Airdrops aren't free money. They're an allocation formula — here's the math.
Every airdrop answers one question: who gets how much? Tune the formula on the right. The 3D scene shows five wallet archetypes — their token piles resize as you shift the weights. Drag to rotate.
How teams actually track "early buyers"
Snapshot the chain
Every transaction is public. Teams pick a snapshot block (kept secret until after, to stop last-minute farming) and export all wallets that interacted with their contracts before it — first-transaction timestamp, counts, and volume per wallet.
Score each wallet
A points formula like the one you just tuned: Uniswap's 2020 drop gave a flat 400 UNI to ~250,000 historical users; Arbitrum's 2023 drop scored 6 criteria (bridge date, months active, volume tiers) with caps so whales couldn't dominate.
Filter the sybils
Airdrop farmers run hundreds of wallets doing identical tiny transactions. Teams cluster wallets by shared funding sources and identical activity graphs — Hop Protocol publicly disqualified ~10,000 sybil addresses flagged by community bounty hunters.
Publish a claim contract
Eligible wallets claim via a Merkle-proof contract: the full allocation list is compressed into one hash on-chain, and each wallet proves membership cheaply. Unclaimed tokens usually return to the treasury after a deadline.
Why most farmers lose
If a drop allocates $2,000 median per real user, a farmer spending $50 gas × 200 wallets needs every wallet to pass filters just to break even. One clustering rule can zero the whole farm — which is exactly the deterrent teams want.
The #1 scam vector
"Claim your airdrop" links are the most common wallet-drainer bait. Real airdrops never need your seed phrase, never charge an upfront "unlock fee", and are announced on the project's verified channels — always type the URL yourself.