What is a crypto airdrop?
This was the first question I asked myself when a friend asked me if I do participate in this free package.
A crypto airdrop is just free tokens given out to individuals in order to spread awareness of a new project or by an already existing project as freebies for reward of loyalty. There have been countless crypto airdrops in which a lot of coins have been given out to the public. And new ones keep on springing up every now and then trust me, you wouldn't want to miss this because it's free and won't cost u a dime to participate.
Why give airdrops?
Different projects have different reasons for their airdrops below are most of them.
As I earlier said they can give out airdrops to spread awareness of a new project. Before you are given u might be asked to refer your friends or post something about the project on your social media account. With this they spread the message of their project to the public.
An airdrop campaign may tell you to fill a form which usually asks for your contact information.
They do this to know their prospective customers and inform them of any significant event occuring with the project.
An airdrop can occur when there is a hard fork on an already existing blockchain. Follow this link to find out more about hard fork and how to get money from them https://cryptocurrencyfacts.com/understanding-hard-forks-cryptocurrency/.
An example is the Bitcoin hard fork like the Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold. Here token is given based on the amount of bitcoins you have as at the time of the fork. A snapshot of the blockchain at a predetermined date tells the project the amount you own at that time. And the token is handed out on a ratio of that amount. This is done to promote continuous use of the second chain because by default users are supposed to follow the chain of the original coin. But, by doing this they know they would also bring attention to themselves and encourage continuous use of their chain.
Note: This is one airdrop you can control the amount of tokens you get for free.
An airdrop can also be given to customers who have been making good use of one crypto service or the other. An example is late last year when binance gave 500 TRX to customers who had at least 0.003 BTC or it's equivalent and had engaged in at least one transaction.
Another major reason why airdrops are given is because of ownership . If you own something you value it more than what you do not own. If you are given a token you are bound to check and observe how that token behaves. An example is when you get on coinmarketcap.com because the coin is now your property you would search for it there and find out how it's doing while hoping the best or it.
How do I get to know about an upcoming airdrops?
To be eligible for an airdrop you must fulfill one criteria or the other.
You might have noticed one day that you have an extra token in your ether wallet on myetherwallet this is handed out to you because you have ethereum on your wallet or because you made use of that wallet.
You can also get it like I earlier said during a hard fork. One major advantage of this is that you control the amount you get. Which you can increase by increasing the amount you have on that blockchain although I do not advise you doing this due to the volatility of crypto coins.
Only do this when you are sure you have done your own thorough research of the project don't just do so because I said so.
You can also become an active member of some social media pages, chats and groups where different alerts on upcoming airdrops are posted which usually go down on telegram other platforms included. So I do not need to tell you to get a telegram account or other social media accounts. The project distributing the token like I earlier said might tell you to perform one activity or the other on your account. They also do it on medium and discord but I personally have not come across one that tells me to do it on Instagram just an observation though.
There are also some websites that engage in crypto airdrop alerts and they also perform exclusive airdrops for their members a good example is airdropalert.com which I personally use and recommend. You can find out more from this site
https://icowatchlist.com/blog/complete-list-airdrop-sources/.
How do I get and manage my airdrops?
Most airdrop tokens are ERC20 compatible and therefore are on the ethereum blockchain. Initially when I heard about airdrops I noticed they always asked for an ERC20 compatible wallet. I never knew what that foreign writing was until I noticed that I could not view my tokens in my jaxx wallet I knew there was something wrong some where and had to find out. Eventually I found out what ERC20 was and how I could solve my problem. To know more about ERC20 follow this link https://hackernoon.com/erc20-tokens-b3b50c95ad08 the writer really breaks it down to my understanding.
If you have formerly been engaging in airdrops with your multicurrency wallets and can't view your tokens there is no need to panic all you just have to do is export you private address or use a backup phrase to access it on another wallet that supports ERC20 tokens and you will see your sent airdrops.
Examples of such wallets are the online myetherwallet, parity for desktop, imtoken for Android users and cipher for iPhone. You can find out more here https://hackernoon.com/erc20-tokens-b3b50c95ad08 .
The picture above is an example of airdrops I received waiting to hit an exchange. Typically these sent tokens will not have any monetary value until they hit the market which is not usually in a short time you can follow the project to find out when that will occur.If you would love to trade these tokens the probable market they would hit would be binance who usually list new tokens now and then.
You can also engage in an airdrop by adding a contract address to your wallet which is very easy to carry out.
Lest I forget, stay safe and do not give out your private address or any other means of accessing your wallet such as your backup phrase anybody especially online. You know the world of crypto is unregulated there are also scam coins claiming to engage in airdrops but are rather hackers bent on defrauding unsuspecting individuals off their money.
Finally, if you noticed anything contrary to what you know is right pls do not forget to comment and if you liked it don't forget to upvote and resteem thanks.