What are airdrops?
Airdrops refer to the distribution of free tokens to your wallet(s) for interacting with certain projects and protocols within a given timeframe.
Projects and protocols may do an airdrop for a variety of reasons, such as:
- Promotional campaigns: Teams may use airdrops to raise awareness about their specific protocol or project. By giving away free tokens, they aim to attract more users and increase community engagement.
- Community rewards: Some protocols/projects airdrop tokens as a reward for your support, participation, and/or loyalty.
- Fork initiatives: When a blockchain undergoes a fork, resulting in the creation of a new blockchain and cryptocurrency, holders of the original token might receive the new one as part of an airdrop.
- Vampire attacks: Apart from blockchains, individual projects and protocols can be forked as well. In order to win over the user base of the incumbent project/protocol, the forked protocol can conduct a vampire attack. In this scenario, the forked project airdrops tokens to the users of the incumbent project/protocol with the aim of incentivizing you to switch services.
Airdrops are often preceded by a “snapshot,” which captures the state of all user activity at that given time. This is done to record your activity and engagement to determine your allocation of airdrop rewards. At the time of the snapshot, if you’ve performed the desired actions for the airdrop criteria (eg buy, sell, trade, and stake tokens), you become eligible for the token airdrop. And once the airdrop is live, you can claim your token rewards on the project’s official website.
Notable crypto airdrops
Airdrops on Solana are not an entirely new phenomenon. Yet, they’re more recent than most major airdrops in the past:
- Ethereum Classic (ETC): Following a contentious hard fork of Ethereum (ETH) in 2016, Ethereum Classic emerged as a separate blockchain. Consequently, ETH holders received an equal amount of ETC after the fork was implemented successfully.
- Bitcoin Cash (BCH): In 2017, Bitcoin (BTC) underwent a hard fork that resulted in the creation of Bitcoin Cash. BTC holders were eligible for an equivalent amount of BCH, which was later airdropped to their Bitcoin wallets.
- Ripple (XRP): Ripple has performed various promotions to increase the adoption of its XRP cryptocurrency—including airdrops, giveaways, and partnerships.
- Uniswap (UNI): In 2020, Uniswap airdropped its native token, UNI, to users who had interacted with the platform in the past.
- Arbitrum (ARB): In order to incentivize adoption, Arbitrum gave out up to 10,000 ARB to users that interacted with applications on the network before December, 2022.
Solana airdrop history
Notable Solana airdrops include Orca, BONK, Pyth, Jito, and more.
- Orca: On August 9, 2021, Orca released their ORCA token to early contributors and community members.
- BONK: The project aims to accelerate the adoption of Solana, which is why the team airdropped 50% of the coin’s supply to the Solana community on December 25, 2022.
- Pyth: The claim process for the Pyth airdrop opened on November 20, 2023. The purpose of the airdrop was to stimulate participation in on-chain governance and bring the Pyth Network to a permissionless, decentralized, and self-sustainable mainnet state.
- Jito: Eligible users were able to claim their airdrop on December 7th, 2023, on the airdrop claim page. For more details, read our Jito (JTO) airdrop guide.
- Jupiter: Jupiter's airdrop took place in "Jupuary" (January, 2024). To check your airdrop allocation, visit Jupiter's official checker. As for the rest of the details, you'll find them in our Jupiter (JUP) airdrop guide.
- Kamino: The KMNO airdrop checker went live on Friday, April 4th, 2024. For more details, make sure to read our Kamino (KMNO) airdrop guide.
- Tensor: Since Monday, April 8th, 2024, eligible users can view and claim their TNSR airdrop. For more details, head over to our Tensor (TNSR) airdrop guide.
- Parcl & Sharky: Both the PRCL and SHARK airdrop took place on April 16, 2024. Head over to the PRCL claim site or SHARK claim site to claim your allocated tokens. And for more details, read our PRCL airdrop guide or SHARK airdrop guide.
- Zeta: Since Thursday, June 20th, 2024 you can check your token allocation on the ZEX airdrop checker. More details on all things ZEX can be found in our extended guide.
- Drift: Drift opened the DRIFT airdrop checker on Thursday, May 16th, 2024. Also, make sure to read our DRIFT airdrop guide.
Upcoming Solana airdrops
We’ll update this section as new airdrops are confirmed.
Other than the above confirmed Solana airdrop(s), the following projects are rumored to have future airdrops:
- Marginfi: Details to be revealed. In the meantime, read our MRGN airdrop guide.
- MAGIC EDEN: Details to be revealed. In the meantime, read our $NFT airdrop guide.
How to claim airdrops on Solana?
On Solana, most airdrops are not sent directly to your wallet(s). More often than not, you need to claim your tokens on a dedicated website.
To make things easier, if one of your wallets is eligible for an airdrop, we’ll notify you via push notifications and in-app banners. Once you see the banner, just click it to go to the official airdrop page and claim your tokens.
How to trade airdrops on Solana?
Phantom
The easiest way to trade Solana coins and tokens is through your Phantom browser extension or mobile app. After logging in, select a wallet that holds the crypto you’d like to trade. Next, click on the arrow icon at the bottom. In the swap widget, select the token pair you’d like to trade. Then, review the order and submit it!
Jupiter
If a token pair isn’t available in our in-wallet swapper, your next best option is Jupiter. Jupiter is a liquidity aggregator similar to 1Inch, but on Solana. On Jupiter, you’ll find all verified coins and tokens on Solana.
Step
Keeping track of your crypto assets might become increasingly complex the more you trade, which is why a portfolio management tool like Step can be helpful. With Step, you can visualize your portfolio and view aggregations of all liquidity pools (LPs), tokens, farms, and positions on a seamless dashboard, with all the functions and information you need to stay informed.
How to bridge tokens to Solana with Phantom?
If this is your first time using Solana, you might have most of your assets on other blockchains, such as Ethereum or Polygon. Not a problem. With our Cross-Chain Swapper, you can bridge tokens across Solana, Ethereum, and Polygon right in your Phantom wallet.
How to set up a Phantom wallet?
If you’d like a friendly multichain wallet for crypto, DeFi, and NFTs, try us out! We offer browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome, Brave, and Edge, as well as apps for iOS and Android.
First, download Phantom. Then, create a new wallet.
If you’d like to fund, or send funds to, your Phantom wallet, you can do so via the “Buy” button on your asset tab. We offer various funding options, such as MoonPay, PayPal, and Robinhood to make it as easy as possible for you.
Once you do that, you're ready to go!
Disclaimer: This guide is strictly for educational purposes only and doesn’t constitute financial or legal advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.
