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In recent months, I saw a lot of new airdrops, mostly on Telegram platform. A lot of them are harmless "tap to mine" games which can be trusted (in my personal opinion). Some of them were basically giving away tokens based on your accounts age (like Dogs).
I know when these airdrops are around, they make a hype. One of my friends sent me 15 invite links the other day (and honestly, I still haven't clicked on the links) and most of them are basically these mini games. But I also saw some airdrops asking people to pay them little amounts of TON or Tron, in order to put them in a better place in a leaderboard. It seems somehow suspicious. I just want to know what is the measure of a good airdrop? One of my bitcoiner friends once told me "consider every airdrop a scam until they're not". But I strongly believe that there must be some good measures for this issue as well.
What do you think?

Airdrops should be free but it can come with some tasks which you do not require anyone to pay any money.

This is how scam was in airdrops in the past. Many will become scam. Do not pay.

There is no good measure than to avoid paying and also avoid phishing attack.

Agreed, for example today I went to withdraw tokens from a bot and it said "you must buy a power booster first". Well, their power boosters have a start price point of around $8 (1.5 TON with the current price of ton it becomes 8 dollars). Which doesn't seem very much, but I imagine how many people may pay them and what they're doing in their withdrawals (maybe it's a ponzi scheme, eh?)

It boils down to the trust for the project - it's not big of an amount if everybody will get something out of it in the future.
These funds can be used either for the future or just to get a quick buck, we will never know.
Some use TON fees to get the NFTs on the blockchain and to pay rent for them, usually for a year or two (that would be ~0,12-0.13 TON, but it depends).

Again, agreed. But what guarantees that the project will pay me? This is the main concern.

Nothing, really ;D You put your trust and you let it slide for the time being.
Noone will give you a smart contract with money in it just because.
It's up to founders and devs.

I believe the following steps can help to make sure that airdrop is legit and it is not a scam:

1- Verify the credibility of the project by checking its website, social media channels like twitter, discord and telegram and feedback of community.

2- Check the team behind the project and their proficiency and experience.

3- Road map of the project, utility of their tokens and listing plans. No investment should be required from airdrop participants.

4- Supply of their tokens and how realistic are their airdrop distribution plans.

By following these steps, hopefully, we can reduce the risk of falling for scam airdrops.

There's nothing you could able to do to verify if the project or airdrop is legit. Since everything you see is questionable even if how good they are for displaying good visualization and plans for their project. The only thing you could able to do is to participate on any airdrop available. If you think its waste of your time if there's an airdrop campaign not paying you then provably that you will get disappointed and stop airdrop hunting.

But if you are aware that there are times we will not get paid or get scam by the dev. For sure that your expectation might became low and think about that if there's profit will came then its good but if not still fine you can work with other project to test your luck to earn with them.

I totally agree with you.
It's also worth noting about the potential collabs and investment institutions and entities flowing their money into it.
If they are credible - it's more likely the project won't be a Ponzi scheme.

I think you are referring to the latest hype of tap to earn. So your friends are sending you an invites so that they will increased their holdings and so it means they will get a lot from airdrop if that project chooses to do so. As far as making sure if it is real or legit or fake one, usually those fake ones are going to scam you and will ask you to deposit some money before airdropping. So if that is the case then do not give them any ETH or any crypto that they are asking.

Airdrop are supposed to be free, and you just have to give your crypto wallet as where they are going to airdrop. And once the date has been set, you just have to wait for it and check your wallet if you are going to received as some projects have their eligibility.

These tap to mine games are not the ones that are dangerous but projects posing to be airdrops are the ones to look out for. It’s typically harmless to play mini games in telegram UNLESS the project asks for sensitive information such as private keys or personal information.

Additionally, some links to these “projects” may actually lead you to downloading malware or any software that could compromise your account or device. Make sure to check if these links are from trusted sources. There might be some suspicious accounts messaging you sending you links so do not click on these links.

First, check the team behind the project. Sometimes, the same teams have worked on different projects already and if their previous projects went well and they have a pretty good track record then you can continue considering the project.

Second, if the project has well handled social media accounts. In my opinion, if a project is active in different platforms and gives out essential information then it’s usually a good sign.

Third, if they have clear plans. The project might have a date already of when and where will they be listing. Listing dates are generally a good sign.

Last reminder that if a project is asking for money or other sensitive information from you then there’s a higher chance that this project is just scamming you and many others.

You can never be certain, while my method is wrong and you shouldn't do it, I end up just not trusting any of them and either not participate in any of them and just avoid all of it whenever I can, just not deal with airdrop, that way none of them could hurt me and all of them are scams to me. Of course that's not true and we are not going to get this type of result and I think it has to be something that will take a while.

We should look at what we are dealing with right now and we can make a lot of money when we can make some profit as well. So, focus on something that could make us some profit whenever we can. This is why I think airdrops are not easy to find which ones are legit, hence it's easier to just avoid all of them but I know that's not a good way to live in crypto world.

I cannot fathom how much these airdrop projects are earning based on their userbase despite that they're not yet in the market.

Those that you have mentioned that people pay with the games or airdrops just for them to have some better standing and points system through the game.

I agree with CT that it should be free, an airdrop is an airdrop which should be free. I think it all started with the idea of test nets that projects require users to pay for the fees and to transact with their network. And for these TON projects, they're doing it with the potential airdrop tap mining.

It's annoying to be honest, you open one app and then you complete the task and then you'll be redirected to another project and so on.

Payment from Airdrop is not guaranteed. And a lot of time has to be spent here. So if someone has such time then he can earn from Airdrop. By airdrop legit I look at those airdrop projects that bring a new concept and don't copy the structure or strategy of a previously running airdrop. And I've seen most of those projects do good.  So you can use my strategy if you want but I won't guarantee you payment for them. Payment will depend on your luck and your own strategy and time spent

Talking about assurance, then this is something that cant really be known because we dont know on what those projects are up to, specially into its devs or the team behind whether they would really be giving out some airdrops or not. The thing on here is that you should really not that expecting something positive with airdrops. You shouldnt really be that anticipating that the drops would really be that good or something that could give out some good amount of money. Legitimacy will really be proven out basing into the teams transparency or something in talks about known partnerships but at first there's no way on knowing on whose the developer of these projects on which you could really be able to tell whether its a legit one or not. Somehow there are some legit projects that even if its dev arent known but still it do ends up on successful.

This is why on the time or moment that you do deal up with airdrops then make it sure that you wont really be expecting something positive. Deal up on projects on which you do see that it is really that legit.
Dont just that limit yourself into 1-2 projects to deal of with, as much as you could then better to have multiples so that if ever those other projects turns out to be shit but still you
do really have others on which it could potentially be that ending up successful.

In my eyes, airdrop is free and the task is easy. If there is something that is not right, I just ignore it, especially since we have to spend money to complete tasks such as having to make a number of transactions on the network and many other tasks. now they are smart we are assigned to watch a YouTube video until it is finished and in the video there are keywords that must be included in order to claim the prize, they are looking for profit in various ways, be careful we have to be more careful in choosing a project

Let's just say airdrops are free nothing you have to pay if there is something like this you can skip it sometimes this is a condition for eligibility on the other hand we think they are scamming us by sending a little TON so here you can do some research on the airdrop.

I know some airdrops on telegram now have to have a little capital outlay, because some other airdrops follow the same way as the previous airdrop.

Make sure you can see their social X.
See how big the community is.
Whether the team is known or anonymous.
But all of this doesn't guarantee that the airdrop is legitimate because it can't be confirmed yet.

For the aspect of making transactions on the network for you to be eligible for airdrop, those patterns were for a new layer network where they were looking for earlier users to reward them with their tokens, but you see that pattern that has been adopted and introduced by all this Telegram mini app airdroppers is just a means to extort the participants when we can't even be very sure that the launch will be successful.

Well not all airdrops project that demands people to pay some little amount of money are scam because even genuine projects in the past that actually airdropped did requested for their participants to pay a little token before becoming completely eligible. It's just bad that there are many scam airdrop projects out there than the genuine ones hence the discouragement whenever the idea of paying money as part of task is initiated because it's difficult to differentiate between the genuine from the fake until they eventually airdropped.

My thought is that these projects can just state it from the early stage that they will be demanding from their participants to pay some TON fee at towards the end of the entire tapping and task fulfilments, and not to take people by surprise when they never expected it that way.

Listen to that your friend and you'll be safe from scams because alot of Airdrops are either a scam or a waste of effort. Never should you pay for any airdrop to be sent to your wallets because they're always a scam as the scammers are only after the fees that you want to send. An airdrop should be free or have little efforts as tapping and the micro tasks that require you to like a post or share the posts they make to help advertise the project to your followers and others. An Airdrops being legit still might not pay you because they can decide to stop working on the project or it doesn't just get the right amount of attention that was expected for the Airdrops. As an airdrop hunter, you can hunt for all airdrop that doesn't ask you to pay or download suspicious apps or links. Airdrops that aren't being done by many people should be avoided too because for an airdrop to be successful, it needs population.

They won't do that. Why? because the participants will lose their appetite to keep on grinding with the projects or apps that they make. If they will announce it too early, only a few serious one are going to be left and those that are willing to spend bucks with these projects but the majority of them will just leave them hanging.

The last part is what every airdrop person needs to learn about. Not all airdrops are going to guarantee money even if they will pay TON for the fees that are being asked by the project. It may go south afterwards and many will be disappointed by the outcome of it. So with this, take it as if it's also a gamble when you're willing to spend these amounts but even you'd do it for free, you're also spending your time on it even if there is no assurance that these projects are going to be successful once they're on the market or once they have concluded the airdrop period is done.

Agreed. That's how developers farm their players. This is an old method that keeps being used to milk their players. They're playing on the quantity of their players.

Let's imagine there are 10k players, and they're paying eight bucks to withdraw their token. It means they have sent 80k USD to the developers to get a worthless token.

That happens with so many telegram minigames now. You're being forced to complete the task that forces you to send some money to the developer's addy.

But i don't categorize it as a ponzi, but i'd called it as a scam app.

Maybe not many people know that they only allocate 2% of their investment value for marketing. and if the result is $ 8 as you mentioned above, I think it's still pretty good, but if the participants are 5 times more than you mentioned, each participant could only get 2 dollars with a tap-tap duration of at least almost 3 months. ;D ;D.

Indirectly, many players become sales for their campaigns with super cheap pay.

Thanks for your comments. You are right money flow into the project is an important factor as it gives confidence to airdrop participants that management of the project has sufficient funds to distribute fair reward to the participants. I personally earned significant amount of airdrop rewards specially in L2 of Ethereum such as Arbitrum and Optimism, as both projects were backed by professional teams and projects were heavily funded bu big investors.

Thanks for your comments. You are right money flow into the project is an important factor as it gives confidence to airdrop participants that management of the project has sufficient funds to distribute fair reward to the participants. I personally earned significant amount of airdrop rewards specially in L2 of Ethereum such as Arbitrum and Optimism, as both projects were backed by professional teams and projects were heavily funded bu big investors.

If you have the opportunity to participate in airdrops, then I don’t think their is anything bad in it, but we should know that not all airdrops are going to pay, some might end up being a scam, and some might not really pay good amount of money. That’s why when participating in airdrops, the best thing to do when participating in airdrop is dont have high expectation on any project, because you might end up being disappointed at the end.

Some of them do request that you make some transactions which you will be charged little amount of Ton for the transaction, but it’s a choice, if you don’t wish, then you can just decide to participate perform their normal tasks without putting any money.

If you really want to make money from airdrops then you can't really consider which one is legit and which one isn't. First of all find airdrops that do not charge you any money, these days there are ones that ask for money and the moment you see that get away as far away as you can. Aside from that, if it's free then you should be doing whatever you can do to make money from it and try to do it. It doesn't matter if you apply to one or a hundred, as long as you can make some money from it then try it.

Even if 99% of them are fake then one of them could be legit and give you some money. I do not find the work and effort worth it so I do not personally do it, but that is my decision however if you want to do it then you could do it whenever you want to and apply to all of them.

If it is indeed a tool for extortion, what makes me wonder is that this mini airdrop application on Telegram produces surprising coins, such as being able to immediately list on various large and well-known exchanges quickly. but I am sure that not all of them will experience a successful launch, there must be evil parties who exploit this trend

Well, we cannot be completely sure whether a project is a scam or not. But there are several factors that can help you distinguish a legit airdrop from a scam airdrop.

1_ The number of community members (including Telegram-Twitter-Facebook and...)
2_ Project management team and their experience
3_  Telegram blue tick. I prefer to run a bot that has received the blue tick
4_ Check the project roadmap on the main site
5_  Google Search - There are many sites that warn you about scam airdrops

Your friend is right; consider any airdrop scam until they prove you wrong. Don't pay any money to get ranked among the top people to be eligible for Airdrop because it is supposed to be free, unless if you wish to do so if you like the project after your research and you find it worthy of investing in the project.
The recent trend of Airdrop is on telegram; the telegram mini games are now the latest trend of airdrop which some of the projects have paid their participants some amount of money; this trend is going viral because I don't think any form of airdrop apart from telegram based games will get attention; but it is also coming to an end because the number of scam related project been lunched is becoming alarming.

We know that the payment might not be guaranteed but I will still suggest that you do all the once you can so that when people are making money you don't miss out from it and that is one of the most interesting even if you don't make money from a particular one you will know that you have tried you best in playing all the airdrop games, missing out, because this period I have see that majority of this project are that are running this airdrop are always listening so the chances of it failing is very hard because they will try to get the publicity that they want and you will even see people that are ready to buy the coin when it is eventually released to the public after the presale and some people are even ever ready to buy and even bitcoin have a target already if how they want to engineer a way either by holding selling and then trading depends on how everyone wants it to be.

New trends keep happening in crypto and it is actually something that you will be able to invest in, they will make it more interesting, that even aside the money you will get the fun to is their and their is prosperity when it comes to crypto is now for you to do what is best, and we keep learning new things everyday, the energy will determine the momentum and the result to.

But also need to know, it is necessary to consider how safe the airdrop is because now many airdrops are traps that can harm connected devices or wallets.

I also have no problem working on all the airdrops, but at least it's safe and doesn't cause any problems later.
Now there is no need to bother to analyze each airdrop or new project, because there is a special airdrop channel that is indeed specifically to discuss airdrops and I know a lot about the airdrops from these channels.

I have my own community on my local channel, and it's trusted with hundreds of thousands of members and admins who continue to actively provide the latest airdrops.

Now what is being hyped is the Telegram Mini App and many airdrops from the TON network, many of which have also been successful and listed on Tier 1 Exchanges.

Airdrop is legit when its totally free and it will landed on you're wallet without any gas fee, example is DOGS token it is landed on telegram wallet automatically and there is no fee's, if there is an airdrop and you need to pay for transaction fee then that is not an airdrop it is a big scam because there is a gas involved, so be careful on choosing airdrop not all of them are legit and cam give profit some of them are scam that we can possibly loss if we don't take good care of our actions.

In terms of cryptocurrency, airdrop is meant to me the distribution of free token to individual after performing just some simple task but these time around, project developers are beginning to add different rules to airdrop and these rules require that airdrop participants must pay certain amount of money (in a different coin) to qualify for the airdrop. If the money they are adding is fair, no body will complain but some of them are putting a very huge amount that participants need to pay and they are putting and unfair amount.

I told myself that I will not participate in any airdrop to would expect me to spend more than $1. Take for example the Catizen airdrop that some people spend hundreds of dollars to farm but the reward was unfairly distributed and some people that didn't even spend any money on the game, go more reward than those that invested on the game.

He's right because airdrops now are so abused that we never know which one is good, so your friend is actually giving you a good approach on how to deal with these proliferating Telegram airdrops so you will not waste your effort and you will not put high expectations on these new trending airdrops.

Where the money is and what's trending in the community,, that's where the scammers will come to hatch their bad deeds so if you're going to be active on airdrops be sure you are good at tracing good and bad airdrops.

If they are not transparent and they are not building something for their project that will benefit the community, then have second thought before joining these airdrops.

There's a lot of chaos in the crypto ecosystem right now, such as the hype about games on Telegram that offer tokens to their users for playing their games, some are legit, and some are scams. So how do I make sure an airdrop is legit?

1. The Community
Look at how the community is, when it becomes a big community and is supported by various big influencers too, then we have got the first point.

2. The Team
Actually the team is not that important an issue, but if they have a team that is not anonymous, then we have already got the second point.

3. How Genuine They Are
For the hype in crypto, all the copycats will not get any luck, they will only get the leftovers of the original product, so to make sure that the airdrop will be legit, you can pay attention to this one thing.

The three points I mentioned above don't apply to all airdrops in the crypto ecosystem, I'm only referring to the chaos of games on Telegram that are currently everywhere.

I do agree, I mean a project that got a million dollars investment versus one that has basically none that you can see will have a different result in the end. We saw so many people do this very well and we shouldn't really worry about this at all and could make some good result and we can't really be dealing with something bigger.

I think the best thing about bigger investment projects is that we are going to see this being basically an indicator for people and we could make some good return with it based on how much investment there is to a project. Retail or VC it doesn't matter and we could see so much money going into some projects and those are the ones that usually does well, and I am sure that if a project gets a few million dollars investment, it's hard not to do decently.

It's actually easy if you believe and want to get maximum results, then if there is a payment, do it, but if you are satisfied with the results without paying, that's enough ,
because I noticed that the average airdrop ton all made transactions of 0.2 tons if you do a lot of airdrops you need a lot of tons so it's all based on the level of trust and token supply I think

Don't pay anything for the airdrops. If they are asking for payment (even to put you in a better position), then most likely it is a scam. They already make you do task, make you watch videos in youtube, click on links and what not. They are already earning a lot from the thousands of players. And the last move they do to milk as much as they can is to ask for some "extra funds". People that were late to join the game might feel like they're missing out and pay to improve their standing with the hope of receiving more tokens, but they often end up with tokens worth less than what they spent. That's how some developers manipulate unsuspecting users. Remember, airdrops are supposed to be free.

If your method is wrong then why do it? This is funny because we are only good at giving advice to others but we can't even apply that advice to ourselves. I could also be wrong with that and maybe there are still a few who can? You are only being too careful there but I think it is still wrong to call all projects or those who conduct an airdrop a scam because there are still those that are not. Anyways, I see that you admit that you are wrong. Good. That should shorten your sentence ;). It is still possible though for someone to get scammed if they will not be very careful on dealing with these airdrops.

TBH I don't really get what you are trying to say there but I think you are saying that we can earn more with the help of side jobs like airdrops? That's true though but our focus must still be our main jobs first before the rest. Airdrops can be less profitable and very profitable but they are mostly free, and I think that is the reason why we can get scammed easily.

Personally, I couldn’t believe that these airdrop might generate some good returns to players until I tried it by myself and with that experience I found out and learned new things as well. Starting from one airdrop that doesn’t require anything but a fun game to play, and setting up your wallet to receive your rewards, that’s basically with zero risk process, and eventually I have actually received a good amount of their tokens and managed to sell them at a good price.
On Telegram platform personally I never encountered a scam project that took investors funds or stole anything from players. However, that doesn’t mean it is totally safe as well to join any airdrop, if your efforts are not paid out, to me this is a scam and the team stole your efforts to gain other investors attention to invest and steal their funds.
The only measure you can take is to not invest any fund if you are not sure about that airdrop, only your performance on that game might bring profit to you.

How do you classify an airdrop is legit?

1. Make you earn $50+
2. Only worth less than $2
3. Received the coins, but has no value.
4. Didn't receive the coins.

Most people call the airdrop is legit if the airdrop give big reward, but when they only receive less than $2 or no value, they will say the airdrop isn't legit even though the developer already distribute the airdrop.

I'd say the not legit airdrop is number 4, while most airdrop are either number 2-3 (technically airdrop is legit).

I want to say first, airdrop is free. The bull market will start in 2025, and most telegram mini games are currently running. Although few projects are paying off so far. OP As you say many projects are asked to do ton transactions. Yes, it is true that they ask for transaction in almost all free projects, but it is not mandatory. If you feel like it you will, and if you don't want to don't. I think no money should be spent on freebies. If you spend money on it, you get some more rewards.

Few projects that yield?
I think it also depends on how you do it, if you get the first rank then you will have a lot of advantages from the airdrop.

See how Notcoin's success as the first Tap2Earn telegram Mini App made the TON network even more hype.
At first, it was very underestimated, but when it made a big income, many similar games began to emerge that rewarded participants.

Now you may only focus on the Telegram Mini App, but you need to know that the airdrop is quite extensive and not just on the TON network.
There are more airdrops that you can work with, by paying for transactions or even by doing new network tests etc.

Whether an airdrop is legal or not will only be known when everything is done and of course help from the community is needed.
I have a community that provides quite valid information about the airdrop that will be done, so I know what to do.

Normally for those set of persons their reaction is borne out of a high expectations about what they might earn from the airdrop due to the various hypes the project may have received while they were still tapping and mine stage.

Provided an airdrop was made irrespective of how little an amount participants receives then it's legit, except  for those projects that made it as a mandatory requisite for participants to pay some amount of Tron or TON but later paid so little that's where many complains  arises that you had to pay some TON just to get dust.

is actually good advice, especially since there are many airdrops that are designed for suspicious purposes, such as harvesting personal data or even asking for payment to gain better access. An airdrop is essentially a way a blockchain or crypto project distributes free tokens to the community or potential users, usually for promotional purposes. However, currently there are many fake airdrops that take advantage of people's desire to get free profits

Well, that's true. sometimes because of the small payout, people feel that the airdrop is not good. However, there are so many airdrops like that, which give small payouts, even Hamster is also indicated like that. However, I also feel that the airdrops that are not legit are the ones that don't pay and are scams. We never know the results of the airdrops we work on, and also how many coins we will get. However, as long as it pays and has value, I think it's a legit airdrop. especially if the airdrop is really listed in a big CEX.

There are also many indicators of what is considered a "scam" or not, but HK did allocate a small portion of their drop for everybody, simply because of the sheer volume of users and account farms it had.
There is value in it, but it's small due to the nature of the project and its community (the force and amount behind it).
The era of projects that get you good drops almost on a whim during the Bull market is gone, now more effort is needed to even find the project that could potentially be a gem.

yes, I see most airdrops are like that, it takes broad insight and understanding about this airdrop, so that all the obtained will be easier, without having to pay a certain amount, with the presence of airdrops of course it becomes an option to find airdrops that really giving gifts for us to always visit.

just be sure to filter out for those grifter project asking 0.5 TON or more to finish the task though, most of the freebies project despite also have optional task to do TON transaction still put boundary where they only require a transaction and not require the money.
but if they demand the money however, big fat chance they just trying to profit off people. so I don't think that's a good project, but since it's optional anyway, just don't finish this one task only to avoid getting milked by the devs then things will be fine.

To be honest, it's hard to say if an airdrop is legit or will it make it big or not.
But we can surely identify the obvious scams as airdrops are meant to distribute coins/tokens for free.
If any airdrop is asking for any payment then it's probably a scam.
Projects which have a good experienced and dedicated team with an unique idea are likely to make it big.
So if you find any such projects giving out airdrops then you get into it.

While it's easy to see the obvious scam ones, it's very hard to find legit ones among all the ones that look legit but scams. I know that it is going to be very tough to handle all of this because we are going to have trouble finding something decent. Even the legit ones could fail too, so success is not something that is going to happen that easily, we are going to end up with a result that will not be all that simple and we could end up with some trouble on the long run as well.

We need to figure out a way to see this getting any type of good result, and we need to make this work somehow as well. I believe that we are going to see this changing eventually, and it is going to end up being a little bit of a trouble in the end as well.