Effectively Gaming Cosmos Airdrops
Hi folks, so just again I’d like to preface this article saying nothing here is financial advice, and is only for educational and entertainment purposes. Please as always, be sure to do your own research and find what investments might be best for you.
Cosmos Airdrops
If you google $ATOM or Cosmos, you’re inevitably going to come across tons of articles talking about a ton of airdrops. The Cosmos ecosystem is relatively new and many different projects are developing due to its scalability and interoperability. However once again, it is new. And because it’s so new, over the past few months since it’s launch there have been a countless number of airdrops for different projects working of the Cosmos ecosystem.
OK, so there’s not really a countless number because I’ve actually counted them, or at least most of them. Looking at different aggregations for Cosmos airdrops past, present and future, I’ve sorted through most of them going through each one’s airdrop qualifications in order to hopefully come up with the most optimal yet minimal number of tokens you need to stake, which tokens you need to stake, and then also where to stake them. And then after that, I’m going to go through a couple of other important things you can do to for very little cost to increase your odds of qualifying for the next Cosmo airdrop.
Where I Gathered my Data
I’ve basically compiled all of my airdrop information from 3 different sources:
1) https://www.cosmosairdrops.io/
Not one of these sources had all the airdrops contained in the other two, so what I did instead was I just combined all three. Now before going further, I do need to thrown in a disclaimer that some of these are simply rumored, and that these rumors could come from a simple tweet, a forum, a random dev blog comment, etc. But considering these rumors are all the information that is publicly available for certain projects, when aggregating all this data I still treated the rumors as legitimate for simplicity sake.
The Most Important Tokens to Stake
The following in order, is a list of the top 5 tokens with the corresponding percentage of how many different projects required (or will require if they haven’t happened yet) in order to qualify for their airdrops:
1) ATOM: 68%
2) JUNO: 47%
3) OSMO: 41%
4) LUNA: 12%
5) SCRT: 9%
Now if you’re wondering why these number add up to more than 100%, it’s because many of these projects require multiple tokens to be staked. Another trend I noticed was that many of the older projects required ATOM, but many of the newer ones required JUNO or OSMO. I guess you could look at this as another piece of evidence of how the Cosmos ecosystem is evolving.
In order to estimate which tokens lead to the most airdrops, I simply took the list of airdrops and noted which tokens were required in order to qualify for the airdrop and then tallied them. In doing so I found that there were in fact a great number of different kinds of tokens, but overall there were a handful that consistently stood out. Once again for simplicity sake I won’t go into every token that was listed, but I will provide the top 5, because beyond that the numbers were so low that I personally didn’t think the chances and effort were worth it.
How Much Should You Stake?
I could easily argument that just staking 1 token will probably give you significant results, the reason being that many of these projects only required that you stake, period, no matter the amount. That being said, many airdrops were scaled so that if you staked X amount of ATOM you would receive X amount in token airdrops. Therefore if you only staked 1 ATOM for instance, yes you might have qualified, but you probably wouldn’t have gotten airdropped very much. To find the most optimal number, I calculated an average of all the different token staking requirements to find the optimal numbers needed to qualify for the average Cosmos airdrop. Rounded to the nearest whole number, these figures came out to:
1) ATOM: 5 tokens
2) JUNO: 6 tokens
3) OSMO: 11 tokens
4) LUNA: 1 token
5) SCRT: 11 tokens
A couple of things to note on these figures: OSMO is significantly higher, mainly because there were a few more outliers that required 100 or 50 tokens to be staked. Without these outliers, the average would have been 5 tokens. For JUNO, many projects required either any amount to be staked, or 10+ to be staked, which I think makes the average a little disingenuous. Also to note if you had only staked 6 JUNO, you would not have qualified for the famous NETA airdrop, which required 25 JUNO to be staked. Along with other requirements like voting, you could have made up to 15 NETA and at the ATH this would have been worth around $40,000!
Where do I Stake my tokens to Qualify?
I noticed that roughly a fourth of the projects had specifications of where to stake your tokens, whether or not it had to be with a specific validator, or as part of protocol’s liquidity pool. Now about a half of the airdrops I looked at specified an actual list of validators (or in some cases just 1 specific one), and/or a list of LPs (or just any LP on a specific platform), but the trend I was able to see was that in the case of validators, it was best if you:
1) did NOT stake with one that’s related to CeFI (i.e., Binance, Coinbase, Crypto.com, etc.)
2) did NOT stake with a validator that has 0% commission
3) and did NOT stake with a validator ranked in the top 25, or really if you can help it, not in the top 50
I believe the reasoning behind this is that they are really trying to spread out the support throughout the entire ecosystem, and in general these requirements encourage people to support and stake with smaller, less popular validators.
In the case of Liquidity Pools, the overwhelming majority required staking in LPs which were on Osmosis, with a distant second on Junoswap. If you are targeting a specific airdrop, then I would look to the corresponding JUNO or ATOM LP with that protocol’s native token if available, otherwise in many cases it didn’t matter — all you had to do was be in any LP. In general, 24% of projects required staking in LPs.
Voting
I’m including voting last, because compared to all of the other qualifiers, its perhaps the least important. However because voting only takes a fraction of a cent to do, I would recommend voting on every single proposal you possibly can. There were several airdrops that required people to vote a specific proposal(s), regardless of how you actually voted. If you’re using a Keplr wallet, you should easily be able to see all the active proposals that you are eligible to vote on in the bottom righthand corner of your dashboard page:
Conclusion
Is this an exact science? Of course not, it’s all a gamble. But looking at the information out there, it actually doesn’t take a whole lot to qualify for many of these airdrops, and chances are that you’ll at least be able to qualify for some of them. Who knows, maybe there’s another $NETA opportunity in the future…Regardless, if history repeats itself, then positioning your self with a handful of tokens should hypothetically be able to help increase your odds of being targeted for future airdrops.
Does anyone have any other recommendations that I might have missed? I would love to hear about it if I did.
Also, follow me on my new twitter account!: @CryptosWith
Resources
https://www.reddit.com/r/cosmosnetwork/comments/rh9zro/neta_airdrop_for_juno_stakers/
https://www.reddit.com/r/cosmosnetwork/comments/rh9zro/neta_airdrop_for_juno_stakers/