airdrop of liquidity staking protocol Jito has ended. Over the next six weeks, SOL will double in price as the masses begin to join the ecosystem in hopes of seizing the next JUP-scale opportunity.

After three years of development, Starknet finally launched its token in February, announcing an epic plan to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars to 1.3 million addresses for the first time ever The most widespread cryptocurrency airdrop since.

Individual claims ranged from 111.1 to 180k STRK, and while recipients enjoyed generous compensation when the token was launched, others complained that arbitrary eligibility criteria unfairly excluded many users. In addition to this airdrop.

Unfortunately, while the overall cryptocurrency market has experienced a significant recovery, the STRK token has been underperforming throughout 2024 and, at the time of analysis, is trading below its post-launch highs 75% lower.

Speciality: Starknet is one of the most anticipated airdrop projects in 2024. Although the technologically innovative L2 has successfully brought considerable benefits to STRK recipients, due to the lack of outstanding on-chain applications, It struggled to gain traction throughout the year. This airdrop highlights L2The saturation of investment opportunities is extremely high, causing enthusiasm for the entire industry to fade.

As Ethereum enters 2024, all eyes are on “re-staking,” a novel form of economic security that uses re-staking ETH to power the chain. Cut insurance is provided on the application.

Many in the community are hoping this breakout phenomenon will prove a revolutionary use case for the heavily suppressed Ethereum, and while ETH/BTC continues to trend downward throughout the year, emerging players at the forefront of re-staking The protocol did succeed in generating demand for the token; EigenLayer alone accumulated over 5 million ETH before the airdrop was announced on April 29.

What’s Special:

EIGEN recipients were frustrated by the fact that this airdrop was initially non-transferable, and the protocol was criticized for failing to reward all airdrop participants, but The team has been working hard to correct community concerns.

Liquid Recollateral Token (LRT) protocols like ether.fi also distributed additional incentives and fueled the DeFi credit boom as on-chain participants began to leverage LRT.

EigenLayer's success in the absence of a real-time restaking product demonstrates the extremely low barriers many crypto projects face in achieving product-market fit, and forces other protocols to release their own points program deposit contracts, regardless of their Is there really a real time application.

The Ethena points program went live on February 19, the moment the first public deposits were accepted on the app; the first quarter of ENA token rewards began to be claimed on April 2, and The second season of activities was launched immediately.

Thanks to the sizable airdrop incentive program and its timely launch of the hottest financing interest rate environment of the year, USDe supply expanded unrestricted to $2.39 billion by mid-April, and subsequently due to ENA Stalled by waning enthusiasm for airdrops and cooling crypto market conditions.

What’s special:

The ENA airdrop demonstrated the benefits of a well-designed points program and successfully garnered widespread attention for Ethena’s synthetic dollars in early 2024.

Ethena uses clear points eligibility criteria to reward relatively risky on-chain activities, such as re-staking Ethena native assets in DeFi, and proved that the short follow-up to the second airdrop season made the protocol Able to obtain greater benefits from airdrop activities.

On November 29, Hyperliquid airdropped 310 million HYPE (10% of the total token supply) to more than 94,000 early users.30% or more).

With HYPE’s value surging past $33 in the following weeks, the multi-billion dollar airdrop became the largest cryptocurrency allocation ever and eclipsed the earliest airdrop of the cycle. The success was replicated to many more participants, awarding many users with six-figure token bonuses.

Nearly 70% of Hyperliquid airdrops are reserved for users, making the HYPE airdrop appear (at least on the surface) to be a more equal distribution scheme than competitors, which typically reserve the vast majority of tokens Allocate to teams and investors.

What makes it special:

Although the applications built by Hyperliquid do not have a viable decentralization roadmap and deviate significantly from traditional crypto design practices, the success of this airdrop shows that crypto The industry's desire for high-performance products.

HYPE’s success coincides with a general boom in the crypto market in late 2024, during which investors began to ask less questions and imitate more.