U.Today - "Airdrop hunters," i.e., accounts that perform some activities seeking rewards from the products that distribute governance tokens, are in the spotlight in 2022-2023. But is this business really profitable? And what do we know about the average "hunter?" Blockchain researchers from X-explore shared their analysis.
Top airdrop hunters earned over $18,000, report says
Nine hundredsl thirty-two addresses managed to get rewards from the top five recent airdrops, i.e., Uniswap (UNI), Ethereum Names Service (ENS), Optimism (OP), Blur (BLUR) and Arbitrum (ARB). For these "premium" hunters, the average airdrop income of a single wallet totals $18,935, while the median airdrop income is $14,288.A total of 34,547 "standard" airdrop hunters managed to get three or four rewards out of five, with a $9,384 total bonus in average and $6,497 in median reward. It should be noted that one entity or trader might control two or more winning accounts.
The researchers confirmed that the majority of airdrop winners are actually notable DEX and NFT traders. For both categories, the chances of being listed in the "top 1%" of traders is orders of maginute higher than for the average user.
Also, the vast majority of airdrop hunters started using Ethereum (ETH) for transactions before UNI airdrop, which happened in September 2020. As such, the group of "Ethereum veterans" has remained stable for at least three years.
MetaMask, zkSync, StarkNet: Next targets for airdrop hunters
Most of the winners of both categories are actually using Ethereum (ETH) and its services "heavily." On average, a single "elite" wallet performs 50 transactions per month, while for the average Ethereum (ETH) address, this number does not exceed 0.16.X-explore analysts unveiled that the majority of "hunters" do not think their airdrop journeys are over. Right now, they are actively using potential candidates for next big token distribution.
Largely, the activity of successful hunters is focused on the DEX module of MetaMask wallet, NFT platform Foundation, L2 networks zkSync Era, zkSync Lite, Starknet and on DeBank decentralized application.