[Article] Dark Side of Airdrops - Not SEC Compliant

[tokenlion]

Over 340 ICOs have already raised almost $9 billion since the beginning of 2018. The cryptocurrency market is filled with uncertainty at the moment, but with all the scammers, hackers and creeping crypto regulations – these numbers are something to be proud of. Quite a number of people thought that 2017 was the year of ICOs, but in reality, only around 210 ICOs raised under $4 billion.

It appears that the signs of bears coming to the market and SEC overlooking every project didn’t startle the ICOs – they are still growing in popularity.

First of all, what is an airdrop? It can be described simply – free tokens, free money. It’s a “new” way of marketing to raise awareness. Free tokens are given to people for completing simple tasks like joining Twitter, Telegram, Facebook channels or for no reason whatsoever.

Also, there have been cases where airdrops were real, physical ones – balloons were filled with ICO tokens.

Airdrops might be one way to evade the securities laws and they have sure gained some popularity. Everyone loves free money! There are websites that you can sign up for and receive alerts when airdrops go live.

Airdrops have been a topic of discussion to the SEC for quite some time now. Airdrops might be a good way to get around the bans on advertisement, an excellent way to get more people, but it will just hurt you in the long run.

What is your opinion on airdrops? Do you participate in them? Do they do more bad than good?

Link to the full article: http://tokenlion.net/blog/post/150/dark-side-of-airdropsnot-sec-compliant

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[caisa88]

I think that airdrops are a win-win situation for both ICO's and for the participants. It's one of the best marketing solutions , i have seen telegram channels of ICO's with 100k people in them and mostly came there because of the airdrops. I don’t see what other marketing tool could have convinced so many people to join a project.

[qiwoman2]

I like airdrops if the projects are decent and if there airdrops are also decent. I think airdrops should be bigger and have a few good advertising tasks on them for people to do so they don't just get airdropped for doing nothing. I think then it is a win - win for companies and the people that receive the airdrops. So there  should be a fair system of distribution that helps the whole of the crypto community involved.

[Mrs Troll]

Some popular ICO services (Coinlist, Coinchase and so on) already started to provide airdrop service, for identified members of their site. The freshest example is Dfinity, that is accepting  submissions via Coinlist right now. I guess that such 3rd party outsources is the future of most airdrops.

[fonzie213]

Airdrops are great but people need to be aware of all the scammers as well. I saw a couple of airdrops in which they wanted to verify my information and redirected me to a site that looked similar to MEW but wasn't. For verification, I had to input my private key. I just noped the hell outta there!! But people have fallen for these. The lure of free money too great I guess.

[pearlsome]

I divide the airdrops into three kinds.
1. Tokens appear on your wallet and you don't do anything specifically for this. Certain conditions must be fulfilled. For example, if you have a certain coin, then you get an airdrop. Sometimes this is quite useful. So I accidentally got game tokens for one online game.
2. Filling out forms to participate in the airdrop. Basically, in good projects, registration ends up instantly. And shit tokens you will never even get.
3. Distribution of airdrop to investors or potential investors. This is the most profitable in my opinion.

[anobtc]

Airdrop is an easiest way for increasing followers, supports or member for an ICO, both participant and project have benefits. ICO can promote them to the world paying their issued token, which means totally free. The participant gets token by a simple task and hopes it'll worth in the future.

[swiftbits]

Great project can only give valuable token, some airdrop token can't even get a value and the small task are not even worth it
Airdrop can also be a scam, it gives a project popularity and engagement with investors so after earning enough they will eventually gone without any trace
Free Money is interesting but would be great if the time you will invest will be used for the best, don't let your wallet get a token pest.

[Alpha0One1]

Some have value, some don't. It's really a hit and miss.
In my experience, 70% are misses, but still ok as I didn't place any hard earned money into it.

DeepOnion (https://deeponion.org/) was the best signature campaign/airdrop of 2017 that ended only this year. 40 continuous weeks of airdrop to eligible participants and it's price peaked at +$18.

Those very lucky ones who were at airdrop #1 probably gave their crypto portfolio a TREMENDOUS boost!
Some earned more than BTC10 if they had sold at the right time.

[Milansilver7]

I do not get anything from airdrops that I follow, while my email is full of ICO-ICO notice and aridrop offer, I do not like airdrop, because I never get results, but I appreciate their way to find popularity and make their ICO big .

[3kpk3]

Some have value, some don't. It's really a hit and miss.
In my experience, 70% are misses, but still ok as I didn't place any hard earned money into it.

DeepOnion (https://deeponion.org/) was the best signature campaign/airdrop of 2017 that ended only this year. 40 continuous weeks of airdrop to eligible participants and it's price peaked at +$18.

Those very lucky ones who were at airdrop #1 probably gave their crypto portfolio a TREMENDOUS boost!
Some earned more than BTC10 if they had sold at the right time.

I agree with you. I have personally participated in the DeepOnion airdrop campaign along with several friends of mine and we made a killing for minimal effort which honestly did not surprise me since the NEM and Decred airdrops were so successful in the past which is why I believed that there were still some legit airdrop campaigns out there. Airdrops are like treasure chests which may or may not contain treasure. Luck matters a lot in this aspect.

[tokenlion]

I think that airdrops are a win-win situation for both ICO's and for the participants. It's one of the best marketing solutions , i have seen telegram channels of ICO's with 100k people in them and mostly came there because of the airdrops. I don’t see what other marketing tool could have convinced so many people to join a project.

Airdrops being one of the best marketing tools is true, but on the other hand, most of the times from those 100k people on Telegram only 1-3% are actually active. I've been taking a look at different post-airdrop social media channels and found that over 60-70% of followers are fake accounts created purely to get free airdrop tokens.

Projects should be gathering potential investors and building a loyal community instead of filling their channels with random people. Sure, this makes them look good on paper (100k followers there, 80k followers there), but only a fraction of them will be actually contributing to the project.

Just my opinion