Airdrop
|7 min ReadAirdrop Farming Lost Its Gold Rush And What Still Works
Maya Chen
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
This Dec. 12, 2025 field report frames the year as a quiet regime change. The author describes spending most of 2025 rotating through popular interaction campaigns after exiting an onchain AI agent meme trade early in the year. After repeated trial and error and constant conversations with other heavy farmers, the conclusion is blunt: 2025 farming did not die, but the easy money did, and the crowd did not notice until the exits started.
Returns collapsed and studios exited
The clearest signal was the new “small airdrop math.” The report cites a common refrain: many “small drops” paid only $5 to $10, while claiming gas could cost more than the reward. Unlocked rewards that once exceeded 10% without staking reportedly compressed to roughly 2% to 3%, often with staged unlocks. For individuals, that meant more time and more clicks for less output. For studios, it meant the model stopped paying salaries.
The outcome was a broad retreat. Teams either shut down or moved into more controllable businesses such as cross border e commerce. The studios that stayed leaned on Binance Alpha style distributions as a daily, more deterministic source of tokens. Even that cushion weakened when Alpha airdrop token values fell sharply through November, creating the conditions for a second wave of exits.
One detail in the report captures the mood of the year: a studio operator joked that the most profitable “farm” was not an airdrop, but hardware inventory, with RAM allegedly rising from 55 yuan to 240 yuan after a February stockpile. When hardware flips beat chain grinding, the sector has already changed.
BTC dominance squeezed the airdrop multiplier
The report argues that airdrop farming relies on what happens after the drop. A token can only pay if it trades into a market that is willing to rotate and re rate. In prior cycles, that re rating often came from an altcoin season window where liquidity spread outward and narratives pushed small caps into explosive moves. In 2025, the author describes the opposite setup: BTC dominance and weak alt rotation.
The piece cites BTC market cap dominance rising and peaking near 63% at one point. The practical implication is simple. When liquidity does not spill over, alts do not take turns, and new listings struggle to build sustained bids. Without that price amplifier, the airdrop value cannot inflate, so the same operational inputs, gas, time, resources, start producing smaller and smaller outputs.
The report also paints a harsher microstructure. Even when projects launched at lower valuations than the old mega airdrops, “catch up pumps” were hard to rely on. The author describes repeated patterns, early positioning ahead of listings, aggressive selling on day one, steep one day drawdowns, and long bleed after a brief spike. In that environment, the dominant survival rule becomes fast monetization, because a large share of long tail tokens drift toward zero.
For a related discussion referenced in the source, see the Odaily post linked in plain text here: https://www.odaily.news/zh-CN/post/5207966
New lanes: talk to earn and Binance Alpha
With classic “click more, wallet more” farming losing edge, the report highlights a pivot toward skill based farming, especially content driven reward systems. The thesis is that information itself became measurable and rewardable, turning analysis and distribution into a new form of “airdrop labor.” The author points to Kaito’s Yap to Earn mechanics, Cookie Snaps, and Galxe Starboard style contributor programs as catalysts for a wave of TGE explainers and project threads on X.
The key shift is cost structure. The report argues that a strong post, with visuals and a clear viewpoint, can create more value than a week of onchain interactions, while lowering exposure to sybil filters that erase multi account farms. This is framed less as “posting is free money” and more as “posting is a new battleground where quality and reach matter.”
On the studio survival side, Binance Alpha is described as the most important lifeline of 2025, with a peak and a fade. The report states Alpha launched in May 2025 and reached a high watermark in September, when TGE frequency climbed to roughly one to two per day. It claims Binance Web3 wallet daily volume surged to about $5 billion at one point and users grew from roughly 100,000 in August to roughly 400,000.
A Sept. 17 snapshot is used to quantify the peak window. Over Sept. 2 to Sept. 16, 26 Alpha airdrop projects were tracked. The top performer, STBL, is cited at about $200 if sold at listing, and about $675 if held through Sept. 17. Holding all 26 through Sept. 17 produced a combined value of $2,529, versus $1,544 if sold at listing.
Then came the turn. From October, the report says returns slid. Participation had surged, thresholds rose, and claim execution became more competitive. By November, the report claims participation dropped from above 400,000 to about 200,000, yet token values fell even harder, pushing many accounts into “break even or small loss” territory once trading wear and operational cost were counted.
The two backstops that still compounded
The report closes by naming two “real backstops” that kept serious farmers alive in 2025: selective token launches and stablecoin yield.
First, launch participation still worked for projects with concentrated attention and financing, where marketing intensity and KOL amplification can lift opening pricing. The logic is not long term conviction, but harvesting the first day premium. BuidlPad is cited as an example, with five launches described as broadly profitable, typically delivering 2x to 5x at TGE, and in some cases reaching 10x at peak for names such as FF and MMT.
Second, stablecoin yield is framed as the real foundation, not a side quest. The report cites a Binance USDC flexible deposit campaign in August, with a stated 12% annualized rate and a per account cap of $100,000, as the archetype of “high yield, low operational complexity.”
The highlight is Plasma’s campaign, described as the 2025 ceiling. On Aug. 20, Plasma and Binance launched an onchain earn event allocating 1% of total supply, described as 100 million XPL, as deposit rewards, plus a stated 2% annualized return on USDT deposits. The report says the first 250 million USDT quota was filled in under an hour and the second 250 million in about five minutes, followed by tighter per account caps at 10,000 USDT as remaining capacity was absorbed.
Using a final total quota of 10 billion USDT, the report estimates that depositing 10,000 USDT yielded roughly 1,000 XPL. At an opening price around $0.6, that implies about $600 of airdrop value for roughly one month of capital time, with an annualized figure above 70% before adding the base USDT yield component. The framing is clear: when the market is cold, the only real edge is compounding without bleeding.
The report also argues that early network “head mining” windows can briefly push annualized returns into the 30% to 40% band for heavily discussed chains such as Plasma, Monad, or Linea, though the window is short and execution matters.
Finally, for individuals, the report suggests that selecting DeFi yield products inside a major wallet can reduce operational risk relative to chasing unknown contracts across open chain venues, trading upside for controllability.
The closing thesis is straightforward: 2025 did not kill farming, it killed the old farming. In slow markets, the advantage is research time and building a premium account that can win in content based systems. In hot markets, the advantage is fast monetization, taking profit early without marrying the chart. For 2026, the implication is not “farm harder,” but “farm tighter,” with stricter cost control, more selective participation, and a clear focus on what actually compounds.
Disclaimer: This document is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed in this document are not, and should not be taken as, investment advice or recommendations. Recipients should do their own due diligence, taking into account their specific financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, which are not considered here, before investing. This document is not an offer, or the solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any of the assets mentioned.