Airdrops: Titanic of the Crypto World?

[rajatjain]

f you have heard about bitcoins, then you must have heard about altcoins, and more importantly you have some idea about ICOs , about how it is so easy to raise money rather than the traditional way of meeting with VCs, impressing them with shiny numbers, giving them board seats along with a huge chunk of your shares just to keep their money flowing into the project.

ICOs solved the problem of getting funded by simply going to the crowd and asking for it. With ICOs coming into the scene, many organisations left their traditional way of getting funded from the VCs and just simply going to the people all around the world. As a result, not only did the funds come in huge numbers, they came early and didn’t need much convincing to do from the teams. A white paper, team credentials, advisors was all it took to get millions of dollars within a month.

Anyone familiar with ICOs also know how such ICOs are functioning nowadays. There are more than 200 ICOs at the moment which are trying to collect funds from those same crypto enthusiasts who helped in raising some of the billion dollar market cap crypto-companies we see today. So how does an ICO stand out and tell people to invest in them and not the other 199 companies?

The answer is airdrops! Airdrops solved a dual purpose: help in bringing huge numbers to the telegram, facebook and twitter community. In other words, the telegram, twitter an facebook community is built effectively from these airdrop hunters only. The second purpose was getting the word out about the company. Maybe a person might see the airdrop about a company and just for a change research about the company and invest in it.

Bounties do not interest people anymore like airdrop does. All one needs to do to get some free tokens as part of the airdrop is join telegram. Do nothing for the project and grab those tokens which other people (the real investors) pay to get them. The company then uses that army of airdroppers to showcase potential investors, the interest the project is getting from people all over the world. Basically, it is a psychological technique or FOMO to show people that they are getting a lot of interest by people and their sale might get closed out soon.

If a company says that they see potential investors in airdroppers, it is wrong. Airdroppers are those people who do not participate in any discussion, spam the links only because they are forced to and stay dead until the campaign is over, ready to ask for tokens into their wallets.

It is a real shame to see so many ICOs falling for Airdrops as a means to showcase how big of a community they have, even though none of it is organic. No one wants to build community through the product since it takes time, involves a lot of strategy and manpower and airdrops seem to be the best way to eliminate all of those things.

I titled airdrops as the titanic because sooner or later the ICOs which are focussing on airdrops will face its consequences. The people who are looking for airdrops are not interested in keeping those tokens! So as soon as the coin hits on exchanges, the people are most likely to sell off those tokens to either purchase bitcoin/ethereum or directly to fiat. Not only this causes harm to the project as soon it steps into the exchange listing, it causes distrust among the loyal members who actually purchased the tokens because they liked the project. If a firm thinks that still it is fine, a short term dip due to sell off of some 1 percent tokens given as part of airdrop won’t cause them harm, then they are mistaken.

Airdroppers dictate how a company is run. After the main sale, if you do not provide them with an exchange to sell off those tokens, they will get into attack mode! They will post negative messages on facebook, twitter, bitcointalk, reddit and any blog they can find. They will fill the group with SCAM! posts and they will push you with their huge numbers behind them to spend some money to go for an exchange. When a 10k telegram community is built on 8k airdroppers, you really don’t have a choice, do you?

The money which an organisation might have saved for hiring some devs or for future purpose will be spent on an exchange just to give them a medium to sell off those very same tokens. There is no way that airdroppers tend to contribute to the community in any way apart from the spamming of links. They are just to increase the community number by a value of 1.

If a company who is looking to raise funds in the organic way, they need to ensure they spend real money on some good marketing, making a better product, using youtube and youtubers , influencers for their promotion instead of providing free tokens to raise a army of dead people! Because sooner or later, those same airdrops will become the titanic of that coin!

[rajatjain]

I am really fascinated to see how the ICO's of today are competing with other ICO's to collect money. Blockchain conferences are just for namesake but a good website with a good explainer video seems to be intriguing for people. However, if its marketing to the right investors they still rely on advertisements on google which cost a lot of money. What is the best way to market a product when you don't have a known advisory team behind you?

[awazieik]

Every Company or business is looking for a way to get investments. With ICOs is possible for a company to raise a huge amount of money which he might not have been able to raise in traditional markets. Airdrops have been used to get investors attention, i do believe that with time, there will be best practices to raise funds in the crypto space. For now lets see how things play out

[novy]

The last couple of ICO shows us that airdrop is just some sort of gratitude to the community. Every person gets few tokens, equals to 10-50$. Ths amount can't do much on the market. Presales/private sales are market killers, but ICO don't care - they took enough money and ran for doing their work, you cares about token price )))

[rajatjain]

The last couple of ICO shows us that airdrop is just some sort of gratitude to the community. Every person gets few tokens, equals to 10-50$. Ths amount can't do much on the market. Presales/private sales are market killers, but ICO don't care - they took enough money and ran for doing their work, you cares about token price )))

Yeah it was supposed to be gratitude to the community but check the icos on icoalert now. Almost every ico is trying to build a community of 5k to 20k members through airdrops. That is not what i would call an community which came on their own but rather came due to some free tokens. When 10 dollars worth of tokens are airdropped to people, you just don't give them 10 dollars, rather you give them power to force you into some unfavourable decisions which you wouldn't have done!
To think in another way, lets say you join as a person who wishes to get airdrop which is worth 10 dollars. Even if the company and everything about is great, the tokens are not likely to go beyond 20 or 30 dollars within a month and you find it much easier to sell it off as soon as they come and maybe use that money to buy small quantities of something you may prefer, or into something you actually may believe in! The minute the tokens get unlocked, the same people will literally try to ask, plead, beg , harass and kill you if you don't give them an exchange to sell off those very tokens! Isn't this a bummer for the ico's who are looking to stay in the market for as long as they can!