Crypto airdrops have distributed over $26 billion in value to users since 2020. Most of that value was destroyed within weeks. Recipients dumped tokens, protocols lost users, and the industry concluded that airdrops were a broken mechanic.
That conclusion is wrong. Airdrops aren’t broken. Most airdrop strategies are broken. The difference between Hyperliquid distributing $12.6 billion to 94,000 users who held and evangelized the protocol, and Scroll distributing tokens to millions of wallets that were dumped and left, isn’t luck. It’s GTM architecture.
Crypto airdrop marketing, when executed with strategic precision, separates the protocols that build lasting communities from the ones that bleed users overnight. When designed correctly, an airdrop is the single most powerful go-to-market mechanism that has ever existed in any industry.
No other distribution strategy in the history of business can simultaneously acquire users, convert them into stakeholders, create viral network effects, decentralize governance, and generate billions in earned media attention in a single event. Traditional companies spend decades and billions of dollars trying to achieve what Uniswap accomplished in one afternoon in September 2020.
This report analyzes why airdrops work at a structural level, what separates the five most successful token distributions in history from the hundreds that failed, and what the framework looks like for projects planning their own TGE in 2026 and beyond.
