The Six-Year Evolution of Web3 Airdrops: From Uniswap to Monad, How Should Ordinary People Properly "Claim Airdrops" in 2026?

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Author: kkmoat, Founder of GANx Labs & Chinese-language lead for stacks.btc

At its core, a Web3 airdrop is when a project incentivizes early users to participate by distributing native tokens or NFTs for free—bootstrapping liquidity, enabling decentralized governance, and quickly accumulating the community and TVL (total value locked).

From the “DeFi summer” that began with Uniswap in 2020 until now, airdrops have evolved from a simple “everyone gets some” marketing gimmick into a complex behavior-incentive system, anti-Sybil (Sybil attacks) mechanisms, and long-term retention tools.

Current trends in 2026 show that blanket (blanket-style) airdrops have cooled off significantly, shifting toward threshold-based (threshold-style), quest/task-mining (task mining), and hybrid models. The focus is on real usage—not farming volume.

Phase 1 (2020): The “Genesis Age” of DeFi airdrops

Representative projects

Uniswap

1inch

dYdX

You have to mention Uniswap because: all subsequent airdrops basically descend from it

September 2020:

Uniswap distributed 400 UNI to historical users

Directly changed industry allocation patterns

It’s basically considered: Web3’s first large-scale “wealth redistribution event”

Key characteristics

1. No Sybils

2. No farming

3. No task system

4. No points

In other words: if you used the product → you get paid. The essence is Protocol ownership, not Marketing.

Phase 2 (2021): ENS era — “Users own the protocol”

Representative projects

ENS

DYDX

Gitcoin

The most iconic one: ENS (2021)

This is a milestone-level airdrop because it was the first time it clearly proposed:

Users are not users

Users are shareholders

ENS distributes governance tokens to users who hold .eth domain names for DAO governance.

Why is ENS especially important?

Because it established: Web3’s political system, not its financial system.

ENS’s three long-term impacts

1. DAO governance became the default

Almost every protocol now has: a governance token

2. “Contributions” became a core metric

For example:

Holding a domain name

Using the protocol

Participating in governance

Not just simple DeFi wash trading volume.

3. The community ownership narrative took shape

This line started with ENS:

users → owners

Phase 3 (2022–2023): Airdrops became a growth hacking tool

This is: the most critical turning point

Airdrops shifted from: rewarding users to: acquiring users

Representative projects

All the items in the list below belong to this phase:

Aptos

Arbitrum

Starknet

Celestia

Aptos (2022)

This is: the standardization of the testnet airdrop model

Characteristics:

You need to run the testnet

You need to test claiming the NFT

You need to run a node

It distributed roughly $430M worth of tokens to testnet users. I only spent 5 minutes binding my Google account and Discord account, and got 150 APT tokens worth $1,700 in an airdrop.

Key change

This was the first time: technical contributions = airdrop, not using a Dapp.

Arbitrum (2023)

This is: the largest-scale L2 airdrop

Value was close to: $2B USD.

Arbitrum made a key innovation:

Multi-tier scoring

For example:

bridge

transaction

liquidity

DAO voting

This directly led to: airdrops becoming financialized—because you can optimize your wallet address behavior to increase your airdrop weight.

Celestia (2023)

This is: the modular blockchain narrative airdrop

The airdrop recipients include:

Cosmos stakers

Rollup developers

Ethereum users

And it distributed about: $730M USD.

Key change

This was the first time there was a cross-ecosystem airdrop, not a single-chain airdrop.

Starknet (2024)

This is one of the most controversial airdrops, because it was the first time it began large-scale filtering of users based on a balance condition, and added standards with multi-dimensional opacity.

For example:

GitHub developer

Ethereum staker

contributor

And about 50 million STRK were allocated to an early community member plan.

Key change

This was the first time: identity-based (identity-oriented)

Not: activity-based (behavior-oriented).

Phase 4 (2024–2026): The Points economy era

This is: the current era.

Core mechanism:

Points system

For example:

Blur — earn points by trading NFTs with staked ETH

Blast — earn points by earning ETH

EigenLayer — earn points by restaking

LayerZero — long-term interaction records

Scroll — complete tasks to earn Points

Now: everything you see today is actually not an airdrop.

Instead, it’s a pre-airdrop incentive system (airdrop warming mechanism).

Key change

Airdrops are no longer about completing tasks, but about locking funds. Now the core metrics are:

TVL

duration

liquidity

Not:

transaction count

Modern airdrops increasingly rely on points systems to measure user loyalty and deposit time. But after depositing, funds can be stolen; and because time redundancy leads to deposit losses, the final airdrop can even be less than the principal.

Monad: a very typical “attention-driven airdrop”

Monad’s core isn’t technology. It’s: Attention engineering (attention-driven design).

The testnet has hundreds of millions of addresses, but it’s not product-driven—it’s social-driven. This is the key characteristic of the next generation of airdrops.

If you participate in a lot of address interactions, it’s useless—you need to gain the project team’s recognition, get a Discord role, have influence on social media to get a Monad Card, earn nominations, and keep developing toward something like private-community engagement rather than just simple interaction.

Why do almost all projects need to do airdrops now?

The answer is simple: airdrops are the cheapest way to acquire users.

Traditional methods: Google Ads

Cost: $50–$200 per user

Airdrop method: send tokens

Cost: 0 (theoretically)

So airdrops become a growth tool rather than a reward.

The real economics of airdrops (most people don’t realize)

This is the most important part. Many airdrop projects show: first it goes up → then there’s mass selling.

For example:

ENS

dYdX

STRK

Driven by market enthusiasm, prices rise quickly, but then clearly retrace due to selling pressure.

This is called: Airdrop Dump Cycle

Process:

1. Airdrop (airdrop

2. Price spike (massive surge)

3. Dump (crash)

4. Stabilization (stabilization

This is something that almost every airdrop project goes through. So if you have an airdrop, you need to think about a better time window to sell—rather than just FOMO or FUD.

The future of airdrops: 5 trends—this is my core judgment.

1. Chain-level airdrops are ending

For example:

Arbitrum

Starknet

zkSync

Scroll

They’ve basically all done it; in the future, only ecosystem airdrops remain.

For example:

Lending

Restaking

NFT infra

So I believe future opportunities mainly come from ecosystem protocols, not from the chain itself.

2. Airdrops are becoming financial products

For example:

staking

restaking

liquidity mining

The essence: Yield (lending/borrowing), not reward.

3. Capital thresholds will keep getting higher

Previously $0; now $1000+ is just the entry level. In the future it may even be $10000+, because Sybil (Sybil) costs are rising.

4. AI will participate in airdrop allocation

A lot has already happened—for example, automated chat and automated trading. So in the future, project teams may use:

on-chain reputation (on-chain scoring)

behavioral pattern (user behavior)

identity graph (identity map)

All of these will depend on whether you can claim the airdrop, rather than relying on a single way to connect and claim.

5. Airdrops are becoming “attention wars”

Not a technical competition—who can attract users.

The airdrop types most worth watching in the future (2026)

Tier 1 (most likely to generate large-scale airdrops) examples:

Monad

Eclipse

Berachain

Movement

Tier 2 (medium-sized airdrops)

restaking

lending

derivatives

Tier 3 (small but frequent)

DEX

NFT infra

social

Final summary (core viewpoint)

If I had to summarize it, it’s:

1. 2020: Airdrops are rewards

2. 2021: Airdrops are user entitlements

3. 2022: Airdrops are growth

4. 2023: Airdrops are trading

5. 2024–2025: Airdrops are finance

6. 2026: Airdrops are attention

What you need to do is:

1# Give up pointless testnet farming

2# Participate in the project team’s testnet nodes or technical contributions

3# Participate in the project team’s clearly defined task system for airdrops

4# Participate in systems that clearly award Points, such as staking and trading

5# Be active in the Discord community to earn an identity for community contributions

6# Keep using the product and deeply participate—long-term mindset

7# Build on-chain identity, and keep your Web2 identity active

Since Web3 airdrops began with the Uniswap genesis event in 2020, they’ve evolved from a simple “use equals reward” model into a complex system of behavior incentives, identity verification, and attention-based economics. From ENS clearly stating that users are protocol shareholders, to projects like Aptos and Arbitrum optimizing airdrop weights through multi-dimensional scoring, and now to the Points system and attention-driven design—airdrop’s essence is no longer just token distribution, but a tool for long-term participation, community building, and value recognition.

For long-term participants and newcomers alike, airdrops still contain opportunities, but the strategy must upgrade: give up simple farming, deeply participate in testnets and node contributions, complete task systems, actively stake and interact, and build influence in the community. By doing so, you can not only potentially get high-quality airdrops—you can also truly become part of the protocol’s ecosystem.

Although blanket-style airdrops have cooled off significantly, threshold-based, task mining, and hybrid models are on the rise—emphasizing real usage and long-term value. This means that as long as your approach is right and your strategy is long-term, airdrops remain a viable path to securing early entitlements and participating in innovative ecosystems. The future belongs to those who understand on-chain identity, contribution value, and attention economics—opportunities in the airdrop industry have never really disappeared.

In short, airdrops have evolved from rewards → user entitlements → growth → trading → finance → attention, becoming a core tool for Web3 user acquisition, governance, and community building—while the core capabilities of the future will be identity, contribution, attention, and long-term participation.