Pessimism on the timeline is at all time highs. What liquidity remains in the market is continuously being spread thinner and thinner; in the first half of 2024 already more tokens have launched than the entire history of crypto COMBINED. Frameworks have gotten better, technologies easier to use, and networks cheaper, all of which fueled this Cambrian explosion.

Airdrops are a beautifully unique part of crypto. Teams are eager to pay YOU just for interacting with their products. Often this payout can be in the range of 5+ figures. Free money falling from the sky is fun for those who receive it, but often stirs rage in those who are excluded. Furthermore, many complain that current airdrop strategies are ineffective at retaining “real” users and cater mostly to bot farms and sybil attackers. As a result in many cases token price and daily use metrics suffer in the weeks and months following large airdrops. Airdrops aren’t going to disappear anytime soon, but certainly could be improved and/or further gamified to increase user engagement and decrease negative sentiment. Here I’ll propose airdrop strategies that could serve this end.

Note: this is heavily based off of Ruben from Coinmonk’s 2021 article here. I do not mean to steal credit from a very obviously smart person. However, I am still doing this for 3 reasons. 1, my goal here is for this to be as simple as possible, leave out the complicated disk recovery stuff, and make it more non-tech friendly, 2, the more this info is out there online, the more likely someone is to find it and get use out of it, and 3, there were some details not in that article I found elsewhere, which I included here. In any other case I would not mirror (pun intended) someone else’s article so closely. Thank you Ruben!

Recently Bitcoin has caught a second wind of activity after the viral success of Ordinals NFTs that make use of bitcoin block space to store their metadata. After a few weeks ordinals have appreciated massively in value and also now consume about 50% of all bitcoin blockspace.

Today in crypto there are a number of novel technologies quickly advancing and gaining public interest. ZK technology and its applications, decentralized networks offering services such as compute, data storage and indexing, modular blockchains and many more. These technologies are exciting and often monopolize the attention of the crypto-aware public. One among these trends to briefly take hold of the prevailing narrative were soulbound tokens; developers, twitter threadoors and crypto experts have been dreaming up numerous applications for these tokens since Vitalik published a short report on them in January. Soulbound technology, however, despite sounding shiny and new, is not a novel concept. In fact, the ‘soulbondedness’ of tokens has always been possible (and used many times in the past). The main difference between then and now is the attractive marketing language that shrouds it. In fact, soulbound tokens highlight an important crypto-axiom that will be soon invalidated.

Ethereum after the merge won't be as centralized as you think.

Let’s play a game. Look at the chart below, and guess what the token in question is (pair is against USDT).

From the coast of Canaan, a great many longships cast off towards the Western waters of the Mediterranean. Eventually, they would pass the pillars of Hercules and venture into the waters of the Atlantic, conducting trade and settlement with the West African coast as well as the North of Europe. Their ships had mechanisms not seen before; battering ram bows and reinforced hulls. The adventures these ships undertook brought unthinkable wealth to their captains and owners, placing the unconventional societies they served on par with the mighty empires of their day. Many centuries later, a great army of the descendants of these people would march over the alps and be the only ones to seriously challenge Roman hegemony before the Empire’s eventual collapse.

Recently there has been a wave of DNS hijacking attempts across multiple dApps and public RPC endpoints for entire blockchains. The financial consequences of these events has been nearly zero and they certainly do not compare to some of the recent high profile exploits that have taken place within DeFi and beyond. Exploits of the traditional variety (bridge hacks, flash loan and other economic attacks, social engineering and theft, etc) have been taking place since the dawn of crypto and any rational participant will tell you that they expect these occurrences to both continue and increase in severity. The more capital that’s locked up in a smart contract, the more incentive bad actors have to attack it. But exploits of the traditional variety are not what is most concerning to me. The wave of DNS exploits reveal a playbook for our adversaries that could effectively stop some projects in their tracks if not avoided.